Miranda Gowlland

I'm most useful as a sounding board - someone to think out loud with, who will give you honest - and empathetic! - feedback to your challenges and goals. In 25 years of working life, mostly in marketing, I’ve worked at all stages of company size and growth. From pre-launch startups early in my career, to established corporates via 8 years in sales at Google and Meta (or Facebook, as it was in the olden days) I have seen success and failure and learnt loads along the way. I can offer you the breadth of my experience as you’re on your own journey of building and being an entrepreneur. I’ve also worked in different ways: as a contractor, a consultant, a FTE, a fractional exec, and they’ve all taught me different skills. Come to me for thoughtful advice, a sparring partner or simply to get something off your chest. I may not have had exactly your experience, but I bet I can relate to it and help you find a path forward from it. Some areas I can help with: Understanding whether your growth problem is a marketing problem or not Nailing positioning Honing your brand Who/when/how to hire for marketing Using agencies vs in-house What to do on limited budget/resource Thinking about organic growth Brand vs performance spending Building or restructuring teams Empathetic leadership Building culture across remote teams

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  Branding

  I cut my teeth in brand management and it taught me discipline that’s carried me through my career. I’ve spent the years since arguing that brand and performance are as important as each other - despite working mainly in performance marketing. I’ve worked on rebrands, redesigns, brand positioning, messaging frameworks and I can be useful here for helping you understand what your positioning, how to build brand, and how to defend brand spend against short time horizons.

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  Building a team

  I have experience spanning the full range from having no team and deciding the who/how/when of hiring through to rebuilding a marketing function from scratch, hiring across performance, CRM, brand, content and comms. I’ve navigated whether to in-house roles or used agencies - and have done plenty of both. I can be useful on the awkward parts: what your first hire should actually be, generalist versus specialist, when agencies are the better answer, and what to do when a hire isn't working out.

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  Email marketing

  CRM and lifecycle have been part of every in-house role I've held. I've built programmes from nothing, run them globally, and evaluated platforms, built business cases and at the end of the day, actually written the copy and designed the flows. Useful for lifecycle mapping, deciding what to automate first, deliverability basics, and which tools might be best for your organisation.

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  Go to market strategy

  I’ve worked on this at many lifecycle stages: a new product seeking product-market fit, a validated product that’s scaling, entering new markets or new channels for an established product. The strategies might differ but there are always some guiding principles that can apply. I can be useful for pressure-testing whether you have a marketing problem or a positioning problem, and sense checking your thinking.

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  Leadership

  I’ve led marketing in companies where the function’s worked brilliantly, and where it’s been valued. I’ve led marketing in companies where… it hasn’t. The hard parts of leadership aren’t unique to marketing - managing a board that wants certainty, building for both short term growth and long term gain, holding a team together through a bad quarter. I can give you perspective from a career with plenty of ups and downs.

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  PPC strategies

  I’ve done both the buy and sell side of paid search. 8 years at Google gave me a depth and knowledge I still use today. I’m less hands on in Google Ads these days, but I still know it well. Lots of experience with other platforms too, and I can help you work out which ones to prioritise, what you want to do in them, and how to get started.

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  Remote work

  I've worked remotely and across time zones for much of my career and most recently managed a distributed and multicultural team. I'm less interested in what tools you use here than in the team culture side of things: unclear ownership, decisions made in calls half the team didn't attend, managing to get the best out of people whether you’re in the same timezone or not, how to build an effective working relationship by screen only.

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  Social media

  I sold social media while working at Facebook, since then I’ve been on the buyer side. I’ve run ads and organic social in all my client-side roles, as well as handling influencer marketing in more recent roles. Here to help you troubleshoot all things social media whether organic or paid.

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  Venting frustration

  I have 25 years of experience in working with founders, consultants, senior leaders and executive boards, and I'm now training to be a coach, so I've had plenty of practice listening properly rather than waiting for my turn to talk. I get how hold it can be to grow a business. Bring me the thing you can't say to your board, your co-founder or your team. I may not be able to solve it for you but I will give you the space, empathy and active listening you may be needing.

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  E-Commerce

  I've worked in ecommerce across a lot of product types both high and low consideration/frequency/order value. The channel, messaging and CRO focus may change but there are commonalities across all and ultimately the common thread is really understanding your customer well enough to know why they’re hesitating at point of purchase.

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  B2C

  Almost all of my career has been consumer-facing: travel, subscription, DTC ecommerce, energy and on-demand services. I'm at home with the messy end of consumer marketing - long consideration cycles, weak attribution, heavy seasonality, and the gap between what customers say in research and what they do at checkout. If you're pure B2B, I'm not your best match here.

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  Small and Medium Businesses

  I’ve spent a lot of the last decade consulting for small and growing businesses, including luxury furniture, wellness tech and others, where the marketing team is small (or non-existent). The useful conversations are usually about sequencing: what to stop doing, what to do next, and what can wait another six months.