Dominic Head, digital and marketing officer for Historic Houses, shares some practical advice for the aspiring comms professionals. Read on to get his recommendations for accredited marketing courses, as well as a view of comms in the age of the coronavirus.
Why did you choose to pursue a role in communications? For example, has it always been your passion or was it pure happenstance?
Oh, happenstance! But I don’t think that explains the full story. Did I dream as a child of one day becoming a comms professional? No. To be honest, I’m not sure I would have known what a ‘communications professional’ was. But the principles of the role — building relationships, understanding, and engaging with others, designing project plans, constantly learning and developing my skills and knowledge, researching trends, setting goals, and approaching everything with a creative, interrogative mindset — these things I’ve always been passionate and abnormally excited about, and communications just so happens to fit the bill in embracing all of these.
What personal skills or attributes do you think are most important for a communications role? Why these skills/attributes in particular?
As above, you can take your pick on so many skills and attributes that I think are important for a comms function, but what I think all good marketing and communications professionals have is an insatiable need to solve problems and make things happen, with real-world outcomes in mind. That’s to say communications isn’t simply about posting nice images on Instagram, or even building a following of tens or hundreds of thousands there, but in understanding that we’re doing this to solve broader challenges and help achieve specific, wider business objectives.
What sort of challenges do you face in your role? Is there a particular challenge that you experienced in the past that stood out?
When you work for a smaller organisation, you benefit from the capacity to be more agile, but often equally suffer from the need to wear multiple hats and can frequently stretch yourself too thinly. In my role, I manage all social media channels, digital content creation, weekly e-newsletters, online and offline paid advertising campaigns, delivering webinars, media partnerships, website technical maintenance and SEO, and the wealth of enquiries from members, such as login issues (for our visitor members) and marketing advice (for our house members).
The pandemic has been an incredible disruptor for the heritage industry I work in, but from a digital and communications point of view it has created opportunities that will help enormously in the long term. At Historic Houses, representing 1,500 independently owned historic houses across the UK, a particularly difficult challenge has been engaging our member houses to show a practical interest in working together and with us. That affected everything from our capacity to find up-to-date images of the houses, to knowing what news and stories they were publishing, which would, in most cases, be known only through our own hard-worn research efforts.
With CoVid-19, the surge in interest in digital upskilling, in finding creative means to forge opportunities and using new means to engage audiences when we’re all locked away, created the means for Historic Houses to fulfil its role as a supporter and enabler of our member houses, and we’ve since co-ordinated social media activities among houses, built campaigns for houses to, for example, go blue to celebrate the NHS, and staged marketing webinars, where we’ve helped them understand the fundamentals of Instagram and video content creation.
How is the role of communications perceived in your organisation?
As above, communications have been a core part of what we do as an organisation in the face of a global crisis. What seems to have been a trend this past year, is that organisations that have prioritised frequent and honest communications with their customers and supporters seem best placed to thrive when the crisis subsides. In our case, we’ve realised that communications has become the linchpin around which our entire purpose revolves.
From the house members’ side, daily updates from our policy team have helped them through the uncertainty of ever-changing government restrictions advice, and their marketing teams have benefited from central coordination on campaigns and themes to provide structure to their media and content output. And from the visitor members’ side, new online lectures, a weekly e-newsletter, and homemade videos behind-the-scenes has provided entertainment and interest even when visiting was impossible. These are all themes we’d like to retain even when the world returns to a semblance of normal.
What advice would you give to those at the start of their career in communications?
Jump into everything with an open mind and a lot of enthusiasm. Communications is all about making things happen with real-world goals and objectives in mind.
If you’ve not got a job in comms yet, and all the comms roles you see require ‘X years of experience’ (a frequent and annoying trait of jobs boards) then don’t be afraid to take on something that isn’t necessarily specifically communications but where you might be able to take on, say, the company’s social media feed.
At the same time, you need to make sure you’re upskilling outside of work. So, start a course with the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) or Digital Marketing Institute (DMI) to build up your skills. If money is a concern, there are free course with the Open University and FutureLearn that can help you on your way. To be a great marketer, you need to always be learning, whatever your level.
Your goal is to position yourself to your next employer as someone who has achieved real-world success in communications in the workplace and has benefited from specialist knowledge upskilling from an accredited body outside of the workplace, which also demonstrates enthusiasm and a desire to continually improve as a communications professional.
What do you think the secret of success is when working in communications?
Beyond enthusiasm and a desire to keep learning and problem solving, a great communications professional treats everything with an analytical brain. As mentioned before, it’s one thing to post beautiful images on Instagram, another thing that those images translate into new followers, and another thing again that your Instagram feed becomes an effective component in your customer acquisition strategy. This involves an almost obsessive interest in the analytics and insights tools provided by the likes of Facebook and Google, and the desire to consistently record and improve your numbers using dashboards and infographics to demonstrate success.
Furthermore, a great comms professional is, perhaps not uniquely, best set-up for success with their ability to build wide and engaged professional networks, which can in turn help both solve in-work challenges and career development challenges. People in communications tend to naturally have an affinity for working with and engaging others, so it’s worth really making the most of these skills using tools such as LinkedIn and online and offline groups to keep expanding your network.
We at React & Share live for helping communications teams through understanding website content sentiment and improving it off the back of feedback. How do you and your team approach content improvement?
At Historic Houses, we’re certainly not short of content to share. Some of our houses were built before the reformation. Others before the Doomsday Book was written. Our problem has therefore been one less of not having enough content to share and instead one of not having the resources to research, write and share it.
What we’ve found is that user generated content (UGC) has made a massive difference in our capacity to create content in a time efficient way and at a scale that makes sense for the needs of our audience. Leveraging the incredible knowledge of the people who work at our houses – in terms of guest posts, proposed social content and raw video footage that we can edit and share, has enabled me to focus on delivery and reach as a means to reward the houses for their efforts and satisfy the needs of our visitor members and our social followers.
Improving on that content, however, is a case of simply recording, watching, and adjusting on the numbers. Our social media policy is do more of what works, and that is a good guiding principle for all marketing and communications efforts. Create structure and regularity to your communications, try things out, get a feel for what’s working best, and do more of that. Keep doing that, and you’re on your way to really succeeding in your communications role.
