This last month, we’ve covered some of Trio’s legends. First, we finally sat down with our superstar project manager, Catherine Hu, and now we have the chance to speak with Colleen Anderson, the Head of Performance Marketing.
If you know us, you probably know Colleen. Colleen encapsulates everything that makes Trio, Trio. She’s hard-working, passionate, strategic, and most of all, cares about our clients and her team of geniuses, including Darren and Claudia.
Colleen celebrates her 5th anniversary at Trio in July 2025 and has grown with the business, now leading us in being performance marketing experts.
What drew you to performance marketing?
I studied Corporate Communications at a University in South Africa and completed my dissertation in Media Studies. This is when I first became fascinated with the power of marketing.
Following university, I worked in marketing for a year before deciding it was time to travel and see the world. I was also convinced this was my chance to become a famous travel influencer, but turns out it’s more complicated than you think!
During my years of living in Southeast Asia, my interest and curiosity in marketing grew. Once my visa expired, I purchased a one-way ticket to the UK. Fast forward six years, and I’m now Head of Performance Marketing, even more passionate about the power of marketing and how important a strategic approach is to success in the industry.
Are there any key lessons you’ve learnt that influence your work today?
Marketing is about what your target audience wants to see, hear and experience, not what the brand wants to say. This still applies to everything my team and I do today. From analysing campaign performance to creating headlines. It’s all about understanding what the target audience is telling us so that we can effectively market our brand’s products and services to them.
What current performance marketing trends do you find most influential?
AI-generated creatives. This trend began when AI first emerged, but as AI has evolved and improved, so has the quality of AI-generated videos and imagery.
In many cases, viewers can’t tell the difference between AI-generated content and human-generated content. The positive to this is that people can save time and money in producing high-quality ad creatives. The negative is, how do we know what is real anymore?
At Trio, we still prefer the human-led approach. AI learns from vast amounts of data, meaning it often prefers quantity over quality. Trio is much the opposite. We strive for high quality in everything we do, because we know only great results come from work that takes time.
What do you believe is the next big thing in performance marketing?
AI. Again. The use of AI in marketing has been ongoing for some time, but it hasn’t even scratched the surface of what it is capable of. I’m both excited and terrified about what it will be able to do in the near and far future.
What I do know is that I’m ready to embrace it, learn more about it, and use it in conjunction with my knowledge, expertise and experience.
Is there anything you think brands get wrong with marketing?
Collaboration and goals. When it comes to marketing, it’s not about having multiple marketing channels all firing at the same time without consideration for what the others are doing or trying to achieve.
Performance marketing is about leveraging the strengths of each channel and ensuring that all channels work towards a common goal. You can hear more from me, Claire and Jamie-lee in our recent 3 in 3 episode:
Do you have any tips for creating a strategic campaign?
Start by looking into the future. What do you want to achieve and by when? Then you can work your way backwards to understand the milestones you need to achieve to make the end goal a reality.
Once you have identified your milestones, you can map out how you’ll achieve them, including resources, marketing channels, assets and costs.
Tell me about a time when you had to demonstrate value of performance marketing
I’ve dealt with numerous clients who have been convinced they know what their audience wants to see and hear on their marketing channels. In all of these situations, my response has been to present them with our research, which highlights not only what their audience wants to see and hear, but also what has been proven to work.
In almost all cases, we have been trusted to A/B test both approaches and have been able to prove our research, experience and expertise were correct. The end result: a happy client!
Want to get strategic?
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