CMO Chats with Mark Hayes, Head of Growth Marketing for TASK Group

Can you tell us a little bit about your journey and what sparked your interest in marketing?

Hi everyone. My name is Mark Hayes, and I’m the head of growth marketing at TASK Group. What sparked my interest was what I encountered: I started off my career initially working in sales and worked my way up to being a business development manager. At that point, I was getting really fascinated with the concept of marketing and wanted to do a career change at that point, so that’s where I dived into marketing and haven’t looked back since then.

On to my second question, which would be, What does your company do?

TASK Group is an end-to-end digital engagement and transaction platform. I know it sounds a mouthful, but we’re basically designed specifically for the hospitality sector. So our connected ecosystem provides a comprehensive suite of integrated solutions, from point of sale to self-serve kiosks to loyalty programs and mobile apps. Our track record speaks for itself. We power, through Plexure division, the McDonald’s app in 65 of the global markets, which connects over 325 million users, and that’s processing almost close to 11 billion API calls a month—to give you some of the idea of the scale that we deal with.

I am probably one of the users of that app as well. Just wanted to kind of go through your role as the head of growth marketing in your company. What is your current marketing focus?

My main focus at the moment is driving what you call sustainable expansion, particularly within the US and Asia Pacific markets, and martech strategy is absolutely vital to achieving this. It allows us to operate with the precision and agility of a much larger company despite our very niche focus.

What we’ve done is we’ve carefully built out a martech stack that provides deep customer insights, and it really fuels our growth efforts in three key ways. Laser-focused targeting, personalisation, data-driven marketing, ROI focus, and operational efficiency. What we’ve got there is that we use tools like SparkToro and heap.io to give us a granular understanding of our target audience, their online behaviour, their pain points, and their preferred channels. That allows us to deliver highly relevant content and a personalised experience through account-based marketing and targeted campaigns.

For example, SparkToro insights led us to develop a Spotify audio ad campaign, knowing that our demographic is actually highly active in listening to podcasts on the Spotify platform. If we go into the data-driven decision-making that I brought up before, we leverage platforms like factors.ai and HubSpot to measure and attribute revenue to specific marketing efforts. This data-driven approach is really crucial for us for optimising our strategies, justifying our marketing spend, and demonstrating the effectiveness of our campaigns. What happens is, I can confidently say, you know, this campaign generates X amount of leads and Y amount of revenue. And when you’re presenting to executives within the organisation, that’s an incredibly powerful tool to have in your toolkit. Then, when I talk about operational efficiency, that’s because unifying all of our data and systems within HubSpot is our one point of truth; we’ve eliminated data silos and empowered cross-functional collaboration. What this means is that we’ve streamlined our approach; we combine that with some other tools like Segment and Apollo.io, and what that does is allow us to make faster, more data-informed decisions across the entire organisation.

What I’m getting from here is that you’ve been really making sure that these tools are used efficiently and, at the same time, are applied to your campaigns. Now, since we are on the topic of your campaigns, can you tell me about a particularly innovative or successful marketing campaign your team has recently executed, something that you’re very proud of?

There’s a recent campaign that we just ran for the February through April period. This was a personalised, account-based marketing campaign. Since we were going into the US market, we were obviously very active, and especially in the face of well-established competitors, we’re up against a formidable challenge there. Outspending them was not an option, so we had to outmanoeuvre them with smarter strategies. As I’ve mentioned before, our martech stack provided valuable insights into our target audience, but we did need to go deeper.

To gain a deeper understanding of the pain points and the software challenges. We brought in a company called NewNext to conduct what we call in-depth interviews to allow us to effectively get insights from quantitative and qualitative research. What they did was help us determine our messaging and tone and enabled us to work with another partner called Vidico, who’s based in Australia, to create a video campaign that was precisely targeted towards our target audience, and likewise, from that qualitative and quantitative research, we chose LinkedIn as the platform that we were going to deploy that on because we knew that our target audience was very, very active on there.

Roughly at the same time, a really interesting development happened with LinkedIn, and they launched a new product within the advertising suite called connected TV. That was an opportunity for us to test out in terms of getting our message directly to decision-makers during leisure time while they’re actually watching television on a smart TV. What happened as a result of this video campaign over that period of time is that we got close to 175,000 plays and a very impressive 52% completion rate, which is actually quite good when you actually consider that the average view rate on LinkedIn is around about 16%. However, what was really interesting was the connectedTV campaign; we had a 96% completion rate. What that told us is that the viewers were actually quite engrossed in the content that we were actually showing them. What we did see from that was that it did lead to a significant increase in web traffic, and we did have a significant increase in the number of brand searches for task software. So, yeah, I was very, very proud of that campaign and how we deployed it. It just really goes to show that you can think smarter, you can break through that clutter, and you can actually achieve some really outstanding ROI by conducting thorough research, employing really targeted strategies, and delivering what I would call compelling video content.

