Expertise / Marketing Strategy & Leadership
From marketing objectives to an organisation capable of delivering them
Throughout my career, I have held roles in which the marketing remit extended beyond a single channel or discipline.
Responsibilities have covered marketing strategy, growth, CRM, ecommerce, campaigns, customer experience, budgets, KPIs, creative, marketing operations and collaboration across the organisation.
My approach is relatively simple:
Strategy has limited value if it cannot be turned into decisions, budgets, people, processes and practical execution.
- Marketing Strategy
- GTM
- Functional Leadership
- Budget & KPI
- Growth
- Cross-functional Execution
Strategy is also about choosing what not to do
A marketing strategy should make it clearer:
- which customers the company wants to win
- which problem marketing should solve
- where growth should come from
- which channels and activities have a role
- how the budget is prioritised
- which KPIs actually matter
- how Marketing should work with the rest of the organisation
It also means choosing what should not be prioritised.
I therefore do not assume that more marketing automatically produces a better result. What matters is identifying the activities most likely to move the business objective.
For example, that might mean:
- more CRM rather than more acquisition
- lead generation rather than direct conversion
- better creative rather than more media spend
- better data rather than more campaigns
- fewer activities with clearer ownership
The strategy has to fit the specific business.
What should marketing actually deliver?
I work on turning high-level objectives into a concrete marketing model. This can include:
What commercial or organisational impact are we trying to create?
Who are we trying to influence, and where are they in the customer journey?
What should the customer understand or choose?
What should Paid, CRM, Sales, content, the website or other touchpoints each contribute?
Where should the resources go?
How do we know whether the effort is moving in the right direction?
Which skills, processes and systems need to exist to deliver the plan?
I therefore prefer strategies with a clear connection between:
Marketing should be able to explain why the money is spent
I have been responsible for marketing budgets and worked with budget allocation across acquisition, CRM, campaigns and creative, among other areas.
That does not mean the cheapest channel should always win. Prioritisation needs to take into account, for example:
- acquisition economics
- customer value
- lead quality
- conversion
- retention
- market potential
- campaign needs
- strategic priorities
- creative requirements
- operational capacity
At Dirks, for example, the commercial assessment changed the acquisition model from primarily:
towards more:
It was a strategic change in how the marketing budget should create value, not just an optimisation of an existing ad account.
The overall marketing effort delivered:
Leadership is more than the number of direct reports
My roles have involved different forms of leadership. It is important to me to distinguish between them. I have experience with:
Responsibility for a discipline, its objectives, priorities and development.
Getting different specialists and functions to deliver towards a shared result.
Setting direction and quality for professional deliverables.
Briefing, prioritisation, feedback and management of external partners.
Creating alignment between functions with different goals and perspectives.
In relevant roles, I have led designers and interns, among others.
I have therefore not had the same people-management model in all my Head roles.
A significant part of my leadership experience lies in functional ownership and cross-functional execution: taking responsibility for a result and getting the necessary people and functions to work in the same direction.
Marketing can rarely solve the most important problems alone
Many marketing problems quickly turn out to be cross-functional.
- A CRM problem may require Development.
- A dashboard may require BI.
- An acquisition problem may really be a Sales or conversion problem.
- A campaign may require Finance data.
- A product launch may require close coordination between marketing, ecommerce, design and operations.
I have worked across, among others:
- Marketing
- Sales
- Product
- Finance
- BI
- Development
- Ecommerce
- Design
- external agencies
My role is often to make the marketing need concrete enough for other functions to act on, while understanding their constraints and professional ownership.
It also means being precise about responsibility.
If Development builds the integration, my responsibility is to define and scope the marketing need, not to take credit for the code.
B2C marketing across functions and 14 markets
As Head of B2C Marketing at Billetto, my responsibilities spanned:
- lifecycle
- customer experience
- marketing budget
- KPIs
- CRM
- performance
- marketing operations
I worked closely with:
- Marketing
- Product
- Finance
- BI
- Development
- B2B
- external agencies
and led the work with a graphic designer, interns and external agencies.
A significant part of the role was about prioritisation. With more than 20,000 events, 14 markets and over one million CRM recipients, the question was rarely: “Can we do more marketing?” It was rather: “What should take priority, for whom, when and why?”
This led to work on, among other things:
- CRM and lifecycle structure
- campaign prioritisation
- customer data
- RFM and decisioning
- contact policy
- KPI and data foundations
- marketing operations
- governance
Across the overall email effort:
Building the marketing function
At Checkmate, I was the first full-time marketing hire and built the marketing function together with the CEO. The role was broad and included:
- marketing strategy
- acquisition
- CRM
- campaigns
- ecommerce
- creative
- client projects
- project management across marketing, design and development
It was a different kind of leadership task from taking over an established marketing organisation. Here the work was very much about creating:
- direction
- processes
- deliverables
- commercial offerings
- execution
At the same time, I worked on client projects and sold more than DKK 1 million in web, design and content projects.
