In this episode of Room 301, host Rob Twells chats with John Hoey, the Digital Lead at Maintel, about his journey from graphic designer to marketing "unicorn" with expertise spanning SEO, web design, and digital strategy.
We explore the tools and techniques John swears by, the importance of good planning and learning from your failures (never launch a website on a Friday), and the marketing pet peeves he'd like to see banished to Room 301.
Tune in for insights, a few laughs, and plenty of practical takeaways for navigating the world of digital marketing. But please... no more acronyms!
It's time to step into Room 301...
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Rob Twells (00:01)
John, how are you?
John Hoey (00:03)
Very well Rob, thank you very much for having me on this show, I'm really looking forward to this.
Rob Twells (00:07)
No problem at all. Well, John, introduce yourself about where you work now, your history, how you got into marketing. That'd be great.
John Hoey (00:16)
My name is John Hoey, I'm the digital lead at Maintel. We help organizations, both public and private sector, to deliver mission critical services. So we offer them efficiency that can enhance the workplace and improve service delivery and ultimately customer experience.
Rob Twells (00:34)
So a bit of a unicorn, aren't you, John? You've done a bit of website, done a bit of SEO. Yeah, how did you get your experience? How have you become a bit of a unicorn?
John Hoey (00:42)
Yeah, well, initially, I did a degree years ago in graphic design. you know, that's kind of my foundation, but then kind of kick around from job to job in the middle. Like at the time, it was super difficult to get into kind of the industry unless you had experience. It's all about experience, isn't it? It's not necessarily about the degrees or anything like that per se. It's experience. So it took me a few years to get into it until I was in my thirties.
My dad had his own business and he said, I'm paying a fortune for a website. Can you do something to help me out? And so I started having a play and started building his website that way and then kind of bit more. And then a few other people started asking some questions and, you know, and wanting me to do it that way. And then before I knew it, I'd had my own little freelance business and then moved on to the University of Birmingham as the web designer for the students union there. And then moved on to a small marketing agency in Burtwood.
and doing a bit more SEO, it was like the big thing then. You build websites and because you built a website, everyone was going, can you do some SEO for me? So it was, that, you know, and kind of understanding that and learning as you're going along. And then that kind of snowballed into, you know, a couple of other roles. then previously where I met you Rob at Air IT and then like now it's at Maintel as the digital lead.
Rob Twells (02:05)
Excellent. I think being a unicorn in our game is a great place to be. It means when it comes to strategy, you can have an opinion about all parts of it. And when you are starting to pull in different people, third parties, agencies, team members into that strategy, you've got a good idea of how it all fits together. Whereas if you're just a specialist in one area, it's hard to understand how other areas and other channels can impact what you're doing overall. So think it's nice to have a broad understanding of a lot of different things. So yeah, and obviously…
John Hoey (02:30)
you
Definitely. I remember one of my old managers, who was a director when I was at the uni, she said, what will happen is that you'll find yourself and it'll be, do you, you know, deep dive into a certain area or do you become more broad? And I found myself initially deep diving into SEO. But then one thing when I did do it, I was an SEO manager at one point, but I actually found that I all the other bits as well and being able to go, okay, well,
How does that impact this? what will that entail on the user experience of the website and kind of really developing it that way. So I've been quite lucky in that aspect.
Rob Twells (03:14)
Yeah, I exactly. And obviously, running an agency myself and clients come to us with various different services and bits and pieces, you have to have an understanding of what the impact can be. Well, for anyone that doesn't know, hopefully everyone does at this point, we asked three core questions on this podcast. One is what's in your toolbox? One is a failure. Bonus points for being funny. And then finally, what's the pet peeve of our guest in regards to marketing? So what are we going to put in room 301?
So the first question is what's in your toolbox? So this doesn't necessarily have to be a tool or a piece of software, a SaaS platform. could be anything. It could be a way of thinking. Obviously we're all very busy. Lots of different marketing channels to implement, lots of team members to manage, et cetera, et cetera. What helps you stay efficient on a day-to-day basis, John?
John Hoey (04:02)
Well, my first one is I like to be organized. I think that's the kind of key. you're at a scatter gun approach, it can be difficult. so I like to try and make sure that my day is kind of organized as much as possible. So I forward plan quite a bit. Just even like the tiniest little things. There's a great book I can't remember the name of the author, but it's called Hyper Focus, Hyper Time. So it's all about planning your day out and.
