Marketing at Wise – Life in the Affiliates & Partnerships Team
Marketing
The Affiliate & Partnership team’s goal is to find and support any business or individual who wishes to make money from promoting Wise.
Our vision is to build a best-in-class partner programme that is: easy for partners to understand, rewards partners fairly and gives them all the tools, information, creative and reporting they need to successfully promote Wise.
Currently we have a central team of 5 based in London who work globally across all regions. Today, the team consists of 4 core affiliate marketers and 1 analyst, with the aim to grow the team to 8 by the end of 2021! There are also an additional 3 team members who focus on building out affiliate sites we acquire too.
In a truly Wise style we come from a mix of career disciplines and nationalities. There are people with more technical SEO backgrounds, traditional affiliate account managers and some with general digital marketing experience. From Brits to Latvians to Italians and lovers of golf, K-pop and ‘plantfluencers’. It’s a real mix of skills and interests. What brings us together is our joint passion for building and marketing a product that will make living international lives easier and cheaper.
Our team is broken down into 4 main functional ‘pods’:
- New partnership discovery
- Affiliate recruitment & outreach
- Account management
- Programme infrastructure & data
New partnership discovery
This pod pursues new strategic partnerships beyond our bread and butter collaborations with content and media sites. The growth of Wise’s product is constantly opening up more partnership opportunities. There are companies and communities out there with huge audiences of potential customers. The goal is to figure out who they are, how Wise can help,and how we might replicate this success in other markets.
Affiliate recruitment & outreach
This pod focuses on discovering new partners we can work with at scale. Their challenge is to reach out and onboard partners at scale to our programme. Also once we’ve found a new partnership vertical that works, we need to figure out how to find all the other similar sites to replicate that success.
Account management
The account management pod is focused on protecting and growing our existing partners on the programme. We don’t want to spend all that time bringing onboard new partners, only to lose them to competitors or have them disengage. With each new product or currency launch we need to make sure that our existing partners are aware and know how best to promote this. We keep a close feedback loop to make sure our platform provides all the tools and information they need to make them successful.
Programme infrastructure and data
With the large number of partners we work with across a range of promotional categories, we need to ensure that we maintain and keep a partner platform that can support all our partners. From reporting to allowing us to measure the impact of conversion optimisation tests through to a scalable communications platform that allows for easy partner segmentation, this pod focuses on building the right infrastructure to allow our partnerships to scale.
Whilst each pod has slightly different focus areas, we have weekly catch ups, stand ups and ideas sessions to make sure that everyone in the team gets all the support they need. We have a strong feedback culture at Wise which helps us to constantly improve and think through the lens of others to ensure we’re always focusing on the biggest impact projects. Feedback is always given in a blameless and constructive manner and for me personally has been massively helpful from a developmental point. We also have internal quarterly bite size sessions where teams across Wise provide updates on what they’re working on alongside our quarterly mission updates which you can read about here.
What’s it like working at Wise?
When interviewing candidates, this question tends to come up a lot. My answer is always the same – I can honestly say that Wise has been the best place I’ve worked. There are always new challenges and opportunities to take on and you’re given the freedom and autonomy to tackle those. New ideas are always welcomed, and as long as you can come up with a clear and data-backed plan with an outline of how you will track and measure success, then typically you’ll get the green light. It’s super empowering and you always have the support and brain power of your peers and leads to help you through.
But rather than just have the opinion of one, here’s some of the other reasons why others in the team love Wise.
A crystal clear mission
With our autonomous team structure it can easily become chaotic. But what helps miraculously guide the 2500+ employees we have in the business is our mission to make sending, receiving and spending money abroad as cheap, transparent, convenient and fast as possible, with an ultimate goal to get costs down to 0. We put customers first in all that we do which makes our product stand out from the rest of the space.
A chance to learn and work with incredibly talented individuals
There’s a lot of smart people working at Wise, tackling problems we’ve not come across before. With our channel’s strong focus historically on content media partnerships, we’ve always had a close relationship with our SEO team. We have some of the best minds out there and they’re always willing and happy to provide guidance, support and tips. We also have a mentor scheme at Wise and you can easily set up coffee chats to find out more about what others in the business do. There’s always an opportunity to get involved in related side projects as well to develop your skills and knowledge.
Want to become part of the mission?
We’re always looking for passionate, like-minded people to join the mission and help us tackle the challenges we encounter along the way.
To help you think through whether this is the right role for you, these are some of the key attributes we look for:
- A problem solver: You enjoy finding solutions and new ways of working with partners. Whether that’s identifying new partnership verticals that could help tap into new audiences or figuring out ways to scale globally
- Resilient: You don’t take no for an answer and remain positive even when a partnership fails
- A hustler: You know who to target as the ‘champion’ within a company and can win partners and internal stakeholders to your cause
- A people person: It’s all about building honest relationships with our partners, making sure that both parties are clear on the expectations
- Data obsessed: You make data-informed decisions in everything you do. Whether that’s assessing the market opportunity through to setting clear success metrics for test partnerships, you use data to extract learnings that can be applied to future partnerships
Feel like this is your calling? Why not check out available roles and join our team of affilinados and help us build our mission force of Wiser promoters!
