Who I am.
What is your background and experience in marketing?
I've worked through various levels of marketing roles over 15 years, from communications at entry level through to campaign management and market research at manager level, and then strategy and brand management at senior level roles.
I've been in-house for education and publishing companies, and significant freelance and fractional roles in government, construction, retail, and automotive (with smaller one-off projects in other industries). About 70% of my experience is B2B though most if my in-house roles combined both, such as publishing where I would work on B2B global schools and universities alongside B2C through owned eCommerce and retailers such as Waterstones and Amazon.
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Within these roles I've worked on, overseen, and guided both short-term performance marketing and long-term brand building, delivering revenue and profitability respectively. I've worked to a range of objectives, from brand perception to channel metrics, demand and lead generation to search rankings, new business and revenue acquisition to legacy product sales.
This is all underpinned by formal postgraduate level training in both general marketing and brand management, covering all aspects of research, strategy, tactics, and most importantly their relationship to each other and how to bring them all together to create end-to-end marketing operation based on evidenced, proven best practices that underpin effectiveness and deliver marketing that both contributes to business performance and integrates with other business functions.
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What types of business hire you, and what do they hire you for?
There's a range: about 70% of my experience is B2B though most of my in-house roles combined both, such as publishing where I would work on B2B global schools and universities alongside B2C through owned eCommerce and retailers such as Waterstones and Amazon.
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If I'm going to be honest, most of my major projects have been companies in one of three situations. The first have been burned by consultants or fractional marketers who oversold their expertise and ability and under-delivered in practice and results. The second have been shafted by "growth" specialists who left them with high spend for diminishing returns. They all need to do some course correction, a reset, or simply put a better and more sustainable approach to marketing in place. The third are at the start or very early in their marketing journey and needed help to build a solid end-to-end foundational marketing programme that is both a realistic and responsible use of their resources.
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Around this, there are smaller one-off projects to address a particular (usually immediate and short-term) need. I've helped clients cover campaign management during periods of short-staffing or recruiting, developing campaign automation, created digital asset packs for campaigns, among other things.
What areas of marketing have you delivered work in?
While I've delivered work in most areas of marketing, there are some areas I'm less experienced in than others. Many freelance and fractional marketers will simply lie and say they are brilliant at everything, or lack the humility to admit that there is a difference between theory and practice and reading about something doesn't mean you can do it properly. I'm happy to give you this list of what areas I am both trained in and have delivered in real-world roles - and you will see there's things that are not on there. I've not had enough experience in quantitative research to ethically charge a client money for it; I've not been directly responsible for delivering some comms channels like social media and PR; I've worked in collaboration with SEO agencies on multi-year plans, but I'm not a technical SEO who can do fancy back-end work. ​
Why is it important to hire a freelancer or fractional marketer who is properly trained?
The short answer is that training makes you better at the things you do.
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Note: this question refers to training in the overall marketing discipline, not training in specialisms and sub-disciplines like digital marketing or PPC. That's a vital distinction, as competency in parts does not mean competency in the whole. Hiring a marketer trained in programmatic advertising is great if your project is for programmatic; if it covers positioning and pricing, they will do more damage than good.
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Unfortunately, over the past several years, a large proportion of the marketing discipline has bought into an anti-education and anti-training mentality. As a result, roughly 70% of people working in marketing have no actual training in the discipline, leading to a profession crowded with people who think they know more than they do. It's why so many marketers end up doing mediocre work, and why so many marketing teams end up surviving rather than thriving. Even worse, many senior marketers can make it to the top of departmental ladders without training, failing to understand or articulate how and why marketing impacts business performance and how to present marketing as a credible contributor.
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Training gives a benchmark to evaluate sources of information against so they can be critically evaluated and assessed to determine their quality and potential efficacy. This enables best practices to be identified, and combined with an ability to identify how principles apply to different contexts, tailored solutions can be designed to solve the specific problems at hand.​ Every business needs bespoke solutions: working on experience-only relies on them having been involved in enough similar situations and scenarios to yours, as their expertise and problem-solving abilities are limited to what they have been exposed to.
Being self-taught also has a major drawback: how do they know if the sources they are learning from are any good? Without a benchmark to compare them to, many of these marketers make the same mistakes: they take opinion as fact, accept anecdote as evidence, confuse confidence for correctness, and assume popularity equals best practice.
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Hiring untrained freelancers, fractionals, and consultants is different from having untrained people in-house. In-house staff have various safety nets: as working year-on-year means that mistakes can be corrected over time and learned from, drops in results can be recovered from, and workloads and deadlines can be moved around to accommodate things.
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When you are hiring somebody on a project basis, there are no safety nets. They need to deliver it well, first time, on time. If you go for experience-only and/or self-taught marketers, you are gambling on the boundaries of their expertise being wide enough to do a good job for you.​ You are also gambling on their ability to come up with a good plan B if their plan A doesn't work.
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Hiring somebody who combines experience with proper training mitigates these risks: they will create the most effective plans for you and build the most confidence in marketing across your business.
Who did all this cool stuff for you?
I don't have any accomplices.
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It's (technically) based on 15 years of ethnographic research, observing the marketing industry, listening to praise and complaints, and comparing what very good and very average marketers and agencies do.
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I created the strategy and I deliver all the tactical work. If you are interested, I'll happily tell you how I applied the process I use to the Lone Wanderer, and show you how I've practiced what I preach.
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Ultimately it is the result of the variety, depth, and quality of my expertise. The Lone Wanderer actively demonstrates my skills and abilities, proof that I can do the things I say I can.
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I did all the illustrations and artwork myself, as I've been using various Adobe and art programs for my entire marketing career.
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I made the website (I have over 8 years of working on websites with very good website managers) and did the SEO (I managed the relationship with a very good SEO agency for nearly 5 years).
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I write all the copy, having done high quality copywriting courses over the years, and getting a lot of practice from creating some very successful content marketing over the past decade.
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I made all the assets, from promotional ads to invoices. I set up all the technical back-end things you don't see.
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At the time of writing it's just been me. I am working on some promotional videos as and when I can, which means the music I use will be the one thing across the Lone Wanderer I didn't make or do myself.