One area that taught me was emails. So emails in the morning between nine, nine fifteen, lunchtime, around lunchtime, because if you get a chance to have a lunch, you you can sit there and just have 10 or 15 minutes to reply and then of an evening as well. And then in between you can go, OK, I'll deal with that later. I quite I must have OCD or something coz my inbox is clean and very clear. It's all organized.
Rob Twells (04:53)
I say I have to have an empty, empty inbox if not archived in certain folders based on what it's about.
John Hoey (04:58)
Exactly. Yeah, that's it. And so I try and make sure that, you know, at the end of the day, or, you know, the start of the day, it's, it's all kind of foldered. And so then it helps me plan my day. I always try and do, you know, three, three key things a day. So if I've got three jobs to do, get them done. And then I'm kind of everything else, you will have bitty jobs as well. And you will be able to kind of, you know, decide, you know,
what are the little bits you can do as well. But if you've got three key things that you need to do for that day, and you've planned your week ahead as well, that really helps. And that's kind of what I tend to try and do. And then the other thing as well, I think it's even from a workload perspective, it's great to always do tried and tested, but it's also good to experiment. So it's about like, okay, how can we do?
you know, if we're going to run this strategy on a certain piece of work or a project, what can we do to experiment with that? You know, and what can we do that's slightly different? And that's something that I'm trying to, we're trying to bring into to Maintel to try and really kind of emulate now and yeah, and develop.
Rob Twells (06:10)
Got you. And do you have any sort of tools to manage your, say three core things a day, where does that live in your head? Are you one of those sort of unicorns who can store it up here or do you have tools?
John Hoey (06:18)
No, it's mine is my planner. Yeah, I have a work planner every day, know, pen and paper. Yeah. And, and I think that that that helps me down because it allows me then and I know that there are tools that you can do for to optimize and AI and everything like that. But I think just being able to physically write it down and go, yeah, and then cross it off from a very checklist kind of person. So cross that out, get that done. And then in my
Rob Twells (06:25)
Old school pen and paper. wow, that was a…
Yeah, no, I agree. There's lots of tools around now for organization AI, like you say, to time block for you. But I think when you've been doing something for such a long time, it's very difficult to shake that even if it's slightly more efficient to do it a different way. I I've been doing I organized my workload in the same way I have done for the last 20 years, which is I use something like Todoist or Trello, which sort of lists everything, but then I time block. So I stick it in my calendar in between meetings.
John Hoey (06:57)
Yeah.
Rob Twells (07:13)
I've just done that for as long as I can remember. I'm not the sort of person to miss a deadline. I typically get stuff done on time. I like to consider myself pretty efficient. But is there tools out there that would make that process quicker, easier? Probably, but it's learnt behaviour at point.
John Hoey (07:27)
Yeah, I think definitely. And I think that that's just for for say my process. If we've got bigger projects and bigger campaigns, then it is like monday.com. So that's there because you've got multiple stakeholders involved as well. And it's good that everyone can kind of to kind of understand what they need to do and sign off. And yeah, I've used that in the past. And, know, I think that's a good kind of tool then to to bring everyone in.
But that's just my own kind of personal thing when I'm using like, pad and paper. I wouldn't necessarily, you know, send that out to everyone on the, you know, in a project to do the same thing.
Rob Twells (08:04)
No, no, no, interviewed someone on a previous episode called Emma, another agency called Victress and she was exactly the same, very old school pen and paper. I think it goes in more. Seeing the ink go on the page, I think it just enters the brain more, et cetera, et cetera. I probably need to do more analog stuff, to be honest, but there we go. So failures, I'm a big believer that the more you fail, the more you learn effectively, you know, within reason. don't want a catastrophe on your hands, but I think little failures here and there, trial and error.
John Hoey (08:23)
Thank
Rob Twells (08:34)
it helps you understand what works, what doesn't work, and sort of improve for later. So John, what are some failures you've had in your career? And you do get bonus points for being funny as well. So over to you.
