Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with William Lawrie, EMEA digital marketing manager at JLL:

Shaheen Samavati 0:14
Hi everyone, I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix, and I’m excited to be here with William Laurie, EMEA digital marketing manager for JLL, a leading professional services firm that specializes in real estate and investment management. Thanks so much for joining us.

William Laurie 0:26
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Shaheen Samavati 0:29
Great. So first, can you tell us a bit about your background and how did you end up in marketing?

William Laurie 0:34
Yeah. Well, I’ve got mixed backgrounds. Brazilian, English, grew up in both places. Kind of did a hospitality major, actually. So I did all the operations, front desk, spa work, cleaned the toilets. I did all this stuff and decided I wanted, I’d rather work in marketing and I managed to get a job in a hotel for marketing. And that’s kind of where I dipped my first toe into marketing, and I really liked it. I did digital marketing kind of, I actually did a finance degree at the same time thinking “I want to be a bit more consultant, do finance.” I did that for a bit, but it wasn’t quite my fit. So actually for the same company, JLL, but in Brazil, then I wanted to do my MBA. And that’s really where I realized, which was in IE in Madrid, and that’s really where I realized I wanted to do marketing and I really enjoyed tech side of it and all the analytical side. So that’s what I wanted to pursue after leaving the MBA. So I managed to get a job at a digital marketing agency in the UK, which is, if you don’t have experience in the UK, it’s always good to have a bit of experience to get another job because they really see that as a plus and it’s really difficult to get job without experience in the UK. And then I managed to go back to my old company, JLL, which is going through a digital transformation phase, and as a digital marketing manager. Originally, I was hired for, primarily to focus on the residential side, but after a bit of restructuring, I’m on the operational side and help out in different departments, do project management, account management and operational side of the digital marketing.

Shaheen Samavati 2:21
And so how does what you do relate to content marketing?

William Laurie 2:25
Yeah. So what I like to call myself, to make it easier to understand, is sort of the account manager of the different business lines. So there’s different business lines within JLL, because it’s a very large company. So there’s residential capital markets and such and it goes on and on. My primary focus is still residential, but you help out with other business lines. And so I’m sort of the account manager, I’m the person who they talk to if they want to talk to digital marketing. And then we have a wonderful team which I work with and they, around, and they specialize in different things such as SEO, digital marketing, performance, and ABM. And then they also have a content marketing manager, but they focus primarily on the online side of it. So I have a general expertise, I don’t know everything, I still don’t know everything, I’m always learning, I probably will always be learning. But I have a general knowledge where I can provide them what the best practices are, or content and online media, digital marketing and social media. I sometimes have to improve myself, I have to test myself, and sometimes I have to ask questions and test them too, say, “Do you think that’s the best practice? Do you think we should go other ways, so they kind of think a bit more in a digital way, since it’s slightly new, and in the end marketing will slowly, it will end up meshing with digital marketing, so they have to be just as savvy. So I try to help educate as well.

Shaheen Samavati 4:02
Okay. Well for those who don’t know, can you just give us a brief overview of what JLL does? I mean, it’s a huge company. I’m sure lots of people are familiar, but just a quick overview.

William Laurie 4:13
JLL is a complicated one, because it’s real estate. But I think the best way to describe it in the simplest fashion is it does everything in real estate except own the buildings and build the buildings. So everything else you can think of, it does. It does consulting for hotels and real estate, it does how offices, how best to structure the offices, how to design the offices… selling offices, it’s not just hotels, or buildings or corporate buildings, it’s also houses, small houses. So they do everything you can think of really, they’re just a massive, massive company in real estate.

Shaheen Samavati 4:57
And you said that, I mean, you’re essentially working like an account manager. So what’s your day-to-day like? I mean, what’s your typical day?

