Interview: Emily @ Deloitte
ABOUT THE GUEST: For the past year, Emily worked as a Customer & Marketing Consultant at Deloitte. Before working at Deloitte, she completed a Digital Consulting secondment at Visa. She got her Bachelor’s degree in Canada at Queen’s University.
Q: In your own words, what is the goal of marketing, and how is it different from sales?
Marketing and sales go hand-in-hand: to have a successful sale, you need good marketing, and vice versa. But the two are definitely different. Sales is mostly about trying to get direct deals, whereas marketing focuses on brand loyalty, how to retain your customers, and how to get people to be more aware of your product or service. Marketing generally has more breadth and ties in advertising, branding, and channel strategy, rather than just the immediate sale piece.
Q: Did anything surprise you when you first got a job in marketing? What do you wish you’d known before you started?
When I first started working in marketing, I was surprised about how many technical components were involved. For example SEO, I didn’t understand the backend process behind crawling a website, or that there were actual data-driven practices to follow when making something search engine friendly. Also, I never would have expected using so many tech tools across my projects — Google Analytics, Google Ads & Tag Manager, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the list goes on!
For certain industries, there are also different limitations I never really thought about. I’ve done projects for pharmaceutical and cannabis clients. There were a lot of legalities involved around what we could and couldn’t put in our marketing messages. It surprised me that some industries have very specific, unique marketing regulations.
Q: You currently work in marketing consulting. How is it different from being a marketing associate at a corporation?
Deloitte is segmented by specialty, so all the projects in my group are guaranteed to be some sort of marketing topic. If you’re a marketing associate at a firm, you’re probably doing similar tasks as consultants at Deloitte. But the main difference is: as marketing consultants, we’re never siloed to one thing. We have the opportunity to work in different industries and with different clients. I’ve had projects in so many different areas: financial services, pharmaceutical, automotive, retail and grocery, you name it.
Once I was working with a marketing team at a big 5 Canadian bank, trying to determine how we could market a new direct investing app. Once I did a project management case with a grocery company to determine how we could switch from one loyalty vendor to another. One time I also worked with a non-profit, and we were looking into how to implement a new CRM. Marketing consulting is really rotational.
Q: Since you help clients in many different industries, how do you stay up-to-date on industry-specific terms and best practices?
When you first get on a project, your client understands that you’re not an expert on their particular company and industry. So they send over an onboarding package with context so you can better understand. For a non-profit client, I had a list of acronyms that I never heard of before. Every time the client referred to something I didn’t recognize, I would note it down. On top of that, a lot of our senior managers and partners specialize in certain industries or have experience aligning themselves to one client. So I can also always go to them for specific questions.
Q: What does your typical workday look like? Walk us through your routine!
I have 2 different routines: on project, and not on project. When I’m on project, I have a regular meeting with my team every morning where we cover the agenda for the day. After that, I usually have a touchpoint with a client. From there, I get to work with a lot of slide building, team brainstorming, client workshops, and pulling analytics and data. At the end of the day, I have a closing touchpoint with the team. Overall, there’s a lot of team solutionizing and client meetings.
When I’m not on project, ‘on the bench’ or ‘on the beach’ as we call it, I still have work to do (it’s not a free vacation!). Mainly what I do during this time is helping out on proposals. Here’s what the process is like (take Microsoft for an example). Let’s say Microsoft needs someone to fix their branding for an AI product. They’ll send out a “help wanted” task to consulting firms. From there, my group at Deloitte will submit a strategic deck that says ‘you should pick us, we can help with that problem, and here are the reasons why’. So proposals can get a little sales-y since we try to sell our firm to the client.
When we’re not putting together proposals, we also write research articles and papers like ‘Deloitte Digital Marketing Trends 2021 pdf’. That part reminds me of writing reports in university.
Q: What made you choose marketing consulting specifically?
I went into university already knowing that I wanted to go into marketing in general. I think it’s because I came from an arts background, studied a lot of design, and always wanted to do something creative since I was a kid.
What led me down the marketing consulting path specifically was when I became a marketing coordinator at one of my university’s consulting associations. At first, I just wanted to learn more about the industry, but then I REALLY started to enjoy working with the team. I got to network and get to know a bunch of consulting firms that do cool branding work and marketing-related projects. So I thought: this is really cool! I can still do creative work, but am not anchored to one product or client everyday. I also thought: what if I don’t want to just market for cleaning products? What if I want to do confectionery, or switch into automotive?
Marketing consulting looked like a great opportunity to explore and try out a bunch of different things, while keeping my passion for marketing. I think that’s what ultimately convinced me to take this path.
Q: What do you like and dislike the most about working in marketing?
What I like the most is always being able to try new things and solve new challenges. One of the fun projects I’ve done was when a bank came to us and asked ‘how do I brand our new app to be cooler than our biggest competitors and appeal to the millennial market?’ Working with my team to brainstorm and solutionize that challenge, doing first-hand research, and talking to millennials to understand their needs was really exciting. Those are the main reasons why I really enjoy working in marketing.
What I don’t like about marketing is some of the necessary, mundane tasks. We often have to pull a bunch of numbers from social media, analyze past statistics, and pull insights from super granular data like ‘what percentage of people ages 20–30 are on TikTok’. My marketing tasks can get very technical, which can be boring at times. It’s super useful though!
Q: How have you changed/grown as a marketer, and what caused that growth?
Most of my growth has been from project experience. I’m the kind of person that needs to do in order to learn. For example, I needed to get hands-on with social listening tools to learn which types of queries work and which don’t. Same thing with SEO: I only truly understood it after getting in there directly and trying to crawl a site.
Also, reading has definitely helped. I recommend reading through all the information Google offers — like their articles, open trainings, and certification courses. The Canadian Marketing Association, Warc, and HubSpot also offer tons of really great learning resources.
To sum it up, I’d say my growth as a marketer has come from a good blend of hands-on experience, people, and reading.
Q: In your opinion, what marketing skills/experience are important to be competitive as a top job applicant?
I think just having a solid understanding of the different types of marketing — email, digital, traditional, social media content strategy, etc. Really knowing how the channels are different and having experience working with them all is really important.
The RevHouse Rundown:
- Compared to sales, marketing is more broad & focuses on the big picture of advertising, branding, and customer acquisition.
- Marketing is not all creative! There are a lot of technical aspects too, like SEO, paid search, marketing analytics, and even legal considerations.
- The daily life of a marketing consultant VS marketing associate are different. Both do marketing work, but marketing consultants can work in a variety of industries and with a variety of customers.
- Marketing consultants have 2 separate work routines: on VS “on the bench”. On project entails a lot of team brainstorming, slide building, and client meetings. “On the bench” involves preparing pitch proposals and research reports.
- Hands-on marketing experience and reading from reliable sources are great ways to grow as a marketer.
- Really understanding the different types of marketing, and the special nuances of each is key to standing out as an entry-level job applicant!
Next interview coming soon. If you enjoyed this article, give it a like!
