At Commtract, our community of experts are the lifeblood of our business. One initiative we are taking on in 2019 is featuring more of our experts to showcase their unique talent, ready to be engaged on our marketplace!
We interviewed marketing and communications whiz, Heather Potter – keep on reading to find out all about her!

Heather Potter | Marketing Communications Professional | Melbourne, VIC

1. What interesting skills and experience do you bring to the table as a contractor?
Although, as a former journalist, I’m a writer above all things, I am most fascinated by the numbers behind a business – particularly in terms of what they tell us about how customers are engaging with a brand. Every number tells a story about human behaviour and gives insights into why people are doing things (or not doing the things you want them to do). This can help you refine your product offering, improve the types of content you’re delivering on your social channels, deliver better media stories – just connect better. If you’re not looking at your numbers often and in detail, you’re guessing

2. Do you have any entertaining stories about this contracting life?
One of the great things about contracting is the ability to work from home. I’m a bit of a night owl, so I tend to work quite unsocial hours and I don’t enjoy early meetings. I was juggling a time zone challenge that required me to be on Skype very early one morning. From the waist up, I looked very professional but from the waist down, I was wearing flannel pyjama pants. I would have gotten away with it too but half-way through the meeting, my cat decided it needed more attention and jumped onto the coffee table – knocking my laptop onto the floor and giving my client a glimpse of cat print pyjamas! My cat is a jerk.

3. What have been your favourite projects/engagements/roles/clients?
I love working with data so one of my favourite recent jobs was a data analysis project I did for a gorgeous lingerie brand called Silent Arrow. They were interested in understanding more about their audience and how their brand proposition was connecting and whether they were leaving any opportunities on the table. I did a deep dive into their social media, Google analytics and marketing data and was able to share some insights that really helped them see their brand opportunities in a new way, which was very rewarding. I hope to see this translating into new growth for them in the coming year.

4. You have done fantastic analytics projects for major brands such as Sushi Sushi, Boost Juice and BCG. How did you get trained up in Analytics, and in your opinion why is it crucial in today’s marketing and comms landscape?
When I first started in communications my peers were saying, “You can’t measure PR. It’s about a feeling…” Firstly, I always thought that was crap but secondly, digital has transformed the landscape and enabled us to KNOW everything about how people are connecting with us. There is now so much data available in a business that the biggest issue Marcomms teams have is figuring out how to use it. It’s no longer good enough to say we had x number of clippings and x number of new likes. We have the data available to do really sophisticated analysis that helps us understand in a really detailed way which audience segments are engaging with which platforms and which products and refining our content marketing offering to such a degree that we largely eliminate waste. You can’t just chuck an ad on TV that says, “Coke is it” and say we’ve done our job. Coke is what? To who? On what platform? And besides, nobody watches TV anymore anyway – the media market is so fragmented you have to segment your activity or you’re not going to reach anyone effectively.

5. And finally, any wise words to share with other professionals in contracting?
Keep up the networking. If you stay home with the cats too much poring over spreadsheets, you can become a bit Unabomber after a while. Not speaking from experience or anything…