William Laurie 5:04
A typical day… it’s all emails and talking and stakeholder relationships and project management. So, every day in the morning, I try to, well I catch up on my emails, and make sure I respond to people’s questions and see if they’re doing the best practices. Or maybe they want to implement something on the website, or they’re thinking of a marketing campaign. And if they think of a marketing campaign, which they’re thinking of, and they tell me, then that’s when I get all the stakeholders together, all the experts in performance marketing. And then the content marketing of the offline, as well as maybe SEO people, or talk with the product manager of the actual site and put them together in a room and try to figure out what is the customer journey end to end, because you really have to sync, not only the content has to be in sync with the offline stuff as well. Otherwise it won’t work as well. And sometimes, if you post a photo, for example, on social media, that person is going to relate to that photo, maybe he’s going to try and search with that photo, and it’s easier for that person to find on the website, if he associates, if he sees that photo on the website: “Oh, that’s related to that.” So you kind of have to put them all together and also project manage besides account managing.

Shaheen Samavati 6:27
So, well correct me if I’m wrong in understanding, but are you basically, rather than working on like the global content for JLL itself, you’re like working on content for particular projects?

William Laurie 6:37
Yes, well more on residential. I talk a lot with the marketing team, with residential, and say what are the best practices on social media, how it can improve. And then I do work a bit throughout Europe and sometimes global on different projects, depending on if they need more resources and I can come in to help and do different projects.

Shaheen Samavati 7:02
So you basically, yeah, consulting with clients.

William Laurie 7:04
It’s a bit complicated. Yeah, it’s a bit of consulting the clients, a bit of like an agency within the company. And yeah, you could talk about us like a consultant almost, it’s not an easy one to… I’ve had that question several times. And it’s not the easiest way to, not the easiest role to describe.

Shaheen Samavati 7:26
Do you have an example of like a recent campaign that you’ve done, something you’ve worked on that we can check out?

William Laurie 7:33
Yeah, I mean, there’s the… we did, a few months ago, we released the Living campaign. So the Living is… to put it in simple terms it’s the B2B side of a residential market. And we released it all together under new brands. Well, I didn’t come up with the name and everything. It was the marketing team that we needed to help the plan with the digital marketing, and also work together with the other European countries, since it’s a Europe-wide campaign. And it’s basically saying “We are the thought leaders, we’re here, we’re putting all these together.” The services within that B2B are, for example, students… also healthcare. So for example, where the older population need to be healthcare taken in the houses—I forgot the exact name—and other such services, which I will put together under one umbrella, and kind of go on to the residential brand. So we really needed to promote this and create brand awareness and throughout, so we had to release it in Portugal, Germany, and other countries all together. And we worked with the marketing team, the performance team, and several other stakeholders in our different countries, and I’m very fortunate to have stakeholders in different countries in Europe, which makes it a lot easier to do a European campaign because they bring their expertise to the table. So that’s one, you can see, you can probably see on LinkedIn, it’s more of a paid campaign. So you won’t, it’ll be difficult to find exactly the campaign organically, but it did pretty well. And we’re going through different phases to release that in the future as well.

Shaheen Samavati 9:23
Okay, so a lot of what you’re doing is like paid campaigns, through social media and stuff like that.

William Laurie 9:25
Yeah, so we do a lot of paid campaigns. We are also trying to build a social… an improved and larger organic social media network for the residential in the UK as well. Since it is actually relatively new to JLL, for you who don’t, maybe some of you don’t know that JLL do residential. That is actually pretty normal, because we started off as mostly doing buildings and offices. So residential is actually relatively new to us, because we just started out recently, while other real estate firms, big ones, started as residential and went to corporate. So it’s kind of, it’s an interesting and challenging time. And I enjoy working with that a lot to build the brand: the residential.

Shaheen Samavati 10:26
Yeah and you mentioned this campaign that you did that was across Europe. So that brings me to the question of just like, what challenges do you face working in the European market—or opportunities?

