Midlands Spotlight: Jack Hardy, Digital Marketing Manager
1. What made you want to be a marketer?
My journey into marketing began with a graphic design degree. After graduating top of my class, I started working as a graphic designer and noticed that many parts of the degree that I enjoyed were actually marketing tasks. This led me to secure a role as Head of Marketing in Dubai.
Now, over 10 years later, I can see that marketing fits my skills perfectly. I'm creative, strategic, and analytical, which are all important in marketing. I like that in this job, I’m able to solve problems with no two days being the same.
2. What excites you most about marketing?
Having problems to solve and challenges to face. Then ultimately, overcoming them to drive growth for a business.
3. What has been your favourite project you've worked on/a highlight from your career in marketing?
Just before the 2019 Covid pandemic I started working as a Digital Marketing Consultant for a Parent to Teacher app called Weduc. The premise of the app is very simple, to connect parent and teachers to facilitate a better education for students.
Once the pandemic hit, it isn’t hard to see how Weduc would be incredibly valuable to schools across the world. However, schools had quite rightly used all their budget to support families that were less well off.
This meant that while schools were crying out for such an app, they didn’t have the funds. Further to this with Weduc being a scale up company that had not fully utilised digital marketing before I had just signed up to two accelerator programmes. One with Google Ads and other with Twitter (now X).
So, our entire target audience had no purchasing power and I had fully committed to an aggressive marketing plan…
Based on the CEO once stating that “if anyone was to ever use Weduc, they wouldn’t want to live without it” we started an initiative to launch Weduc Lite. A slimmed down version with limited functionality and onboarding requirements. This was then released for FREE and advertised by the accelerator programmes as well as Covid initiatives.
The idea being that we could do some good in the world and once normality had returned those schools would want to buy the full version of Weduc.
Once it was all said and done, I was able to use my powers of marketing for good. We helped a lot of people. And I was able to drive the bottom line for the business and the project ended with a 3,400% ROI.
4. What would your advice be for fellow marketers?
There is a story, journey and rhythm to marketing… make sure you share the story and bring the stakeholders on the journey. If they can help put a brick into the wall, they will understand and appreciate the outcome far more than if you work in privacy.
Be transparent and honest, always. In everything. Mistakes, learnings, failures, successes… you get it. Build trust.
And the 3 mantras I work by are:
- Clarity – You can’t manage what you can’t measure
- Essentialism – Do the right thing, not everything
- Growth – Hypothesise, test, learn, improve.
5. Over the next 2-3 years, what developments in marketing are you looking forward to the most?
I'm really excited about how AI will continue to change marketing. At Jam 7, we fuse human expertise with AI to unlock ambitious B2B tech brands growth potential. We call this mix of human skills and AI our 'Growth Agents'.
AI will help us to market faster and better. It will help us understand what customers want, create better content, and run smarter campaigns.
But remember, AI won't replace humans in marketing. Instead, it will help us be more creative and make better decisions. It's an exciting time to be in marketing, and I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do with these new tools.
About the Author
Jack Hardy is the Head of Marketing at Jam 7, a Chartered Marketer, and an award winning CIM board member with over a decade of experience in crafting B2B growth strategies across various technology platforms and SaaS providers. At Jam 7, he leads a team of Growth Agents by fusing human expertise with AI to unlock ambitious B2B tech brands growth potential.