A day in the life of marketing

Welcome to the Lendable Marketing Team: probably better described as the 'Commercial, Strategy and Growth Team'.

A great team strapline would be:

Serve more customers, even better

We are the external face of Lendable in a business-to-business context, strategically aligning our internal departments with our external partners (mainly price comparison websites). We use detailed data analysis to drive growth: building business cases and spearheading credit or development projects based on our findings. All of these projects are designed to help us give more customers the highest quality experience.

We are a close-knit team of three, although we work very closely with three more 'Lendies' in the Product team. Together we make a crew of six, accurately named (by at least one person) 'The Corner of Champions'.

8:45 The Corner of Champions

Every morning I cycle into work and skip over to our sunny end of the office. I stash my sweaty cycling gear into the filing cabinet that the marketing team have acquired (stolen) from the store cupboard and quickly slam the door before the overwhelming scent of 4 Lendie cyclists escapes. Oli and Chris (my teammates) have a shared cafetière of fancy coffee on the go. For reference, we do in fact have an office coffee machine, but Chris is French and Oli thinks he’s a hipster. This is much to my pleasure as the coffee smells like Sunday morning, even on a Monday.

I listen to Chris and Oli bicker about a colossal breach of the 'one-brews-the-other-washes' system in place.

No, they are not in-fact married. Yes, I am glad that I do not drink coffee.

9:55 Working with Product

We begin the day with a team stand-up. Product and marketing initiatives have heavy-crossover and so all six of us gather round and share the key tasks or projects we are working on that day and use the opportunity to gain input from each other or gauge friction points. (We also mock each other’s facial hair and discuss the million-and-one weddings we have been to this year... but primarily: product-marketing friction points.)

I have a cup of tea.

11:00 Why Strategy over Marketing?

A typical day really does not exist in the marketing team. For starters, we have never actually done much in the way of direct marketing outside of some standalone testing like our most recent TV campaign in September. We are a team of non-specialists with backgrounds in retail and finance and that is almost certainly one of our greatest strengths, as between us we have quite a broad skillset but none of us would particularly consider ourselves an 'expert' marketer. We approach each business case based on first principles and as you can imagine, this keeps things interesting.

I probably have another cup of tea.

12:00 External Partner Relations

We work very closely with our external partners (primarily price comparison websites), so a typical day will usually include collaborating with them, be it via slack or email or many of our regular zoom catch-ups to align on growth projects, make improvements to panels for customer-transparency or share data so that we can serve more customers even better. Commercial and strategic negotiations are also a large part of our role. Of course, this can also include beers… and hot wings, but only after 5pm.

12:30 Funnel metrics

We monitor our funnel daily for conversion metrics and other KPIs in order to ensure we have a finger on the pulse for optimisations, be that internally with our product or credit teams, or with our external partners. We need to be ready to react or pro-act at a moment’s notice to market changes, and funnel analysis provides the raw material for those discussions.

There is a rumbling. I look up. Suddenly the whole of credit, capital markets and data science are stampeding towards our end of the office. I quickly assess my escape routes (first floor window) in case this is in fact, finally, an uprising against a marketing team strategy update. Luckily, so far it has always just been the lunchtime rush.

14:00 Data Analysis and Commercial Modelling

Our role is very data-driven and a lot of our time is devoted to fighting with SQL and Python queries, in order to extract the necessary data we need for strategic objectives that we are championing. With this data we are often building models to interact with stakeholders in credit, capital markets, data science and/or business cases to interact with stakeholders in product and development. Being able to do this independently as a team allows us to be agile and add value to the other departments more efficiently.

The milk has run-out.

I reach forward to my keyboard, my hands shaking as the caffeine slowly seeps from my bloodstream to slack our office manager for an emergency Gorillaz order before the more general mutiny begins. I also include bagels and Diet Coke for good measure.

16:00 Compliance

We are dedicated to ensuring that our customers have the best experience with our products and that both our own and our partner journeys are compliant. The marketing team therefore works closely with our internal compliance department and our external partners to monitor existing processes and channels for due diligence and to manage policies for upcoming projects in advance of deployment.

17:00 Intra-team Skill-Share

Although we all spearhead different OKRs, this is probably the most collaborative team I have ever worked in. Second only to the cafetière, is our love affair with the whiteboard (also stolen). So a proportion of each day is often devoted to the three musketeers downloading and analysing each others’ projects in order to optimise or solve our more complex problems as a team. No project has ever been achieved in a silo at Lendable Marketing, and that is what makes us a true team.