William Laurie 10:40
Yeah, so there are always challenges to work in the European market, because there’s several campaigns, this is such a big company, this is relating to such a large company in general, it might not be the same for smaller companies. But there are so many campaigns going on, so many different marketing managers in different countries. And then you’ve got different holidays, which is something you don’t think of sometimes, you have to think about the holidays, and the timings and scheduling with everyone. So that’s one of the things, you have to really talk to everyone and say, “Can you do that? Do you have resources to do that, to build out, to help think about that? And when can you do it? I have a campaign, so maybe you have to push back what budget…” Also you have to think about the budget you’re going to release in each country because some markets aren’t as big as the others. So you have to think about the ROI. And then you also have to think about the content in general. Europe, we’re fairly lucky in Europe, because there isn’t massive, massive cultural differences within the continent. So it makes it a bit easier to adapting social media, especially B2B. But you do have to, what we realize is they do perform better in their own language. So you always have to make sure you have someone translating, or someone who’s knowledgeable about the country, the market, because it’s not really good enough for you yourself to translate. And then sometimes you always have to make sure that the translator has expertise in either social media, or real estate or the industry that you’re in, to make sure that you translate properly. Because sometimes a person who doesn’t know the industry well might not translate the words in the fashion you want. So you really have to make sure that that’s done properly as well. And of course, the performance is a lot better if you do translate it in the proper way, and it’s in their own language, for several reasons. One, the person engages more with the campaign, plus it usually tends to perform better on the social media when it’s in their own language.

Shaheen Samavati 12:49
And do you manage all of that or is some of that done at the local level?

William Laurie 12:55
The paid campaigns… lucky to have a team which are very knowledge about that, and they do the performance campaigns and they target the right audience. They have all the knowledge of the audiences and a bit of testing, they do dynamic ads to see which is best, and really see it perform. And it’s always a good rule of thumb, especially with a big campaign, you do it a bit small at the beginning to make sure how it goes to see if it’s performing well, test it out, and then… you don’t want to spend all your money at once at the beginning, and just test out and then put all the money in. So I have a great team to work around that. And they do a lot of work and they’re there all day working on those campaigns. I’m very fortunate to have them, otherwise I woud be super busy as well. And I don’t know as well as they do.

Shaheen Samavati 13:47
Yeah, it sounds like a huge coordinated effort.

William Laurie 13:50
Yeah, exactly.

Shaheen Samavati 13:53
Well, I was just curious if you have any advice for those who are looking to get into digital marketing with a large corporate such as JLL.

William Laurie 14:03
Large corporate, JLL… Well, I think it’s always good to have some expertise first, because otherwise you’re gonna have to start small and it’s a bit difficult. So maybe the best way is there’s, I was fortunate enough to find the agencies, and there’s several digital marketing agencies which are around which aren’t that big. And when you look at digital marketing requirements or even any marketing requirements, a lot of them say “I want agency experience.” And since there’s so many, there’s loads more, just try and maybe find an agency just to get some experience and you don’t have to be there that long, but it does give you a bit of insight, gives you a bit more knowledge, you live with it every day. And I think that will give you some great leverage going to digital marketing. Otherwise, if you don’t want to go that route, you really have to prove yourself in another way, by maybe getting certified, in maybe the Google AdWords certifications, which are free, Google Analytics as well, which I think is one of the most important things from my standpoint, especially operationally because I have to answer to so many stakeholders and keep them happy. And maybe Facebook ads, I mean, all of them, there’s free courses, you can find about pretty much all the digital campaign, digital marketing platforms and just do them and get certified if you don’t want to, I mean, you can do it in your free time while you’re studying. That will really give you a leg up.

Shaheen Samavati 15:38
Because you mentioned that JLL l is going through this large-scale digital transformation. So I guess that means there’s more demand for these kinds of digital marketing profiles.

William Laurie 15:46
Yeah, I mean it’s, nowadays there is more digital marketing requirements. But I think now as you come along, and as you go more into the future, you see that they’ll become one and one with marketing. They won’t be just… not sure if we’ll be specialized in just digital marketing, you’ll have to have the whole knowledge of also marketing and digital marketing. It’s becoming such a big part of our lives that it’s normal now to do digital marketing—it goes hand in hand, you don’t expect to do it, it’s really difficult to do a marketing campaign without digital marketing.

Shaheen Samavati 16:24
Yeah, all marketers have to be digital marketers now.

William Laurie 16:27
Yeah, exactly. So there is a high demand and I think if you want to get your hand into marketing, I think it there is a certain benefit to knowing digital marketing now. Sometimes more of the marketing, especially during these times, during COVID, when most of the engagement is actually at home, and I don’t know how it’s going to be after we come out of it, but it’s probably going to be more online, more digital now. Especially if we see more remote workers, there’s not going to be as much people transiting to their workplace, which is, most of the transit in the world is usually business orientated rather than leisure orientated. So you’re gonna have to focus more on the digital marketing side and become unique and relevant, and differentiate yourself.

