Marketing sits at the start and throughout all our prospect and customer engagements. We’re responsible for building the Shieldpay brand in market, driving new business demand as well as customer and partner communications.

Being relatively new to the business myself, bringing my experience from both agency and brand environments, big and small, I strive to find a good balance between agility and structure. It’s important that we can maintain our speed to market, but we need to document and order our processes so they form sustainable foundations for the future as we grow.

I love that we have a strong focus on learning and development within the team, particularly important for the marketing function as such a fast-moving industry with marketing technology advancing all the time. And a particular passion of mine, as I thoroughly support having a growth-mindset and continuous learning. We’re an ambitious team, with a wide variety of skills and experiences, with a continual drive to improve. And being part of a start-up/scale-up gives us a large remit and opportunity to work across a variety of disciplines, from brand design to web development, and analytics to PR.

Whilst marketing is quite independent in some ways – focused on external audiences and delivering marketing campaigns and activity, inter-team collaboration is essential for our success. Sales are our partners in driving demand, and we work very closely with sales on bringing leads through the funnel. Customer success and product teams help us bring the product information and use cases together (that are so valuable for marketing content). Then working closely with the partner team is essential for us as it’s an important channel to market for Shieldpay. As a result, we have a multi-layered partner programme with many different types of partner relationship, so close-collaboration and alignment is key.

I’ve most enjoyed seeing our campaigns go live and seeing the fantastic response and support both internally and externally from these activities. Our brand is still growing, so all the opportunities we can get to take our brand to market is both existing and vital for us!

That’s not to say it’s without challenges, working in a smaller organisation means there’s always a lot to do, and sometimes because the business is doing things for the first time it can take a bit longer. And it goes without saying that the business is constantly changing, you need to be comfortable with staying on your toes to really thrive at Shieldpay.

But there’s huge potential within the Shieldpay marketing function. As we’re growing there’s a lot of scope to steer and own the marketing strategy, and lots of opportunity test and learn. And what better environment, than a supportive, close-knit team, within a warm, welcoming Shieldpay family.