Back for round two, May’s employee of the month, Connor Hyslop has returned to claim the August title! This time, we found out a little more about Connor and his journey into marketing.
This month’s employee of the month has joined the select group of people who have won the title more than once! Our employee of the month for August is our PPC Executive Connor Hyslop!
"Connor has really stepped up to a recent challenge, demonstrating professionalism and competence when dealing with a difficult event that could easily have become a major issue."
"Connor has been brilliant. He's received some great feedback from his clients for the way he handles the calls. He showed this in calmly dealing with a delicate situation and he's spotted some great organic / paid social opportunities. He's always willing to learn and is a real credit to the Blue team."
Though you might have met Connor in his last employee of the month interview, this month, we sat down with him to find out a little more detail about his background and journey into marketing.
Congratulations on your second employee of the month win! This time around, can you tell us more about your role as PPC Executive?
Yeah, so I am a PPC Executive at ClickThrough. My job boils down to two parts of what I do - my main focus is looking at the day-to-day performance for my clients: monitoring budget and spend for any current campaigns, and sending updates on strategy pieces, or tests we've got running to keep them in the loop. The second half, which I've been able to do more of recently as I’ve developed in my role, is contributing to broader strategy ideas. For this, I do a lot of work with our PPC Strategist, Stephen Duncan, coming up with any new tests that we want to try, and judging what we can see in the data and performance to help form further good ideas and best practices we can apply more broadly.
Just before ClickThrough, you were doing a Masters degree in marketing, following your Bachelors in business management. What made you want to pivot and go more towards marketing?
So in terms of marketing, (aside from business) my next favourite subject was psychology, which my mum did herself at uni, so I'd always spoken about it with her. After I went down the business route at uni, marketing appealed to me, because it was the closest link between business and psychology. I wanted to delve deeper into more of an understanding of how consumers think, how they shop, and why they behave the way they do.
In terms of specialising in PPC, I only knew about it as one of my friends was working in a similar position, so it was quite a steep learning curve when I arrived! I do really enjoy it, because it does bridge that gap of, yes, you're looking at data, but you are creating ads and ad copy so it quite naturally links that business and psychology bit as well. I can't say it was planned, but I'm happy with the way it's worked out!
You’ll find most marketers never quite planned their specialisms, but just found their feet in the right one for them! What would you say is the biggest thing that you learned from doing your masters, that you've been able to apply to the reality of working in marketing?
I would say it's managing my workload and being able to juggle different tasks and projects at once. To put a long story short, there was a month where I had eight modules or so with different assessments, all due at the end of the month. It forced me to manage my workload and ensure I was making good progress in all projects at the same time. Compare that to when I’m working on eight clients across five days, I’ve had that experience of being able to balance those plates, compartmentalise, and be able to jump between tasks in an agile way. Your brain has to be in a lot of different places during the day at an agency, so my degree definitely helped with that!
How does it feel winning employee the month for a second time, so soon after your first win?
It feels nice! To be honest, I wasn't really expecting it, though that’s the same for when it happened the first time. To be completely honest, it was quite a busy month for me and I was just focused on that, so it didn't really register at first! It’s just great to get that recognition of effort but, honestly, the whole team deserve it too!
I think recognition is just something that the whole company is very good at. When someone does something well, they make sure people hear about it and celebrate people. It’s a nice environment to be in.
If you could work in any other marketing channel, which would you pick?
I think I'd quite enjoy CRO. It looks a lot of fun, what they do – using the interfaces to build tests for web pages and drill down into data. Saying that, I think I’d go for content – I was good at English at school and I feel like my campaign reports and commentaries go down well, so maybe I could translate that into a content skill!
What are you planning on spending your second voucher on? More golf balls?
I think I said golf balls last time and I have actually run out of golf balls! No joke, I really have run out, so I may be using it on some more! I'm going on holiday soon though, so I might use it on some holiday clothes, which is quite a boring answer, but it's probably a more sensible answer than golf balls!
Last question – young, would-be marketers will be off to uni soon for their own marketing (or business management) degrees! Do you have any advice for anyone who is going off to study either business or marketing?
I think one thing I would do, which I didn't do a lot of, (and it's advice one of our Strategy and Performance Directors, Alex Copping, gave me when I first joined) is just ask questions of people who know more than you! Really take on the attitude of trying to learn from everyone, to find things out quickly and help guide your own path. Your lecturers, or students in years above that you may know, will be happy to answer questions about your course and any modules you might be thinking of taking. You’ll find people want to be helpful and are willing to give you advice in their subjects, and making these connections will help you progress in your knowledge a lot quicker.
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