Matt Simmonds
Director of Marketing
I run marketing here, which is a wonderfully vague way of saying I somehow ended up responsible for websites, advertising, videos, design, campaigns, analytics, databases, and occasionally figuring out why something that worked perfectly yesterday has decided it no longer believes in working.
My business card says Matthew. Everyone calls me Matt. If someone calls me Matthew, I immediately assume I’m in trouble.
Twenty years of making things people notice
I’ve been doing marketing for more than 20 years, and somewhere along the way I apparently forgot to specialize.
I design. I write. I build websites. I shoot and edit video. I create advertising campaigns. I write code. I build databases. I manage hosting. I obsess over analytics. And when something breaks, I usually stare at it long enough until one of us admits what went wrong.
At Signature Financial Solutions, I get to do all of that for an entire group of financial advisors, each with their own personality, audience, brand, website, goals, and occasionally very passionate feelings about the precise shade of blue we should be using.
I also write HTML, CSS, JavaScript and SQL, which means I spend a surprising amount of my professional life politely asking computers why they’re doing something I very specifically did not ask them to do.
The part I love is figuring out how everything fits together. Good marketing isn’t just making something look nice. It’s understanding the audience, finding the right message, building the thing, launching it, measuring what happened and then making it better.
Of course, doing all of that in financial services adds another character to the story: compliance.
So the actual process is usually:
- Have brilliant idea.
- Build brilliant idea.
- Become emotionally attached to brilliant idea.
- Send brilliant idea to compliance.
- Make brilliant idea compliant.
- Launch slightly more responsible brilliant idea.
And somehow, I genuinely love it.
A little more about Matt
Apparently a professional biography is supposed to reveal something about the actual person eventually, so here we go.
What’s the greatest lesson you’ve learned in life thus far?
Nobody who says “I’ll circle back on this” has ever actually circled back. I’m still waiting on circles from 2011.
If you could have any one superpower, what would it be?
The ability to make people read the entire email before replying.
I already answered your question.
Second sentence.
There were only three.
Something unrelated to work that you love doing?
Cooking. And I don’t mean casually throwing something together.
If I’m making dinner on a Tuesday night, there is an unreasonable possibility that tweezers, garnish placement and a completely unnecessary drizzle of sauce will become involved.
My family knows the rules: nobody eats until I take the picture.
Favorite food?
A perfectly cooked steak with my homemade Caesar salad, sushi, and ice cream.
Not necessarily together.
Although I’m not prepared to rule anything out.
#1 song on your playlist?
I’m Canadian.
It’s The Tragically Hip.
I believe they revoke my passport if I answer incorrectly.
The leadership team behind Signature Financial Solutions
Want to talk shop with Matt?
Have a marketing question, a project, a weird idea, or the beginning of an idea that currently makes absolutely no sense? Send it my way. Those are usually my favorite ones.