Meet Jannine, Marketing Manager for Penguin Random House Children’s

KPI, ROI, SEO, UX…

From the outside, Marketing might seem like some dark art full of acronyms and analytics or a combination of both. But, to put it simply – it’s our job to promote our books to consumers.

As a Marketing Manager I’m responsible for creating campaigns which connect readers to books they’ll fall in love with. The ways in which we do this are endless but primarily this is through advertising, which can be anything from billboards in public places, gorilla or experiential marketing, placing adverts in magazines and newspapers, or online through social or web advertising.

Once I have my campaign strategy in place, day-to-day tasks involve bringing my campaign to life. To do this I need to identify our target audience with a little help from our Consumer Insight team who research all our different readers. Once I know exactly who I’m targeting I can then start brainstorming ideas as to how best to reach this audience and engage with them, this involves everything from competitions, video and asset creation, bookshop promotional items and advertising. After those details are decided I then spend a lot of time working with media companies booking advertising space and then with freelance designers to produce our assets, adverts or promotional items which we’ll use in the campaign.

“Marketing can be a very creative environment so having a strong imagination can definitely help generate ideas to help consumers discover our products. But you also need to be agile, if an idea isn’t working or a campaign takes a different direction you need to be able to adapt quickly.”

Having a growth mind set is important too, marketing is always developing and consumers are always changing so you need to be constantly learning and applying that new knowledge in your campaigns. Usually a marketer is working across several projects so multi-tasking and prioritising has to be second nature, as does reflecting on past campaigns to know what worked and what didn’t so you’re next campaign can be even more effective.

Reaching audiences, grabbing their attention and converting them into a valued customer can be a big challenge, especially in today’s busy entertainment industry. In order to stand out you need to be bold, innovative, strategic and tenacious. In the Penguin Random House Children’s marketing team we are continually striving to produce the best campaigns in the business because we’re really passionate about connecting our books with the people we know will love them.

If you’re interested in kick starting your career in Marketing, check out our Internship opportunities.