How do you explain your profession to people outside of the industry? What do you find most exciting and/or rewarding about this work?
What are the core requirements of your job and how do you measure success?
At the end of the day, we as marketers succeed if we’re able to acquire customers to the brand. We have access to all the typical marketing levers: emails, paid media, site and the ability to create an experience that attracts new customers and retains customers. It all boils down to being able to grow your customer base to grow market share.
What is one notable professional achievement you've made over the past year that you are most proud of?
Beyond hitting and exceeding certain goals and KPIs, my biggest achievement is building a stellar team. I always say that it takes a village, and the team must work collaboratively and lift each other up while having complementing skills.
What professional challenge or failure has stuck with you, and how did you embrace it?
The best way to chip away at a problem is to test and learn from it. It’s important to have some data to understand the impact of said challenge and to make sure it’s a true challenge. In one case, I was relentless about testing something that I believed was turning away customers until I finally was able to prove the case. It took me over a year of presenting it in different ways, but over that time, I gathered enough data and collaboration time with my peers that it proved to be a wild success once we changed course.
What trend or technology do you believe will have the most profound impact on your work (and the work of your peers) over the next year?
I would be remiss not to mention AI, which the Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams team benefitted from. First, we used it to scale SEO and blog content, supporting a lean editorial team. Additionally, as we moved to a service model (versus purely conversion), we needed to supplement our styling recommendations at scale. For this, we partnered with FindMine, which helped us build an AI-powered recommendation widget.
If you could say one thing to your younger self, what would it be?
It’s only a failure if you don’t learn from it.
