Through the Line with Andy Bargery

It's very likely at some point in your marketing career you will come across a freelancer. Maybe you've hired one to work on a graphic design or copywriting project. Maybe your agency has a pool of freelancers you use regularly, or maybe you are a freelancer. There is an army of freelancers working in the marketing/comms/advertising worlds, but how do you get the best from this talent pool?

In this episode, I talk with Ed Goodman, who is the founder of Freelance Heroes - a Facebook group and event for UK based freelancers. We talk about how freelancers and their clients should best work together to deliver successful engagements, including those common pet hates among freelancers. You know, not being paid on time (or at all), being micromanaged and not having their skill sets respected. Listen in if you want to know how to get the most from a freelancer client relationship.

Here are the resources mentioned in the show:

Freelance Heroes Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/freelanceheroes/

Freelance Heroes - https://freelance-heroes.com/

Freelance Heroes Day - https://freelance-heroes.com/freelanceheroesday/

To contact Ed:

http://www.edagoodman.com/

https://twitter.com/edagoodman

This episode is part of the Business of Marketing series and is all about building an agency brand. Now, you might think agencies should be pretty good at this. But you'd be wrong. Agencies work with brands, but so very rarely behave like brands. The result? A sea of samey looking agencies that are hard to differentiate for in-house marketers looking to buy. Like the proverbial plumber's toilet that doesn't flush, agencies are often poor at doing their marketing, or telling their story and using that as a way to differentiate themselves.

Fear not agency people. Lena Robinson from FTSQ is on hand. Lena has spent more than 20 years helping agencies to grow, working for large corporates such as Dentsu and with a host of independent shops too. In this podcast, Lena takes us through her building blocks for creating a brand and story for your agency. We cover purpose, audience, content and content distribution and why, as agencies, we need to focus on who we are and not on what the competition is doing.

There's some excellent advice in here if you're an agency owner or someone looking to grow your business. Fill your boots people.

Here are the resources mentioned in the show:

Webinar: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/webinar-build-your-brand-grow-your-business-taster-session-tickets-59888562302

Masterclass: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/masterclass-reputation-how-to-make-your-brand-stand-outin-a-day-tickets-58662978548

To contact Lena:

https://www.ftsq.co.uk/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinsonlena/

This is the first in a series of podcast episodes where I'll be exploring the business of marketing and not marketing itself. I'm starting with arguably the most important part of marketing: people and how we go about creating a high performing team that fuels the growth of our agency or the success of our in-house marketing team.

Getting your team firing on all cylinders is a huge part of driving business performance. But, in the ever-changing World in which marketers operate, it's not an easy task. I don't have to tell you that the marketing discipline is ever changing, driven along by rapid innovation and new tech. This means there's a constant stream of change, which in turn often leads to stress. Enter Gary Cole and his team of coaches at Archipelo, who help their clients to understand and then address some of these challenges. Gary advocates starting with simply being more human: "how are you, are you OK?", using their ABC model for dealing with personal stress and the scale of awfulness too.

Teams that perform well are supported by a strong culture too. In fact, according to Dr Mark Clutterbuck, the culture of an organisation can have up to a 30% impact on performance. It's also a big part of how to manage stress in people, as well as creating a platform for differentiation. I'm a big believer in the power of a strong culture for being a foundation stone for an agencies success, but perhaps this applies to a marketing department on the brand side too.

This podcast episode is all about people and the stress and culture of performance. I hope you enjoy the conversation and welcome your reviews and feedback.

Here are the resources mentioned in the show:

The Barcelona Way by Damian Hughes

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Barcelona-Way-Create-High-performance-Culture/dp/1509804420

Dr David Clutterbuck

https://www.davidclutterbuckpartnership.com/

To contact Gary:

https://www.archipelocoaching.co.uk/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-cole-0269741/

Did you know the marketing world as you know it is dying? For too long the marketing profession has been doing too much stuff that customers hate; spam email, robocalls, automated marketing campaigns and so on. The advent of marketing technology has exacerbated the problem and made us all reach for the 'easy button', and it has got to change. We have got to get back to being more human and building an emotional connection with our customers. At least, that's Mark Schaefer's point of view in his new book, Marketing Rebellion, The Most Human Company Wins.

