Five questions with… Betty Burrell, Senior Marketing Manager

We’ve been catching up with some of the CTI Digital team, asking them to explain what they do and why they do it.

This week, it’s the turn of our Senior Marketing Manager, Betty Burrell.

CTI: What do you do? And how would you explain it to a child?

Betty Burrell: I tell people what CTI Digital can help them with, and that there's more to us than most people realise. If someone needs a new website, we're the team, but we also do marketing, data, and AI work. My job is making sure people know all of that, so nobody misses out on something we're good at.

What's great about your job? And when is it not so great?

Betty Burrell: What’s great is that no two weeks look the same. In the past few months I've organised an event for women in tech with Manchester Digital (the Digital Her Summer Social), helped write award entries for our AI work, and put together reports about AWS migration toolkits for Nublue (our hosting and infrastructure brand within the CTI Digital Group).

I get pulled into other departments constantly, so I'm learning about many different parts of the business.

What’s not so great? The volume. CTI delivers many services, which means covering a lot of ground, and some weeks that's genuinely a lot to hold in your head. I won't pretend it isn't full-on, but it's the kind of busy I enjoy.

What makes a good marketing manager? And how does the job compare with your expectations from earlier in your career?

Betty Burrell: Being a good marketing manager is being able to juggle a lot of hats. To support every service properly, I need a working knowledge of each one: who the ideal client is and what gets them to buy from us.

That's a long way from where I started. I began at a tiny agency at 21 and had no idea agencies even had marketing teams of their own. Since then I've gone from agency, to client-side, and back to agency again, which tells you how much I like it here.

What's the biggest challenge you see in marketing at the moment?

Betty Burrell: AI. It's made it easy to lean on a tool for every piece of content, and the result is a lot of brands saying the same thing in the same way.

I see it even in awards submissions, where the entries that stand out are the ones with a genuine point of view, not the ones that read like they came from the same prompt.

Standing out now means being deliberate about what actually makes your content different.

Lastly, what advice would you give either to your younger self or somebody starting out right now?

Betty Burrell: AI won't take your job. It will free you up to get better at the parts of marketing a tool can't do. Keep learning wherever you can, and if you want to learn fast, agencies are still the best place to do it.

Connect with Betty on LinkedIn.