Gary Hughes

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT GARY HUGHES

Deep expertise in building connected strategies to drive reputation and growth in UK and International markets. Performance-driven marketer with over 20 years of executive marketing leadership in large public and private organisations, from £100m to over £2bn turnover. In-depth experiences include:• Strategy – significant experience of developing and connecting business strategy with brand / growth strategy to drive performance; expert in research / analysis to underpin strategy development and direction; worked with V-C’s at MMU and Aston on developing and launching new strategies. • Performance – building long-term successful recruitment pipelines from enquiry to enrolment across 15+ business cycles of experience. Expert in specification / implementation of Power-BI to underpin recruitment growth strategy; dynamically aligning with CMS / CRM to maximise outcomes and ROI.• Reputation projects – expert lead on multiple projects to improve University reputation (QS /THE); student experience (NSS) to drive competitiveness in UK & International markets; significant business engagement and enterprise success across multiple cycles.• Communications – creating strategies for optimising value of internal and external content; leveraging channels and reach for brand / reputation impact; significant crisis comms / leadership experience in wide range of sectors.• Digital leadership – led multiple enterprise-level projects for Web CMS (Drupal / T4); B2B / B2C CRM (Dynamics 365); Intranet (MS Viva). Maximising SEO / paid campaigns with growing natural search / traffic and aligning with CMS / CRM to drive digital performance. • Executive relationships - built strong, trust-earned working relationships with executive, business, faculty and school leadership teams; enabled the co-creation of innovative and effective marketing plans and contributing to portfolio development.• Career marketer – strong personal marketing credentials and life-long career commitment (BSc Economics and Marketing / MA Marketing Management), and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Completed the Leadership Foundation’s Top Management Programme (TMP-34) in 2015.