I’m a Director of Marketing and Communications at KDC Group. It specialises in engineering services to the Aerospace & Defence sector.
The purpose of this blog is to document my journey in marketing and provide help and tips to young budding marketeers. I hope you’ll find it useful.
I started my journey in marketing back in 2016, with what was a glorified sales role. I was selling promotional gifts to small (and large) businesses.
The environment in that company was very sales focused. It relied on hard-selling techniques to find a way to sell your average Jane or Joe with a garage or hair salon to buy 50-100 branded pens. They hoped we could then sell them more branded products in the future.
Now, branded goods are a very important part of marketing, but aren’t the first thing that company should have been doing to promote themselves.
I found it very siloed and wanted to explore more of the marketing world. I’ve always had a passion for growing businesses and the promotion side of it is that which piques my interest the most.
Fast-forward to 2017, I joined Cardiff Metropolitan University to study Business Management with Marketing pathways as a foundation degree. I didn’t want to limit myself to marketing if it turned out I finished Uni and decided I didn’t actually like it – spoiler alert; I didn’t).
In 2018, I moved to the University of the West of England in Bristol. It was the same degree but I was an undergrad in year one.
Then, while I was at UWE I decided to get part-time work to supplement my maintenance loan/grant.
In December 2018, I started work as a Project Administrator at Ferchau. Ferchau UK is part of the KDC Group where I was given the opportunity to work on large projects outside of my scope.
Then, in 2020, I was in the last part of my second year, and with the pandemic changing the aviation landscape, the company had to pivot and focus its value offering in different sectors.
At the time there was no marketing department, and the company did very little marketing at all. I was given the opportunity to do marketing part-time alongside my university degree.
Now, 5 years later, and I have a team of 3 and the company has grown significantly from where it was in 2020.
I’ll aim to share parts of my journey with you, my learning along the way, and what marketing is important to do as a growing business. I’ll also look at what I’m focusing on to grow the business further going forward.