Shaheen Samavati 17:21
How has this lockdown situation impacted you in your job?

William Laurie 17:26
I unfortunately, can’t specify, go into that much detail. Yeah, about that.

Shaheen Samavati 17:34
Well I mean, about the plans maybe not, like in terms of how it impacted your marketing, but maybe how it impacts your day-to-day at work?

William Laurie 17:44
Day-to-day work… I mean, there’s more time to do things, kind of take advantage to maybe learn more, improve your expertise. That’s one of the benefits of this lockdown is kind of, you can do that. And do some hygiene factors, of course, organize yourself, make sure you come out stronger than you come in. And that’s what one of my things I said to myself when we started in this lockdown, is “I refuse to come out the same than coming in, I refuse to get this pandemic get the better of me.” So hopefully, just take advantage of the time and learn, and get better and come out with better skills, and make sure that the time to organize, use that, so you come out ready to plan and ready to, come out with plans and campaigns and everything at the get-go before the rest of your competitors.

Shaheen Samavati 18:46
Yeah, so that brings me to the recommendations part of the interview. But you mentioned continued learning; is there one thing in particular you’ve been studying lately or any courses you could recommend?

William Laurie 19:00
I’ve been doing so many courses, because I enjoy trying to build up my skills in general in several things because, I see as very useful skills, like for example, I didn’t know that much about CSS and HTML. And I realized that I actually used it a lot. Not specifically for digital marketing, but for the websites, and I think it’s good to know, especially also because you use it for email marketing. And if you want to go into email marketing, that becomes very useful to know the coding. It makes a bit more sense, everything, and it actually helps with the SEO, which is relevant to digital marketing as well, because the better the campaign, the landing page, the better their performance. So those things in SEO, for example, to improve the performance, such as H1 tags… which I knew what it was, but I didn’t really know until I did HTML and now I know, it makes sense now that do HTML. So there’s other things. So then I’m just doing UX as well, trying to do UX courses, which to me is actually, I think, really important for everything. Not just websites, but also digital marketing, because it really gets into the psychology of how people interact with pages, photos, and how… One of the most interesting things I think I got out of the course was, when a person looks at a page or something, they look in an F shape. So they look at the top two lines, and then they take notice of that. And then they don’t really look at the bottom right, but they take, they just skim through the left of the screen. So you really have to think of where you’re placing your objects and where you’re putting your content, to catch the eye. Because especially in digital marketing, you only have, you have extremely little time to capture their attention. And they’re scrolling like crazy. So you really have to know how to capture their attention in the best way possible.

Shaheen Samavati 21:08
Yeah, definitely seems super relevant. Is there a particular course that you took recently?

William Laurie 21:16
There’s one on Udemy, a UX one. I don’t remember the exact name right now. But if you look at Udemy, it’s the highest-rated UX course on Udemy, and usually the courses on Udemy are very, a lot cheaper. They do… there’s the full price but they’re always doing sales. So it’s kind of they do the emergency marketing tactic where sometimes you see the 200, but wait a second, and they’re usually like 10 pounds. And you get certificate and it’s massive, and you can have it there for the rest of your life, and you can refer back to it. And that’s, I haven’t even completed certifications really because it’s just a lot, and I want to learn about different things and I don’t need everything, but it’s almost like having a textbook, and go back and refer to it as like, “oh, how can I improve myself? How can I suggest something at the company?” Because in the end, I guess everyone wants to grow in the company. So it’s really good to have those referrals and think about new ways and push the boundaries a bit by studying.

Shaheen Samavati 22:16
Yeah, absolutely. I’m a big fan of Udemy also. I’m taking a few courses in the lockdown myself. And then, well, a couple other things I wanted to ask if you have recommendations on. Any app or tool that you use in your job?

