A look forward: New Year’s resolutions from TNW’s marketing team

As we welcome another year in tech, with each one seeming to whizz past with ever-increasing speed, TNW challenged each department to share what they learned this past year, their hopes for the year to come and what resolutions they’ll be making, and sticking to, in 2016.

What happened in 2015? Growing the team, in two ways!

This year was a crazy year for the marketing team at The Next Web and literally from the first day on. We grew the team from two/three marketers in a year to over 15 by the end of the year which meant we’ve gotten way more firepower to work on all the amazing projects we work on at The Next Web. How it impacted the business? Obviously we increase some of the numbers in a nice way but most of all we had the time to think more about the strategy for the long term and most important, figure out what works and what doesn’t.

In terms of knowledge it was even more important, with 15 people these days we have gotten to learn much faster from each other what works. Last year I was still working 90 percent on hands on, these days I became a manager and am mostly trying to remove all the barriers for the team so they can keep pushing awesome stuff.

What’s happening in 2016 for The Next Web (Marketing)

The <3 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

How is the team and how we do marketing going to change in the new year:

• Focus on the user: Obviously our users are the most important to us, they pay our salary but also give insights into how we perform. They’re critical but mostly fair in giving us feedback on how we do things.
• Focus on data driven marketing: We like to track everything, everything. Because we’d like to make sure that we know what kind of impact certain changes have on our users. But also to see what works in terms of campaigns and what doesn’t. Data in making decisions is super important and making sure that works correctly takes up a lot of time for the team itself. In 2016 we’ll make sure to automate even more of that process.
• Grow the team even more: In the last two or three months we hired another couple of great interns that will be joining the team in early ‘16. They’re going to make sure that we can do even more cool stuff and work on the processes and find out what’s going to work and what doesn’t. What next steps, we’ll take there. We don’t know yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be exciting.

My personal new year’s resolutions

1. “Read more books”, I’ve bought more than 15 books over the last two years, but haven’t read more than five. So there is some catch up to do there.
2. “Get smarter, faster”, it resonates back to the other new year’s resolutions I’ve made. But next to reading books I’m dying to do more courses to improve skills in certain areas.
3. “Never eat alone”, one of the books I’ve been dying to read for some time now. But this is really one of the things that already stuck with me this year. Since I’ve started to ask the question: “Who do you recommend I should drink coffee with as well?” I’ve had so many interesting talks with senior people in the industry and/ or entrepreneurs.

Marketing resolutions

How I hope and see marketing as an industry change over the next year? I really hope more companies are going to embrace just screwing up things to see what is going to work or not. I see too many corporates being too scared away from innovating and trying out new things. If they would start on a small basis and start working on new things it could already impact the way we do things in general in marketing in so many ways.

How you can help make this happen? Share your new year’s resolutions and the way you think you can accomplish them. Come visit us somewhere in the new year at our new office at X and reach out to us later on to see if we could host a great event there!

This is a #TNWLife article, a look into life and work at The Next Web.