How Marketing Agencies Stay Productive: Paul Martin of Jaywing
This week we feature, Paul Martin, Digital Strategy Director at Jaywing. Jaywing is an Australian digital marketing agency which lives to create change.
In this interview, you can read more about his work at Jaywing, favorite marketing tools, productivity tips as well as his advice for budding marketers.
Your location: Sydney, Australia.
Your favorite gadget: Sonos speakers. We have them installed in the Jaywing office and they allow for collaborative playlists to be created and interacted with in real-time via the app.
You start your day with: Coffee! Specifically, Single Origin Roasters coffee.
Your favorite time-saving trick: Excel macros and pivot tables.
Your top 3 blogs you read daily: B&T / Mumbrella / TED (not really a blog, but amazing thought-provoking content).
Describe an average day at Jaywing?
There is no such thing as an average day at Jaywing- one of the exciting benefits of working in the digital space! Monday mornings always start with a team meeting to catch up on agency news and client happenings, along with the all important upcoming social events, however from there on out it totally depends on what campaigns are being worked on. Our days can be filled with technical SEO audits, building innovative biddable media campaigns, crunching big data, delivering training sessions and seminars, undertaking a client’s rebranding strategy, designing amazing EMDs, creating bespoke attribution models, designing beautiful data visualisations… and everything in between!
As a marketer, what are some of your favorite productivity hacks?
Take regular breaks away from your desk. Marketing, even in technical areas such as SEO or PPC, is a very creative discipline. To get those creative juices flowing you need to clear your mind, and taking a break after the end of each task, even if it’s just to get up and grab a coffee, helps keep your mind active. The Jaywing offices have loads of casual break out areas where staff are encouraged to take down time throughout the working day.
As a person who is well-versed with online / inbound marketing, I’m sure you rely on a few marketing tools to automate your efforts. What are the top 3–5 tools you use?
I’m not personally a fan of tools that automate processes, as you run the danger of becoming overly reliant on them, and therefore missing opportunities or just simply removing the human talent input from your work. There are however tools we use which help reduce admin tasks meaning we can spend more time on productive work for clients, and tools that as so cleaver they can discover insights or automate actions which we may have otherwise missed out on.
This is a very technical online marketing specific tool, however it’s uses are vast. ScreamingFrog is a web crawler that can be configured to access any website and retrieve any data you wish about the pages of the site. For SEO it is integral in almost all tasks we undertake from finding internal linking errors through to pages that are inaccessible to search engines, for Data and Analytics work it can allow you to assess in bulk what tracking tags are present and how they’re firing across a website, and in Content Marketing it can show you how content is accessed throughout the site and if any duplicated content exists. A brilliant tool.
2. Basecamp
A super cloudbased communication and project management solution. At Jaywing we love Basecamp as it not only replaces emails, which can often otherwise create silos of information in people’s inboxes inaccessible to the wider project team, but also a great collaboration space where all documentation can be easily stored and referenced at all times. The features of BrightPod can work well in collaboration.
Regarding tools that allow you to undertake work a human couldn’t, the Jaywing Intelligence Suite is an excellent example. Containing a variety of different tools, the suite is built around big data and giving marketers an ability to view and manipulate it to retrieve actionable insights that are otherwise manually impossible to unearth. Features and applications include utilising virtual reality to allow our analysts to manipulate huge datasets in a tactile and interactive environment, automate micro-scale decision making based on a set of predefined rules to allow real-time competitor price matching and stock level based media buying activity, and even helps develop a single-user cross-device omnichannel view by linking both online and offline customer touch points to help personalise all stages of brand interaction to your customer.
What is your strategy for getting people to your site and then converting them to a customer?
At Jaywing, we’re actually really lucky that a lot of clients come to us naturally either through direct recommendations, word-of-mouth, or having seen our marketing work for other clients. We don’t really have to work too hard at all on our own marketing efforts, online or otherwise, to acquire great new clients. We also give a lot back to the industry too by producing regular insights pieces and sector reports, as well as running events and sharing advice at conferences, all of which we always offer free to the marketing community which I’m sure helps reiterate our position as a global leader in our profession
Is there any advice you’d like to give to budding marketers to help them work smart and stay productive?
Email inbox management is a big potential pitfall to harming productivity. Replying to every email as they come through with equal priority is a recipe for disaster. Ensure you either have filters set up to automatically sort incoming emails or that there is a folder structure for you to do so manually. Understanding which emails require an immediate response and which can wait for later, is a skill that needs to be learnt and it’s not easy, but once mastered is the first step to becoming an awesome marketer!
How do teams at Jaywing have fun at work / make work fun?
A healthy work-life balance is massively important in any job and is something Jaywing take very seriously. Each month we have an all agency social which is picked randomly from staff suggestions; recent socials have included challenging our logic at Escape Rooms, wine tasting, and bubble soccer! To encourage getting away from our screens throughout the day we also have a free bootcamp and inter-agency sports matches at lunchtimes. If that wasn’t enough, we also have two fully stocked wine & beer fridges which are always ready for 4pm drinks, and of course our famous arcade machine loaded with everything from Street Fighter to Mario Kart!
A big thanks to Paul Martin for taking the time out to answer these questions! We wish Jaywing all the very best for the work they are doing.
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