William Laurie 22:31
So we just got Hootsuite. Hootsuite is great, it helps scheduling for a large corporation. And you can schedule, plan, so you can really see where everyone’s deciding to put their digital marketing campaigns or where they’re gonna post organically, because we got a lot of organic posts and you don’t want to do spam and spam people. So you really have to make sure it’s like one to two or three posts a day, to make sure you’re not annoying people. And also you get a lot of analytics and you can respond there. And you’ve got all the social platforms. So it makes it a lot easier to interact on social media, which is so important with social media, you have to make sure the brand is humanized and you engage with them, because that’s the point of it in the end. You want to seem like a human to them, you want them to build an emotional connection, and not just be seen as a brand. And that’s the point of social media in the end.

Shaheen Samavati 23:29
Yeah, absolutely. And I just also want to ask you if you have any recommendations on how to stay up to date on marketing trends? Any publications you follow?

William Laurie 23:38
Yeah. Well I do love… there’s Twitter, which I like Twitter because you can go through the thoughts. I follow like Fast Company for example, TechCrunch. Fast Company I especially like cause I think they’ve got very innovative things, and then they talk about different companies, which they’re doing innovations, and I prefer that than actually following a single company. Because I do think there are companies and there are people who do great campaigns. But there’s always consistent companies doing different things. So I think you need to learn a bit from every person and take that together, rather than just one person, and bring that all together in one point. So Twitter is a great place to follow these and get these trends and keep up to date, because then you keep a thought leadership. I don’t really follow anyone, just news. And Econsultancy is actually pretty good. It has a lot of trends going on forwards, especially digital marketing trends. Sometimes it’s subscription, some things are free, some are subscription based, but they usually have a lot of information of upcoming trends. But you can usually Google News, Google everything and find out if you really want to and go behind it. I think the important thing is do the courses, learn the foundations and then the trends just try and keep up to date in news, to be honest.

Shaheen Samavati 24:59
And then how about an event or an industry group?

William Laurie 25:06
So there’s the Adobe Summit, which was good. Adobe bring together all their clients, and they actually bring, of course they try to sell the product. But also, they bring together thought leaders in different things and show the trends in different industries, because they’re experts in different industries. So you really see what is going through the mind of people and what, like for example, customer experience is one of the big up-and-coming demands, and that’s what companies are investing in now. And at the last Adobe Summit, they actually had a panel where they interviewed three Gen Z people, which are the people who are now consuming media, and they’re the up-and-coming demographic title—target, sorry. And it was interesting, because they are talking about going into fashion websites, or fashion brands and social media and they’re expecting the brands to already suggest what they want. They’re expecting them to know already without you searching: ” Ah, this is what I want.” So you’re really gonna have to go into analytics and automation, really focus on those things in the future. And so the social media, you’re gonna really have to, probably, especially, specifically in social media… You’re gonna really have to target niches even more, to focus and make it even better, to get a better ROI and better conversions from social media, and target in a very small niche, and become micro-targeting almost in the future, I think.

Shaheen Samavati 26:47
Super interesting. Well, we’re about out of time, but do you have any parting thoughts for those who want to advance in their marketing careers in Europe?

William Laurie 26:58
One thing, I guess, is to network. I really, I’m horrible at networking. I have so much anxiety out of networking, and I always hear people say that. And I’ve just started doing it a bit more because I wanted to be a bit more knowledgeable and try. And people are more friendly than you realize. Because to build up my knowledge, I really wanted to talk to people. So just message them on LinkedIn, of course do like a note or something, and say I want to talk. It might be you won’t get an answer, but just press that button, I think. I think that’s one of the most helpful things to get into marketing, because you’re gonna have to network as well, nowadays, because if you want jobs, it’s more difficult to get through the system with keywords, and there’s so many applicants nowadays.

Shaheen Samavati 27:47
Yeah, absolutely. Maybe start a podcast!

William Laurie 27:51
Yeah, maybe start a podcast. I haven’t reached that. You’re well far ahead than other people, so you’re definitely gonna be, your network is gonna be massive in a few years.

Shaheen Samavati 28:05
I hope so. Well, thank you so much for for joining us on the podcast, I really appreciated hearing your insights.

William Laurie 28:13
No, thank you so much. It was great to be here, and it’s nice to talk to someone besides my flatmates.

Shaheen Samavati 28:19
Awesome. And thanks everybody else for listening in. For more perspectives on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out TheContentMix.com. We’ll also be releasing a lot more interviews like this one in the coming days, so keep tuning in. See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai