A Day In The Life Of A VP Marketing At Financial Services
A VP of Marketing's day revolves around data-driven, direct response strategies, starting with analyzing daily KPIs to immediately adjust bids, staffing, or call queues for optimal performance; constantly being slightly paranoid and confirming that things are still working appropriately, they later focus on long-term growth through conversion rate optimization tests and building dashboards to ensure continuous improvement. The VP's role emphasizes the importance of understanding where every dollar goes and ensuring processes are continuously refined to enhance marketing effectiveness.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Data-Driven Decision Making, Direct Response Marketing, Team Management & Communication, Process Optimization & Analysis
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Philip Cozens
VP Marketing
Financial Services
UC Berkeley
History, Art History
Finance (Banking, Fintech, Investing)
Communication and Marketing
Student Athlete
Video Highlights
1. The VP of Marketing starts the day by analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) from the previous day to identify areas for improvement in marketing campaigns and sales strategies. This involves adjusting bids in Google Ads or Facebook, modifying staffing on sales call queues, and investigating specific indicators to understand performance drivers.
2. Direct response marketing focuses on quantifying the return on investment (ROI) of marketing efforts, tracking metrics such as views, clicks, video watches, landing page submissions, and call center interactions to determine the effectiveness of each marketing dollar spent. This approach contrasts with branding-focused marketing, which prioritizes brand awareness and top-of-funnel activities.
3. A significant aspect of the VP of Marketing's role involves continuous monitoring of production metrics, such as sales, contracts, and call volumes, comparing current performance against historical benchmarks, and proactively identifying potential issues. This requires a slightly paranoid mindset to ensure that marketing efforts are consistently working as intended and to quickly address any breakdowns.
Transcript
What does a day in the life of a VP of marketing look like?
A day in the life starts by reviewing your key performance indicators from the previous day. For marketing and media purchasing, it's best to begin earlier in the morning to make the most impact.
You'll get all of yesterday's data, and any lagging indicators come in overnight. You need to review this data and make changes to ensure continuous daily improvement.
For someone in marketing, this might involve adjusting bids in Google Ads or on Facebook to meet your target cost per lead. In other areas, it could mean increasing the number of dials made or reassigning sales reps to specific call queues fed by different marketing sources.
After that, you'll touch base with your team to understand what's driving the day's performance at a higher level, beyond just bids and routing. This is where you'll look into specific indicators and analyze why they occurred as they did.
In direct response marketing, the focus is on tangible results: when you spend a dollar, what comes back? This could be a view, a click, a video watch, a landing page submission, or a call to your center.
After that, you'll likely start tackling ad hoc projects. Throughout the day, you need to monitor production, not just in terms of sales or contracts sent, but also the number of dials made. You'll assess if things feel right compared to yesterday or the same day last week.
You have to be constantly vigilant. The best marketers are slightly paranoid, always anticipating things could break. You need to be actively confirming that everything is working appropriately.
Later in the day, you'll focus on advancing more growth tactics. This includes planning tests for landing page conversion rate optimization or planning tests for different call cadences. You'll also plan emails for your nurturing system and SMS messages to consumers or prospects, and assess how they're performing.
You'll continue to analyze what's working and why. Dashboards, whether built in Power BI or Tableau, are key for this hour-to-hour focus and for additional ad hoc analysis.
By the end of the day, you'll check if performance met expectations. If there were any flaws, you'll consider how to set up new processes or alter existing ones to ensure performance meets your needs and continuously improves.