IT Digest Interview With Paul Lewis, CCO And CMO At Adzuna

Paul, can you tell us about your journey in MarTech?

I have over 20 years of extensive experience in scaling fast growth digital businesses. Most recently, I was Interim CMO at gift marketplace notonthehighstreet.com, where I worked across a number of key brand and customer focused projects following the private equity backed acquisition by Great Hill Partners. Prior to notonthehighstreet.com, I spent over five years at MOO.com where I oversaw and owned the global marketing strategy, driving growth in the U.S., UK and key European countries. My career also includes household names such as Hometree, VoucherCodes, Ancestry and Betfair, where I leveraged the full suite of brand, customer and digital marketing channels, driving strategic growth and helping to rapidly scale and develop loved, trusted, global consumer brands.

What challenges did the Covid-19 pandemic pose for your marketing team?

The global pandemic has accelerated adoption of programmatic advertising within recruitment and we’re now seeing these technologies spread beyond North America into Europe. Our advertisers have needed to fill roles quickly, often with tighter budgets. The labor market has swung from being an employer’s market, with workers being laid off or furloughed, to a candidate’s market with employers struggling to find enough skilled workers to fill open positions, and this has meant we’ve had to work harder than ever to match quality candidates with advertisers. Some industries have proved more resilient than others, so we’ve had to focus on where the demand has been. And our 20 country-level websites have each experienced their own pandemic journeys based on each country’s lockdown restrictions and subsequent recoveries. For example, job vacancies in the UK fell significantly early into the pandemic but have since recovered to reach record high levels, while Australia and New Zealand experienced far stricter and more prolonged lockdown restrictions.

On a practical note, the pandemic shut down conferences and events meaning we had to pivot some of our marketing efforts online, instead organizing virtual webinars with the likes of the UK government. The real-time and comprehensive nature of our labor market data enabled us to inform organizations, like the UK’s Office for National Statistics, about the impact of covid on the labor market from week-to-week, and we focused on debunking the changing jobs market for our clients and our job seekers through PR & content. We’ve monitored topics from the rising prevalence of vaccine mandates across U.S. workplaces, to changing job search behavior, to the rise in ‘stay interviews’.

Combined, this doubling down meant that despite the pandemic we grew our marketing team in terms of headcount.

What sets Adzuna apart from the competition?

Adzuna is a smarter, more transparent job search engine. We help millions of job seekers access millions of jobs each month, help them cut through the noise, zero in on the right role faster and land the right job. Adzuna provides access to every available online job listing in a single site — without giving anyone else access to their personal data — and our unique tools and salary stats help them pinpoint the perfect role that allows them to know what they’re actually worth. We love using the power of our technology to match people to better, more fulfilling jobs and keep people around the world working. This mission feels particularly relevant as we move forward from the pandemic and return to the working world again.

How do you envisage MarTech evolving, in the years to come?

If there’s one thing that a lot of marketers have learned from the pandemic, it’s the importance of remaining agile and being able to make quick decisions, if needed. The marketing landscape continues to evolve at a rapid pace, creating opportunities for businesses that are able to keep up and adapt. With more of a focus on the data side of marketing, martech is becoming increasingly important. To know your customers inside out, at every touchpoint of the funnel, is a science.

Essentially, businesses need to embrace change because it’s happening faster than ever. Help your teams fail faster so that you can learn faster. Visit old tests, old channels, old hypotheses and test them all again (and again three months later). And pick the right martech setup that positions you for success.

What are 3 things that business owners can do to optimize their digital outreach?

Optimize your digital footprint: A “digital footprint” is the unique set of online data that a business possesses including your company website, social media channels and directory listings. It’s important that these are all claimed, optimized and reflect the current status of your business to be able to communicate your messaging with customers.
Maintain direct communication: With in-person communication still limited due to the pandemic, direct communication with customers remains a priority and very valuable to the relationship. The common tool businesses have been using is email marketing, such as email blasts or direct email outreach, as well as phone calls and direct mail. Consistency can be a challenge due to the world’s current circumstances, but direct communications allow us to stay in touch with existing and prospective customers. As a result, you can secure relationships and ensure people remain up to date with what’s happening with the business.
Show empathy in your messaging: In addition to providing consistent and direct communication, empathy needs to be considered. Times are much better than they were a year ago, but we are all still recovering and getting used to the global shift back to normalcy. Messaging then, needs to show that you care about your customers on a personal level, aside from just the business they provide, and that you’re in things together for the long haul.

As a marketing leader, what are your thoughts on how ROMI and its use as a metric to define success?

The Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) metric differs from brand to brand. In essence, it helps show the direction of marketing performance by measuring how much revenue a marketing campaign generates compared to the investment of running that campaign.

Typically, marketers are driven to run effective campaigns, using their time, energy and marketing spend to drive results that contribute to company growth. For Adzuna, the goal is always to achieve over a 100% ROI (Return on Investment), so we know every $1 we spend, is delivering on the top line and adding further value to the business and our growth aspirations.

It’s important to understand your marketing mix though, and how this relates to channel and overall ROI metrics. If you get a lot of Organic/SEO traffic (typically viewed as free) then you can overinvest in other marketing channels (e.g., Paid Social and Facebook Advertising) and drive a negative ROI. Why? Because if you view your overall blended ROI as the leading metric, and that’s still positive, you’re still driving the business to revenue success / growth. This in turn might help with your strategy and direction, the ability to outspend competition on certain channels due to your marketing mix, and the ability to still drive an overall positive ROI.

Your top pick for a book on marketing that everyone should read?

I’ve currently have three books on my desk that I’m making my way through. Each one hits different notes but are worth reading (and a kindle full of other books that I LOVE reading).

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
The Leader’s guide to Influence (how to use soft skills to get hard results), by Mike Brent and Fiona Elsa Dent
The 4 Disciplines of Execution, by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling

Could you name one other marketer that you would like to see featured here?

I can’t speak more highly about Cian Weeresinghe, CMO of Wise.com (formerly Transferwise). My LinkedIn recommendation on him speaks volumes.

What are the key ingredients that make a successful marketer, in this day and age?

If you can only work on one skill to become a more successful marketer, make sure it’s communication. Communication is different for every single person at every level of an organization, changing on a daily, and even hourly, basis. To make things even more complex, communication is also about listening. If you can focus and work on this every single day, you’ll be a better leader and marketer.

My favorite quote I’ve coined is, “I build happy teams, because happy teams deliver.” The idea here is that you need to communicate with your teams, the business around you and even customers – to find what their happiness is. Maybe it’s clarity of goals, a path to promotion or just salary. If you can identify what makes individuals happy, especially from teams you need to rely on, it will make things so much easier. That, in turn, helps with achieving the goals set out for the business and beyond. Make 2022 the year marketers adapt to this ethos and really learn what makes their teams happy.