This month I’m delighted to be speaking to Martin Shaw, Head of UK Marketing Communications at our client NFP, a specialist people and insurance risk management business that creates sustainable solutions, both locally and internationally, for organisations and employees.
Here’s his 5 minutes with…
Martin, let’s start by you sharing with our readers your marketing background.
First off, thanks for the invite to come and speak to you. Ok, so I actually started out in full time ‘work’ as a graphic designer back in 2006… I’ve always had an interest in design and never aspired to work in marketing until around six years into my my working life. As an in-house designer in a relatively small business with no dedicated marketing manager, my main exposure to marketing was via external agencies that I worked alongside to deliver campaigns, where I did the design work and they built the strategies, the plans and mechanisms to deliver the campaigns to engage with some of the biggest financial services, retail and technology brands in the UK. That’s where my interest in marketing grew, I was like a sponge absorbing everything they did – the language, the frameworks and tactics they used.
Fast forward six years to 2012 and the business I was working for brought an experienced marketing manager in, this meant that I now had someone to learn from every day. I was still picking up the design work but now I was having a strategic input into the marketing plans we were building in-house as opposed to going external. This was great for my development and it meant that the plans I was heavily involved in creating and rolling out were all our own hard work – not the agencies. This meant that when we got the big client wins – our team could take all the glory (from the marketing aspect). These successes gave me a real buzz and cemented my passion for marketing. In 2018, after working for two experienced marketing managers I was finally given my chance to manage the marketing team myself.
For the next four years, I leveraged all the knowledge, tips and strategies from my old managers and external agencies, and optimised them to fit in with the direction I wanted to go in. Proven strategies brought together around Microsoft Dynamics so we could track and measure EVERYTHING, whilst feeding straight into our sales pipelines. This meant every time something converted that had touched marketing, the marketing team could be recognised for our part in the process – something I’m really passionate about.
In 2022 our small business of around 70 people then joined NFP, a US based insurance business with around 8,000 people, providing five core solutions; commercial insurance, employee benefits, people and talent, health & safety and wealth management. At the start of 2024 we then got acquired by Aon, so we’re now around 60,000 employees globally. My role is leading the UK element of our European marketing team with a focus on two core areas:
- Helping our clients and prospects understand the ways in which we can support their business.
- Growing awareness of the NFP brand in the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe.
What does your role at NFP involve?
The whole NFP and Aon ‘thing’ has been an amazing whirlwood for me personally. As I mentioned a moment ago, besides the day-to-day marketing support for the business there are two core elements to my role.
The first one is the educational piece; helping our clients and prospects understand how our solutions can support them to overcome their people and business risk challenges. Because we have so many solutions and aspects to our business, my role here is working with our business-line leaders across all business-lines to identify moments in the year, political changes or economic changes that gives us the opportunity to provide key talking points at moments that matter. At the moment, we have markets softening in insurance, a new Labour government making changes to employer and employee tax rules in the UK and pension auto-enrolment on the horizon in Ireland to name a few. It’s a balancing act to ensure we don’t try to communicate with everyone with everything at the same time; this is where some of our buyer personas come into play.
Secondly, the growth of NFP in the UK and Ireland is crazy…. a lot of our growth comes via acquisition which means our leadership team are always looking for new businesses that add real value to our brand and offer our clients even more solutions to support, develop and protect their most important assets. One of my roles in the M&A process is working with our New York, London and Dublin PR agencies to launch these acquisitions into the media once the deals complete. Once that’s out of the way, the marketing team then begins the process of rebranding these businesses and embedding their solutions into our current offering … a simple one might take 6 weeks, whilst a more complex acquisition might be a 6 month project. These strategic acquisitions help us grow the NFP brand name into new sectors, client profiles and regions. A great example of this is a recent insurance acquisition in Ireland of a business that looks after some of the world’s finest thoroughbred racehorses. A great complementary business for our private clients insurance business-line, when you consider the wants and needs of the people involved with this type of sport. With a large portion of our growth strategy via acquisition it also means our need to advertise is slightly less than a normal business that’s trying to grow its client bank organically.
You’ve worked in professional services/employee benefits for many years, what have been the biggest changes in marketing you’ve seen in recent years?
For me… it’s just the sheer amount of it (marketing/advertising) at the moment…but I guess that’s a result of literally everything we do in our lives revolving around technology – providing a platform for businesses to constantly bombard us. The worst one is LinkedIn for me… it’s over saturated now and unfortunately I think that will turn a lot of professionals away. I’d hate to be in the shoes of an FD, MD or C -suite exec …. It wouldn’t surprise me to see some people move away from these platforms and into more alumni / focussed environments that are free from all the ‘sales people’. It’s something we’re fully aware of at NFP, hence why we’re fully focussed on in-person events, especially in our People & Talent and Employee Benefits business lines. I almost think the marketing landscape in professional services/employee benefits is going back to how it was 15 years ago – more in person and less online events.
You’ve rolled out many successful campaigns throughout your career, what has been your favourite and why?
Back in 2012, the UK government introduced workplace pensions into every business in the UK making it compulsory for them to provide a pension for their employees. This was my first big campaign working with an external PR agency and it was a game changer for our business (Johnson Fleming) at the time. I remember us creating a really nice targeted campaign based on employer size, sector and location. We then organised free to attend sessions at football stadiums around the UK, educating employers on the requirements for them on the upcoming legislation. Within two or three years we’d brought in around three hundred clients. We had an amazing customer service team with some purpose built in-house technology and we didn’t do anything super fancy with our marketing. Our marketing plan was around providing free education, guidance and toolkits for employers to use. I even remember working a few late nights creating toolkits in prospects own brands and getting them professionally printed and posted out with hand signed covering letters. It’s these little personal touches that really made that campaign a great success. What’s really nice to see to is a lot of the clients I helped bring in via that campaign are still clients today, a huge testament to the employee benefits customer service team at NFP.
One of the challenges for marketers is getting the buy-in from senior stakeholders to be bolder and braver, how have you overcome that challenge?
I’m quite lucky in that a lot of the senior stakeholders I deal with are entrepreneurs that do have an appetite for some risk, so long as there’s a well trusted plan behind it and some justified reasoning into why it’s a good idea. Let’s be honest though, I wouldn’t be able to get their buy in if they didn’t trust me and our team hadn’t got the fundamentals right first. There’s no point being big ‘bolder and braver’ if there’s no fall-back position.
If the team and I have a great idea and it’s made it past the idea stage, and I need to get a green light on it, I’ll start building my plan according to the personality type I’m trying to convince. If the stakeholder is more extroverted and a ‘let’s get it done now’ type of person, my covering proposal will be really concise, numbers driven and linked to the business impact. On the complete opposite side of the spectrum, if I were trying to persuade a more analytical stakeholder I’d be sure to have an in depth data analysis and breakdown of the facts, figures and logic behind our plan. I’d also try to get endorsements from other key stakeholders to provide reassurance to make a bigger and bolder leap.
You hear so much talk about metrics these days, and I know how important creating impact is for you, if you could only report on just three marketing KPIs what would they be. Looking forward, what do you think is likely to shape the future of B2B marketing?
I know it’s a real cliche, but when we’re talking about metrics and KPI’s we only ‘measure what matters’. The sheer volume of data we have at our disposal is overwhelming, especially when you factor some of the ecosystems that NFP operate in. Take google analytics for example – it’s so complex! I can see marketing teams all over the world getting bogged down with it all, reporting on more and more aspects of their marketing that they’ve actually forgotten what they’re trying to achieve.
If I had to share three of the metrics that matter to me, the first would be the cost of acquisition. Itemise all your campaign activities and divide them by the number of client wins. What’s nice about our model at NFP, is that all our lead-gen and marketing campaigns are driven from a single system, so we can track all leads that originated from any specific campaign, even if they come onboard as a client two to three years down the line.
The second metric I run is a weekly report on the volume of enquiries per business-line, per week. This allows us to spot which business-line campaigns are performing and more importantly, where we need to focus our efforts to reverse downtrends. It’s always nice to get excited about the ‘big opportunities’ but I personally like to focus on where we aren’t getting traction so we can take action. This weekly report also provides a good discussion point when our team meet with business-line leaders.
The third and final KPI is effort versus conversion. In such a fast paced business, my role is ensuring we’re applying time and effort into things that really matter, add value and deliver results. Being able to have these metrics can help us analyse, pivot and refocus if things aren’t working out.
AI is clearly a much talked about area presently, are you viewing AI positively or negatively in regards to how it can support you in your role?
Ai is a game changer – I don’t proclaim to know a lot about it but when the biggest companies in the world are leveraging it you have to listen and take note. Right now, the biggest positive our team are seeing from it, is to build efficiencies in some of the more manual tasks we carry out. That might be scoping out a new prospect that has engaged with us, looking at the sectors where our campaigns are getting traction or even just using Microsoft copilot to summarise 4/5 meetings that we have each week. Just building efficiencies in the day-to-day stuff, can help free up the team to have some breathing space to think creatively.
To succeed in our industry, you need more than technical (skills) capability. You’ve had a lot of success at building strong relationships with senior stakeholders and empowering teams to deliver their best, what to you are the most important soft skills that you think are needed to be successful?
Be yourself, be curious and don’t be afraid to ask questions, no matter how stupid you think your question is. I guarantee if I’m thinking it, someone else in the room is too. That’s all I’ve done, and all I encourage people within the team to do also. Once you take a real interest in what a stakeholder is trying to achieve and how their solution can add value to a client/overcome a client’s problem, you’ll soon start to build a nice working relationship. And remember, just because we’re at work we can still have a laugh along the way, it makes work way more enjoyable for everyone.
Managing stakeholders and business-line leaders is the hard bit compared to managing the marketing team. We’re really lucky to have a really close-knit group in the marketing department, and I was conscious of that when we hired them. I was always told to hire for attitude and train for skill. They all have their own unique strengths, and they all know what they are so they can work together to tackle big projects and overcome hurdles. I try to get them into the office a couple of days a week so they can all be in each other’s company and have the small talk whilst they’re working. This reminds them that they’re never on their own, they’re all part of the same team and importantly, the sum of all the parts is what makes them great.
Thinking back over your career to date, what’s the best piece of marketing advice you’ve ever been given?
If you’re trying to speak to everyone, you’re probably speaking to no one.
And finally, what one piece of advice would you give to a high-potential marketer looking to step into their first leadership role?
Be yourself.