Congratulations on that initiative, and definitely how you shared being able to use research and how it works and doing experiments based on that is essentially trying to think outside the box as well. Since you mentioned pain points a while ago, I wanted to go to that particular aspect. What are the biggest marketing challenges that you have at the moment?

I’d say one of the main challenges is effectively communicating the full scope and value of our platform to potential clients. We’re a solution, and we offer a wide range of capabilities that can assist a hospitality business. However, one of the issues is that, obviously, conveying this message concisely and in a compelling way can be difficult, especially when you’re competing against more specialised vendors that only deal with one aspect of the client’s pain point.

When you mentioned a vendor using just one aspect, how does your company stay ahead in terms of dealing with that, and at the same time, given that you also have competitors in terms of marketing, how do you stay ahead in general?

You stay ahead by leveraging what we call deep industry expertise—customer insights. That obviously allows us to create these highly targeted, value-driven marketing campaigns, as I sort of talked about before. Our martech stack allows us to create a granular understanding of our audience, allowing us to deliver personalised experiences across multiple channels. But we also prioritise what you call thought leadership and educational content. One of them is moving away from commodity-based content and more towards that kind of blue-flame thinking. That positions us as trusted advisors rather than just another vendor. And so, by demonstrating how our platform solves real-world challenges and drives measurable results, that’s how we differentiate ourselves in a crowded market.

I couldn’t agree more. There’s something about thought leadership that shows your credibility in terms of the experience that you have in the industry, and being able to execute that just shows you know how dependable you are as someone to partner with. With that, I wanted to get your opinion on what the future of marketing looks like for you.

This is obviously my opinion. So, the future of marketing, to me, is going to be largely shaped by artificial intelligence. Predictive analysis, powered by AI, will allow marketers to forecast customer behaviour, anticipate trends, and we’ll be able to optimise marketing strategies in real-time. You’re going to start seeing a shift to proactive, data-driven decision-making that’s going to effectively maximise that return on investment and minimise that ad spend wastage that we’ve seen before.

As it continues to advance, I think one of the things is that there’s going to be a blurring of the lines, in my opinion, between marketing, product development, and the customer experience. You’re going to see AI-driven insights that are going to inform product design and innovation. You’re going to see AI-powered personalisation is going to create that kind of seamless omnichannel experience that’s going to foster that long-term loyalty play. But I’m also going to put a caveat on that, in that while there’s going to be an increasing reliance on AI marketing, there’s going to be some ethical considerations that we’re going to have to go through here around data privacy, transparency, algorithmic bias, all those sorts of things. Marketers are going to really have to be in the hot seat as they navigate these challenges, ensuring that they’re using AI responsibly and that it’s actually in the best interest of both consumers and society at large.

It’s also how we’re going to maneuvre it through the next few years, how it advances, and so, Mark, what is the role of the CMO in one word and why

Connector. My reason behind that is that the CMO is responsible for building that cohesive brand narrative that you know’s going to resonate across all those touch points and the stakeholders. It’s from customers to employees to investors to partners. By being that unifying force and that strategic connector, the CMO, you know, can drive growth, innovation, and customer centricity throughout the organisation as a result of that.

Unified. I love that because it speaks of collaboration, and as you said, it’s also unifying stories, the design, and the narrative of how you want to put your brand out there. What career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders?

First and foremost, stay curious and be committed to learning. The marketing landscape is constantly evolving, so it’s essential that you keep your finger on the pulse of new trends, technologies, and best practices. I’ve gone back to university. I’m currently doing a graduate diploma in applied psychology, and my reason for doing that is to get a better understanding of human behaviour and how that is part of the marketing matrix. One of the best quotes I actually heard in the last year is that marketing is what they call commercial psychology, and it’s something they’ve really sort of taken to heart.

The second thing would be: don’t be afraid to experiment and take calculated risks. Some of my grand successes have come from stepping outside of my comfort zone and trying new approaches. Finally, you never lose sight of the human element behind all this data and technology that you’re gathering and that you’re building your product and your brand on. Building genuine connections with your customers, with your team, and with your peers here at work is what’s going to really set you apart as a marketing leader.