If 2020 has shown us anything, it’s that everything can change overnight. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Zara Easton, brand marketing manager at LinkedIn in the UK, wanted to make sure that the company’s marketing campaign communicated in the most authentic way possible. She also wanted people impacted by the pandemic to receive the messages they really needed to hear. 

After beginning the campaign creation process with strategic groundwork and audience identification, Zara and her team produced an empathetic piece titled “Working It Out” that highlighted how LinkedIn has become an essential tool for supporting one another. 

Today Zara shares with Shaheen Samavati her perspective on adaptability in the campaign creation journey and points out that a marketing team’s plans must carry a degree of flexibility. She also provides insights about marketing campaigns as well as optimizing a LinkedIn profile when searching for a job. She even tells us how she landed her own job at LinkedIn!

You can watch the full conversation in the video above or on YouTube, and listen to the podcast on Apple or Spotify.

Rapid-fire recs

  • Source of inspiration: Friend and entrepreneur Jess Ratcliffe and her podcast, The Ideas Coach. “She helps people find their mission and find steps to get there. She runs a fantastic course called Unleash Your Extraordinary. The reason why she’s so inspirational is because she was diagnosed with a life threatening illness which she continued to live through, but that was her awakening to basically change. I love her podcast and all her content on Instagram is great as well.”
  • Favorite app: Couch to 5K. “I’m not a runner, but I just finished my nine weeks of this app and now I can run a 5K. It has helped me track my progress!”
  • Productivity hack: “One of my productivity tips is quite obvious, but it’s helped me so much. It’s just calendar blocking, but to be really specific. Sometimes I’ve got these five tasks that are quite monotonous, but I need to get them done. I bundle those together and block that out of my calendar and just make sure I turn off everything else so I focus on getting that done.” 
  • Group or hashtag to follow: Amazing If. “This group is run by Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis. They have a fantastic podcast and Instagram account. They’ve recently written The Squiggly Career, a book really showing how you can pivot your careers and the skills you need along the way. So I would highly recommend both of those.”

“I think it also comes down to the balance of appreciating that things won’t always be perfect, because you don’t have the time to do that. You can do your best job to make it a great campaign and a great idea, but if you take too long you miss out on the moment.” 

Connect with Zara and Shaheen on LinkedIn.

This post was edited by Jamie Albert.

For more insights on how to create creative campaigns:

To see the full transcript, click on page number 2 below. 

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