Dirks and SMILY are two examples of the work from this period.
A launch must hold together from proposition to customer journey
I have worked with go-to-market in situations where the company did not just need to optimise an existing marketing engine. Something new had to be built.
At SMILY, for example, the work covered:
- marketing strategy
- proposition and communication
- acquisition
- website
- creative
- lead generation
- CRM
- marketing automation
The key was to avoid building the individual parts as isolated activities.
- Acquisition had to fit the website experience.
- The website had to move the customer forward.
- CRM had to understand where the customer was.
- Communication had to change with the customer’s actions.
The overall launch effort generated:
while six automated journeys with more than 100 emails were built.
Strategy becomes concrete in the calendar and the budget
Across several roles, I have worked with:
- annual marketing plans
- campaign calendars
- product launches
- seasonal campaigns
- sales periods
- budget allocation
- creative requirements
- channel planning
- KPIs
As Head of Paid Marketing at Roccamore, for example, I worked with paid marketing across Denmark, Sweden and Norway. An important part of the role was the connection between:
It required both an understanding of performance and organisational coordination.
The marketing plan could not work if creative was only considered once the campaign was ready to launch.
Standardisation without ignoring the market
At Ageras, I worked with global performance marketing across Europe and the US. A central challenge was creating more consistency in performance, creative and communication across markets without removing local knowledge.
I therefore worked across local marketing teams and with Global Design, BI, Growth and Sales, among others. The work included:
- shared performance principles
- creative direction
- paid communication
- market-level reporting
- lead generation
- Sales alignment
Among other things, this contributed to:
A KPI is only useful if it influences a decision
I have worked with KPIs across:
- acquisition
- CRM
- revenue
- leads
- conversion
- campaign performance
- engagement
- customer value
But I try to avoid KPI frameworks that mainly exist for the sake of reporting. A good measurement setup should help decide:
- What works?
- Where is the problem?
- What should be prioritised differently?
- Where should the budget move?
- Which hypothesis should be tested next?
It also requires Marketing to work closely with the functions that own other parts of the data foundation. At Billetto, for example, I worked with BI on data foundations and with Finance data as input to commercial campaign prioritisation.
Scaling takes more than a good strategy
As marketing grows, the need for structure arises quickly. That is why I have worked with, among other things:
- campaign planning
- dashboards
- documentation
- SOPs
- QA
- naming conventions
- change logs
- project systems
- workflows
- stakeholder alignment
It may seem operational, but it is an essential part of leadership.
If marketing only works when one particular person can remember every decision, process and dependency, the function is not very scalable. That is why I also work with the systems that make the strategy operable for other people.
I do not see execution as the opposite of seniority
My background is hands-on. I have worked directly with, among other things:
- marketing automation
- paid media
- CRM
- segmentation
- copy
- creative
- dashboards
- campaign planning
- platforms and workflows
That also shapes the way I work strategically. I know that a strategy ultimately has to work in:
- a system
- a process
- an ad
- a flow
- a dashboard
- a brief
- an organisation
I am therefore happy to go quite far into the implementation when needed. At the same time, I try to keep the focus on why the work is being done, and which decision or business impact it should support.
When marketing needs direction and structure
I can contribute with, among other things:
Prioritising customers, activities, channels and commercial focus areas.
From proposition and launch plan to acquisition, CRM and execution.
Annual plans, campaign plans, launches and prioritisation.
Budget allocation, KPI frameworks and performance follow-up.
Ownership and direction for marketing areas and cross-functional initiatives.
Collaboration between Marketing, Sales, Product, Finance, BI, Development and external partners.
Processes, documentation, governance and systems that make marketing more scalable.
Connecting acquisition, customer data, lifecycle and retention into a more unified commercial model.
Clear direction. Clear ownership. Room for expertise.
I try to be clear about:
- What are we trying to achieve?
- Who owns the decision?
- Who has the strongest expertise?
- Which constraints are we working under?
- How do we know whether the solution works?
I do not need to own every idea myself. A good solution is not good because it comes from me. It is good if it delivers the intended outcome.
That means I am happy to challenge a direction, including my own, when data or specialist knowledge shows that another solution is better.
Looking for someone with this mix of CRM, growth and marketing experience? Let’s talk.
If marketing needs clearer direction, several disciplines need to work better together, or the strategy needs to get closer to practical execution, you are welcome to get in touch.
Senior roles · Interim · Selected projects