How Savills gets the best ROI from its marketing talent

Savills is one of the world’s leading property advisors. Founded in the United Kingdom in 1855, the company has an established brand legacy, and it has grown tremendously in recent years. Today, Savills has more than 40,000 professionals serving 70 countries around the world.

Like many companies with long histories, Savills was experiencing growing pains as it modernized. Several different UK marketing teams were emerging, all working on different sectors, with no big-picture guidance to keep the brand aligned. As a result, Savills messaging appeared inconsistent, processes operated inefficiently, and a talented team was wasting effort on the wrong projects.

Vix Bennett was hired as Head of UK Brand and Marketing in 2021 to solve these issues. Her first insight: for marketing teams to consistently and effectively support the entire company, they’d need to reenvision their internal processes and come together as one team.

“The ultimate goal was to deliver return on investment for our marketing spend,” she says. “It was clear to me that there was talent in the team, but they just weren’t being used in the right way.”

To fuel marketing and company growth, Vix focused on optimizing three areas: people, processes, and platforms. She began to work on restructuring marketing teams to serve the three core areas of the business (residential, commercial, and rural real estate). Meanwhile, she asked Georgina Green, Associate Director and Senior Marketing Planning and Operations Manager, to find a platform to better manage internal processes.

monday.com ticked the boxes Savills Marketing needed and soon rose to the top of Georgina’s list:

It could integrate with the creative, project management, and budgeting tools teams were already using.

The user-friendly interface would be simple enough for more traditional teams to quickly learn and use.

The platform is flexible to accommodate different department’s working styles.

“monday.com is a great place to have everyone in one space and collaborate, but also without hindering individual teams’ ways of working,” says Georgina.

Vix and Georgina’s first use of monday.com was eye-opening.

They created a monday form to track marketing requests, which fed into an automated dashboard. This visualized how the teams were being used and revealed a problem: only four of 17 divisions were utilizing Marketing’s services. Moreover, much of the work that was requested from Marketing was basic or internal-facing, like name tags and organizational charts, and didn’t need a designer’s talents to fulfill.

From there, monday.com made the fix simple. Vix’s team set up automated responses for common basic requests. Now, when people submit a form through the platform for business cards, for example, they receive an automated message that gives them on-brand templates to create them themselves.

These automations have freed up the design team to work on bigger campaigns and client projects, which generate more revenue for Savills.

Once Vix and Georgina had minimized the busy work, they set out to educate the company on how to leverage Marketing more effectively. As a result, Marketing is now serving all 17 divisions, working on creative campaigns that they used to outsource, and collaborating on all of it through monday.com.

Tracking projects on monday.com has not only improved team communication; the transparency it provides is invaluable for management.

“Within seconds, we can make sure we balance resources in a way that aligns with our company priorities,” says Vix.

For the external design services that Savills offers clients, for instance, Vix can now quickly see the project pipeline, potential income, and how that compares to their target — helping them adjust timelines or dedicated resources quickly if needed.

“Just as important, it’s ten times easier to showcase our impact to leadership and get them on board, and prove we’re getting a return on the investment in our marketing team,” says Vix.

Other departments at Savills are seeing how Marketing has streamlined operations and improved collaboration, and have decided to join in. For example, PR plans to use monday.com to build and manage more transparent content plans. Beyond reducing time spent in meetings and email threads, this opens up further opportunities for PR and Marketing to collaborate on the same platform.

Even within Marketing, Vix and Georgina still see more potential to further improve collaboration and campaign management by combining boards and workflows.

“monday.com is proving to be an excellent platform to help us realize our ambitions,” says Vix.