A day in the life of Kate Cox, group CMO, of HEG

Kate Cox, group CMO, of HEG (Host Europe Group) describes her day...

My day

6.00am: Woken up by Eddy, my five-year-old, who is rising early to have a special breakfast with his mum. With a long day ahead, I enjoy taking these moments to hear about the latest bumps and bruises on the playground.

7.00am: I’m quickly out the door and starting my 1.5-hour commute to our office in Hayes. I use this time to catch up on the news and focus on the week ahead. A quick stop for a coffee on the way to my desk at our office canteen in the Old Vinyl Factory gives me a much needed caffeine injection.

9.00am: The first part of my day is always spent managing my to-do list on Trello, web-based project-management app. I then take a few seconds to glance through the latest updates to the marketing budget and adjust my 2016 plans accordingly, before stepping into a meeting with the video team to chat about how we can leverage the new customer testimonial videos to inspire other small and medium businesses.

10.30am: Apart from my work on a group level for HEG, my marketing team also support a further eight domain registration and web-hosting brands in the UK and Germany. Yesterday, I spent some time with the 123-reg team planning new website tests for SEO, design and copy and helping it develop its Q1 marketing plan.

12.00pm: Our business relies on the success of our customers – and a large percentage of those customers are small and medium businesses, or entrepreneurs who are striving to build their businesses. A big part of my job is going out and offering advice to our customers in person to address their individual needs. To do this, we host regular events, inviting our customers to meet with experts and talk about how they can best use the services they’re paying for to grow their business. We had one such event last night so I spent a good portion of my afternoon making sure I was familiar with the background of each of the customers that were planning to attend.

2.00pm: After a quick working lunch talking with my colleague about his upcoming speech at the Microsoft Future Decoded event, I met with our product team to talk about the latest benefits we can offer customers. With the recent launch of our new website builder, I want to make sure that I’m up to speed before the event on every aspect that can help our customers.

4.00pm: I arrived at the event venue and briefed our CEO and panellists on the specific pain points we want to address based on my afternoon research into the attending customer backgrounds.

7.00pm: The event starts and I’m happily fielding questions on how customers can use marketing to their advantage and work to personalise their websites to attract new business. This is one of the best parts of my job – being able to share our knowledge from dealing with thousands of growing businesses on a daily basis and meeting our customers face-to-face to understand how we can improve our service based on their feedback. 

11.00pm: The event finishes and I manage to send a few quick thank-you notes to the team for organising such a great evening in the cab on the way home whilst also checking our Twitter account to see any first reaction to the research we launched at the event.

Article written by Kate Cox, group CMO at Host Europe Group (HEG).