Do you know how to play to your strengths? Digital marketing manager of property search portal 99.co Jesslyn Kwong does.
The 27-year-old has always excelled in all things analytical like physics and mathematics. So, fresh out of school in 2013, she entered into the workforce as a media analyst. Her job revolved around gathering TV audience ratings, analysing data and coming up with targeted strategies based on the insights. The large volumes of data certainly did not intimidate Jesslyn.
She explained: “It’s not necessary to have the experience, but you have to be very proactive and intuitive. A lot of times, data is just there. You need to have that curiosity in your mind to dig deeper and crunch the numbers. A critical role for an analyst is to derive powerful, actionable insights that companies can leverage.”
Embracing Digital
In 2016, her career in traditional media took a turn towards digital. As part of the pioneer team in MediaCorp’s Digital Group, Jesslyn had to execute paid advertising campaigns on all online and social media platforms and optimise them according to performance reports.
She was also tasked to organise internal trainings and help the company move towards digitalisation.
“We can’t expect everyone to feel the same way, but a strong mandate from the top helps. I was sent for two courses when I was at MediaCorp – digital marketing by Google’s Squared Online and data analytics by General Assembly.
“Believe that everything you do will never have a ceiling. It’s kind of like constant improvement. It’s not that non-digital is going to die. It’s really about adapting. If we don’t make changes to our style of working, we will never make a positive impact on our output,” shared Jesslyn.
New Challenges
Since January 2018, Jesslyn has focused her skills into driving sales conversion at 99.co, a property portal with user-friendly features such as map-based and MRT-based search, as well as access to mortgage calculator, block-specific transaction history and location-specific price trends.
According to her, the property market is saturated with search portals, developers and agents, making the digital marketing scene doubly competitive.
While challenging, Jesslyn regularly brainstorms with her team for creative ways to keep cost per conversion low in her digital outreach. She also makes sure to start off her mornings by catching up on news and updates in the digital marketing industry.
Recently, Jesslyn was one of the speakers at a panel discussion and learning journey organised by Young NTUC on 11 October 2018. The event, held as part of the Todo Todo programme, was aimed at helping youth participants understand the inner workings and culture of startups.
She highlighted: “The challenge and beauty of working in a startup is unpredictable. Today, you put up a list of strategies that you want to implement, but it could totally change because of market demands, industry changes, new trends to jump on, or new features to use.
“It is extremely important to keep up. Unlike corporations with teams of people, you are a specialist in whatever you do in a startup. People will depend on you to get answers and make things work. They will take your advice.”