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Conor Buckley, Digital Marketing Executive, Smyths Toys

Conor Buckley, Digital Marketing Executive, Smyths Toys


What’s your name, job title and employer?

I'm Conor Buckley and I'm a digital marketing executive for Smyths Toys Superstores and we're based in Galway.


On a day-to-day basis I run our Google ads accounts in the UK and here in Ireland so that basically just means ensuring that our products always appear at the top of the search page in the shopping carousel. I also run our YouTube channel, creating video ad campaigns ensuring we reach the target market and uploading organic content and working with suppliers to make sure their correct content is in our channel. Whatever needs to be pushed, we're pushing it on Google or YouTube.

What skills do you need to be successful in your role?

For myself one of the most important skills that you need in my role is analytical thinking because you're looking at data day to day to see which products could be performing better, which you should push a bit more and you need to feed that back to the buyers or the rest of the marketing team. You also need to have interpersonal skills so you can talk to the rest of the marketing team, to the buyers, because you need to lean on them for the business knowledge to understand which products are the correct products to push at the right time of the year.

What do you love about your job?

The main thing I love about Smyths is playing with the toys… I love the feedback you get from buyers whenever a certain product does well on the back of the campaign or the efforts, we put into a Google Shopping campaign or a YouTube campaign. Whenever you come in under budget at the end of the campaign and you’ve reached your KPI’s, you’ve reached your revenue targets that’s always a good feeling. In Smyths there is a great social life and there's a lot of young people so there's a lot of extracurricular activities after work, during the summer there’s tag rugby etc so there’s a great buzz all year with all the young people working in the office.

How did you get into your job?

I initially joined Smyths as a digital marketing graduate. I did the digital marketing masters in NUIG and during that I just noticed the grad program online so I applied for it, sent them my CV, answered a few questions and I was called into an assessment centre in Galway and that went pretty well so I was called back for a final interview where I met the two heads of marketing and I was offered the job which was fantastic. That was over two years ago so for the past year, year and a half I've been phased into my current role then picking up bits and bobs and then here I am in the Digital Marketing Position.

What advice would you give to a college student?

Reading is a big one. I know that lecturers always push it and even myself when I was in college it's an awful pain. you try to do the reading, but you can't do it all, there's other things going on in college that you prefer to be doing. But especially since joining Smyths I signed up to a lot of blog posts or newsletters or just emails that industry leaders would send out. Especially if you have an interest in a particular field definitely sign up to as many of those as you can because digital marketing is constantly adapting, and things are constantly changing. There are massive changes to come in the next five to ten years so if you can keep on top of those you'd be very attractive to future employers.