Resources for modern marketing
Jo Trotman is the new marketing manager for The Residence Collection and Window Widgets. Here, she talks about the expertise and resources required to build an influential brand in today’s marketing landscape.
Marketing is a business discipline that is constantly evolving as new communications channels emerge and, with it, providing opportunities for the early adopters. But building an influential brand in an industry sector requires considerable resources, expertise and commitment.
The Residence Collection brand has arguably been the most influential in the sector since its launch in 2012, where the first fabricators came on board, eager as early adopters. Since then, the R9 platform evolved into The Residence Collection, which includes R7, R2 and the new RD door brand, and it has built an unrivalled reputation for product design and quality in both the trade and consumer channels.
The success with discerning consumers has also been realised thanks to a marketing vision that embraces some of the most inspirational B2C campaigns and activity in the glazing and fenestration industries. If you consider that The Residence Collection has 59K likes and followers on Facebook and 14.8K followers on Instagram, this represents a strong consumer engagement. However, Pinterest alone gets 252K monthly views. To put this into perspective Aga can only boast 151.9K monthly views on the same platform.
Therefore, it comes as little surprise that the resources in the marketing department reflect heavily on our consumer driven brand. While Sarah Hitchings oversees the whole function at board level as sales and marketing director, I’ve been brought in to manage the marketing department on both an operational and tactical level.
We’re now actively looking to grow the department, and are currently recruiting a new graphic designer. The benefit of having this resource in house is that we reduce costly agency fees, and that it also allows us to update brochures, point of sales materials, and other marketing deliverables very quickly. It’s always been the strategy for The Residence Collection and Window Widgets to appoint experts in their respective fields, and so already I’m finding a wonderful and creative culture within the business.
Sian Morgan also recently joined us with a degree in photography, so we can make the most of our product applications and installations and, furthermore, it will allow us to further engage with homeowners through social media for further site imagery. We’ve built an impressive reputation for photography over the years and this investment in Sian, and the plans for a new small in-house studio, will allow us to build on this further.
To boost our already impressive social media platform, we’re looking to add a social media apprentice to the team with a view to offering them a full-time role in two years’ time. With more platforms coming into the mainstream all the time, this will be a fundamental role within the department. I believe in the apprenticeship schemes; I started my career in this role and, with the right mentoring and coaching, this really is a huge opportunity for someone to develop their career in a time where social media is so important for business.
Like most consumer-facing businesses in this industry, leads are the lifeblood of the sales process. Claire Cooke looks after all the consumer lead generation for us and can track every single lead that we receive through digital channels and is very much a modern-day forensic marketer with strong analytical skills. Collectively, the team have some very unique skillsets, many of which aren’t seen in a typical industry marketing department and that in many ways is because we challenge typical convention, much as The Residence Collection range of windows and doors has done.
The modern marketing landscape has evolved with social media and lead generation and these aspects are more important now than ever before. Yet, there’s always a requirement to outsource some skills, after all some of the most influential brands in the world do so and, on that basis, we’re in esteemed company.
But experts within can help transform a marketing function from one that is task-led to one that exudes creativity and invention, and that’s something I want to build upon in the years ahead.