John Hoey (08:45)
Okay, well the major one which I think sometimes you can only It only happens when you when you do, you know, I think as well I think that's the key thing in your right. You've got it. You've got to fail You know, that's how we learn and that's how we get better My one was early. I was building I was freelancing and I was building a website for a business in Birmingham and
I was working full time in the day and doing this kind of an evening as well. And I decided that I thought it'd be a good idea to launch the website on a Friday night at around six o'clock. Yeah, exactly. Even now, like we've just launched our new website at Maintel, like I was like, right, it's going to go Monday, Monday, Tuesday at 10 o'clock in the morning. Everyone's around all the stakeholders there in case we need anything. I didn't and because I was on my own as well.
Rob Twells (09:24)
Never deployed in Scottish. Everyone knows that.
John Hoey (09:43)
It was, yeah, I can log into the system and, you know, upload it myself and get it all done for you, no problem at all. And then when I logged into the system, there was three old WordPress websites in the same like folder structure as well. So it was just, it just opened a whole complete can of worms. And then you just kind of thinking, you know, how am I gonna get these kind of sorted as quickly as possible? Everyone's gone home, no one wants to work on a Friday night. So that was kind of my.
more biggie and I learned very quickly not to do that. And I think the other ones as well are, I've noindexed a couple of websites as well, when I did a bit, early days of SEO and then you kind of two or three days like, what's going on there? Why is there no traffic in Google Analytics? That's not, things aren't pulling very correctly and yeah, it's disappeared from search and you know.
Luckily, you can put things in place quite quickly afterwards.
Rob Twells (10:42)
The thing is you won't do it again and you'll able to take that experience of not launching a Friday into the businesses you've worked on their websites for. So I can say there's benefit to all of this stuff. What did you do in the end? I mean you were a freelancer, you were independent, so did you have to just work the weekend to fix it?
John Hoey (10:45)
No.
Yeah.
Pretty much. Pretty much. was able to get hold of one of the marketing manager at the time and we managed to kind of get it up and running on the Saturday morning. So, you know, all out, you know, always ends well, you know, but, but yeah, certainly not something that I would I would consider doing again. Definitely. So.
Rob Twells (11:23)
So Room 301, for anyone that doesn't know why we call this podcast Room 301, so anyone in SEO will know what a 301 redirect is. It's basically the art of redirecting something elsewhere, hopefully never to be seen again. So that's the idea behind Room 301. It's putting stuff in there that annoys us, winds us up about marketing, never to be seen again, hypothetically. So what are the things that you're gonna put in there, John? What grinds your gears about marketing?
John Hoey (11:51)
think sometimes acronyms, know, like, you know, cause it's really easy. It's really easy as a marketeer to, to use like SEO, you know, or to, you know, to use words like ICP, like Ideal customer profile and things like that. And, you know, some people are going what? You know, you got to, I think you have to remember that not everyone's in your kind of area or remit. I think that happens in any business. So it's not necessarily just related to marketing.
I think just being having the kind of understanding that not everyone will know what you're talking about. And I think using those kind of flashy words at times to impress people, and ultimately we're in a business of results and people want to drive revenue and improve brand awareness and things like that. it's a case of that's what they're.
That's what they're more interested in instead of flashy keywords or anything like that.
Rob Twells (12:51)
With you working in a PLC now, if I'm not mistaken, presumably with that come stakeholders, boards, layers of management that maybe you've not experienced before. Have you found that the way you communicate about marketing had to change at all?
John Hoey (12:56)
Yes, it is,
yeah, I think so. I think, I think experience is key. And I think the more, the more you do it, the more you kind of understand that. And, I think we, with the, website that we've just launched, it's been a great project to do, but like you said, there's been multiple stakeholders involved in it, in a PLC and just for kind of context for people we've got, you know, our compliance team.
you know, have to, you know, reviewing everything. So it's not just our privacy policy or cookie policy that you can just usually take it because, you know, right down to the super detail. and you know, all the contracts and policies have to go on the website and, the investor section that we've got had to be reviewed externally, to make sure that it had all the key components, you know, that, you know, that, you know, complimented that as a PLC and that, that what we needed to set up. and then
We've also got, you know, as anyone, for me, the key key area is IT, you know, they've got to make sure that from a security standpoint, that the website is built effectively, efficiently. There's no gaps. There's no kind of security concerns or anything like that. So when I came into the role, it was kind of tying those things together and communicating with all those different people. and, it's, and it's worked well, and everyone's done a brilliant job in such a short space of time, because I've been here for
Less than six months now and we completely rebuilt the website and launched it in that kind of period of time. And you know, we've got a yeah, we've got a great marketing team as well. So that everyone really pulled together and a couple of late nights and lots of coffee. But, you know, I said I'd deliver it and we've done that. So, and now it goes on to next stage. So it's, you know, strategy, and other kinds of areas that we, that will really develop and really put our mark down over the next kind of 12 months.
