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How To Move From SEO Into A Senior Marketing Role Podcast

Kevin Gibbons from Re:Signal kindly asked me to join him on the Re:Signal podcast.

Kevin and I have known each other for over a decade and have a good flowing chat around:

  • My personal journey over two decades
  • How important SEO was to my career
  • How important SEO is even today for so many brands and for many more years
  • How search has evolved
  • Why digital on its own won’t work
  • How to establish the right team model and reinforce the right culture to get the best of people professionally and as important personally.
  • How you can move into a more digitally focused role or broaden out into a Head of Marketing, Director of or CMO / CGO role
  • How I’ve landed as an interim CMO and building out Focus, the company culture and strategy consultancy

Watch the full podcast

10 Tips To Make The Shift From SEO Into Marketing Management

  1. Learn the wider business as much as possible as soon as possible
    1. Don’t get stuck with knowing just what you think you influence
  2. Learn to move away from buzzwords – explain super simply and explain the importance of SEO
  3. Everyone’s opinion vs no opinion – Learn that bikeshedding is normal, when simple will have an opinion and when seems complicated or you are expert they will not have an opinion, doesn’t mean senior people are not interested
  4. Learn to deliver your updates in exec summary formats.
    1. Show your impact and report regularly
    2. No news doesn’t mean bad news
    3. If something happens or algorithms change, be prepared to say this is the plan moving forward – senior people want and remember
  5. 2020 has been brutal – understand SEO has always been long term plays, if there are short and midterm wins by ramping up activities step up and take on the challenge
  6. Captain and Champion approach – lunch and learns will really help internally, set them up
  7. Develop relationships with other marketing disciplines and work with product (learn the basics of product management and how they manage many difficult product launches and stakeholders)
  8. Understand what stage of the business your business is:
    Crawl – Walk – Run – Fly
  9. Look at learning other marketing disciplines – the more you learn and appreciate the better your SEO action plan can be and the more likely you are to take on more work
  10. Learn to forecast – SEO typically has to and aligns well with finance teams

Mentioned Content

Personal and Professional SWOT on the Focus Blog –

The Serena Williams coach episode to watch on Netflix

Sir Clive Woodward interview on The High Performance Podcast

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