Rob Twells (14:41)
pretty good so I think I'll come again.
And do you find with it being a bigger company and more layers of approval and maybe even scrutiny at times, it's harder to get ideas and strategies signed off or is it easier in your experience?
John Hoey (15:18)
Well, it's about again, it's communication and engagement. So it's engaging with your stakeholder, you know, and the teams And just bringing them all in and saying, okay. Well, what are the low hanging fruit? What's the you know, what can we do to to help you really? You know in kind of like to drive engagement to drive leads and things like that I've just had a great call with our SDR team, you know, and it was you know, we've won in
a different campaign, like a white paper, sorry, campaign. And they're coming to me with ideas about, how do we, know, can we not just have a white paper? How do we develop that into three or four pieces of great content, which is going to be super useful because our ICP, or sorry, ideal customer profile is actually, there's me using acronyms there as well.
Rob Twells (16:05)
Careful John.
John Hoey (16:11)
The ideal customer profile is actually, they don't have time to read it. So it's like, what can we do to put us at their forefront and really kind of work with them to kind of understand that.
Rob Twells (16:26)
Are you looking with that in mind then if they're not reading it, are you looking at all the forms of media, maybe an audio podcast or?
John Hoey (16:32)
That's exactly we're looking at different kind of areas. mean, I'm sure from this podcast, it's great for yourself because you get to engage with your ideal customer profile from different people in different kind of areas and get an understanding of what they want and how they consume information and things. of the, going back to the initial, you know, what's in your toolbox. I'm using a great tool at the minute called SparkToro I don't know if you've heard of that and it's…
Rob Twells (17:00)
I think it's the same chap that founded Moz, I believe.
John Hoey (17:04)
Moz yeah, and we've brought that in because we're looking at, say if we're looking at head of digital transformation as an example, where do they hang out? What do they, know, what type of information do they consume, you know, and we've found that actually some of the bits that we are doing that it's pretty much there, which is great, you know, so you're going, okay, well, that's on point. What other areas can we experiment with and, you know, for the next kind of set of white papers or?
bits of information we can use.
Rob Twells (17:36)
That sounds good. Like you say with this podcast, it's got various benefits. Obviously, I get to speak with the likes of you and get an insight into how you can see them in content and sort of tips and tricks you have. But also it gives our marketing manager, Pete, who will edit this and put it out, but gives him…
10, 15 different clips that we can put out on social media. It gives us a YouTube video at back of it because we record it in video as well. Obviously a podcast that goes on Spotify, Reels for Instagram, LinkedIn video. It gives us probably 30 pieces of content for the sake of half an hour recording. It's a really good bang for buck way of marketing in a world where people consume content like this now. They don't want to read things quite as much. So it's a really good platform for us. Anything else? What else annoys you, John? What else are you putting in Room 301?
John Hoey (18:24)
I think people making decisions without using data. I think it's really easy to go oh it looks good. I did that because it looks great or, you know, it's, it's, I'm really kind of data backed. So I try and use that as much as possible. So like I say, things like this ideal customer profile, just being able to go, okay, so where did, where did they go? What, what type of podcast did they listen to? Where do you know what?
you know, social media, where do they hang out on social media? How do they do this? And this SparkToro tool provides that as a snapshot. But then, you know, if, if you're not using your data correctly, you know, and, know, and, it's, and it's that, that's not just from marketing. That's everyone. So it's sales as well. So it's putting, putting all the data into, to enable marketing, to give them the best tools or to give them the best chances to, to kind of hit that.
that customer profile and to kind of generate those leads. So I think making sure that your data is there, correct, present, you you've got everything that you need to. So it's just like Google Analytics is just like the really kind of basic one. And things like that can really help, really help you.
Rob Twells (19:41)
Now, yeah, absolutely. I'm probably almost too data driven at times. I become a little bit black and white when it comes to data. It's probably my own downfall, but what are the key metrics that you measure? What are most important to you in your day to day?
John Hoey (19:55)
well, I've got, I've obviously got targets, you know, for, leads as well. So, but because our, our funnel is so long, you know, cause we enterprise level IT, you know, it can be up to two years potentially for us to win business. twelve months to two years usually. so for me, it's like, I've got to generate X amount of leads on a, on a monthly yearly basis. So.
driving those kind of conversions on the website digitally, brand awareness as well. how, what the impact of our brand is across social media, areas like that. And yeah, I think that's kind of where we're at at the moment as a business, like, well, as in the marketing team, we are looking at kind of, we'd love to put a revenue metric on that.
as well. I'd love to do that because I think now it's changing and using, I wouldn't say old school, but using forms for white paper downloads and things like that. We want to turn it more from a lead gen to a demand gen kind of business and really kind of push that. And that's an area that we're focusing on and trying to develop.
Rob Twells (21:17)
How do you get your first touch point of a customer? Do you do lots of of top of funnel stuff?
John Hoey (21:26)
Yeah, again, we're running white paper campaigns at the minute. We've got a whole series that are coming out of the next kind of 12 months to do that. We've just relaunched our website because the website was, well, not relaunch the website, we relaunched the brand refresh pretty much. From my understanding, it was 10 or 15 years previously. So when I came into it, it was already kind of fully into the works on the go.
my kinda key areas was to develop the website. yeah, so it was making the, making the website kind of a funny functional and accessible to everyone. and then, yeah, white papers and we've got some other kind of, projects in mind. I'm right in the middle of my digital strategy at the minute. So it's, you know, over the next kind of six, 12. Yeah. So, but again, cause it's such a big business we've got, we've got, you know,
Rob Twells (22:16)
It remains to be seen.
John Hoey (22:23)
mid-level markets, know, we've low, so, you know, we've got three key pillars in the business, a lot of unified communication, security, connectivity, and customer experience as well. So it's, you know, it's those kinds of things, and then there's multiple stakeholders within that. So it's making sure that we can give each team what they need in order for them to, you know, go out and generate leads as well as, you know, us contribute to that target.
Rob Twells (22:52)
And is it your responsibility to get the first touch point? And you mentioned SDRs a moment ago. Do they continue it from there? So your first touch point, they sort of bring it to fruition over 18 months, two years or?
John Hoey (23:04)
Yeah. So, you know, that's as everyone, you'll have just a general kind of MQL. If a marketing qualified lead comes in, there's me using acronyms again. If that comes in, we'll then pass that over to the sales, to the SDR team, sales development reps. If there are any that come in, which we can see and we can analyze and go, okay, these are a hundred user business with, you know, kind of ticking all the box just from kind of an IT level.
We can then pass on to our new business team or another team with the experience to develop that. Say if it's a tender that comes in, because we can generate inbound as well as doing outbound. So if a tender comes in, we can hand that straight over because they're further down the funnel. Then, you know, someone who's downloaded a white paper who may be interested in developing a service or, you know, developing, you know, then the next steps to go forward.
Rob Twells (23:59)
Excellent, Well look John, I really appreciate your time. Both of those two things will firmly go into Room 301. Although it sounds like you're a bit guilty yourself of using acronyms, but I'm not going to, I'm not going to… I'm going to couple of MQLs, is one ICPs. But I know, really grateful for your time. John, where can people find out more about you and Maintel if they would like to?
John Hoey (24:11)
Yeah.
Yeah, well, obviously we're on, our main social media is LinkedIn. You know, you can find myself on there as well. Maintel.co.uk. And yeah, just if anyone would like to connect and then please feel free. I'm happy to have a chat and yeah, great.
Rob Twells (24:40)
Lovely. Appreciate that John. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone for listening and we'll see you again soon.
John Hoey (24:43)
Thank you.
Rob is the Founder of an award winning digital agency (since forming a digital agency group The Digital Maze with Boom Online) specialising in eCommerce, SEO, PPC, CRO, digital strategy and web design. With over 10+ years in the marketing space, Rob has been involved with hundreds of marketing projects and campaigns with some of the best known brands.
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