And, I have to say, I think he's right on the money. Don't believe me? Take a look at your marketing plan. I'd bet you have a website collecting email addresses, a marketing automation platform churning out emails, PPC campaigns leading to gated landing pages and so on. What happened to building relationships with customers, which you can only achieve with real human connections.

That's what this podcast is all about; getting back to basics, building emotional connections with your customers and thinking through the elusive 5th P of marketing... 'Purpose'. I love Mark Schaefer's thinking and style. I could have chatted with Mark all day (if he'd let me). I hope you enjoy the show and please, let me know your feedback or leave a review on iTunes.

Here are the resources mentioned in the show:

The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0593079264/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_j6oGCb4J435RV

Small Data by Martin Lindstrom

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1473630134/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_s7oGCbV270ZN4

Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/000824765X/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_S8oGCbG5QS563

To contact Mark:

https://www.businessesgrow.com

To buy Mark's book and access all the extras:

https://businessesgrow.com/rebellion/

Social media has been around for a while now. Can you believe Facebook is 15 years old, or that Twitter is 13? But, you probably won't be surprised to learn that many of us are still not approaching social media with a solid strategy and hence our results are often lacklustre. You'll recognise some of the signs... a Twitter account you haven't updated in 6 months or an Insta feed full of stock images.

That's where author, trainer and marketing consultant Martin Thomas comes in. He's recently written a book for the Financial Times Guides series titled 'Social Media Strategy'. The book builds on his years of training business leaders for the Institute of Directors on how to think and plan more strategically. And it's not all about marketing - Martin quotes a McKinsey study which found that 70% of the value of social has nothing to do with marketing. We're talking customer service, innovation/R+D and even raising capital.

We cover quite a bit in this episode, from strategy 101, to saving costs in customer care and personal brand for your senior leadership team. I hope you find this episode useful and interesting, especially if you're needing to get more results from your social media investments.

Where to find Martin:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinthomas-marketing/

https://twitter.com/MartinTmkg

Here's the book:

https://amzn.to/2IfMKXE

Do you ever get the feeling you have all the information you need at your fingertips, but no real insight? For example, you can see the volume of visitors to your website, what content they consume and from where they come. You might have some heat maps so you can see where they're looking at each page. But, are you using this data to make smart marketing decisions?

This episode is about precisely that; using the data available from your website to make decisions that improve performance. Sam Rothmann is a real expert in this area and works for web analytics company, Oribi. We talk about how to use web analytics to reduce the friction on a website for your visitors, customer journeys, funnels, attribution funnels and much more. Sam's mission is to make life easier for digital marketers, and that feels like a magnificent goal to me.

Here are the resources mentioned in the show:

Don Peppers Book: https://www.amazon.com/Customer-Experience-What-How-Why/dp/1483560155

http://blog.oribi.io/

To contact Sam:

samuel at oribi.io

https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuelrothmann/

Unless you live in a cave and are entirely shut off from the marketing press, you'll have seen an increasing groundswell of commentary on Artificial Intelligence or AI. It's the next big thing in marketing, now that social media, programmatic advertising, content marketing, year of the mobile etc. seem to be pretty much understood.

So what is it then?

In this Techmap podcast, I speak with Katie King, an author and keynote speaker who has recently published a book all about the uses of AI in marketing. If you want a good overview of what AI is and how you can apply it to your marketing, lend me your ears for 35 minutes. Katie covers examples of successful and unsuccessful applications of AI and how it's probably more approachable than you might think.

Here are the resources mentioned in the show:

Using AI in Marketing book (use FMKA120 for a 20% discount)

https://www.koganpage.com/product/using-artificial-intelligence-in-marketing-97807494833395

https://www.salesforce.com/uk/form/pdf/ai-for-crm.jsp

https://www.qriously.com/

https://www.conversica.com/

http://robotsoflondon.co.uk/pepper

https://www.ibm.com/watson/

To contact Katie:

https://twitter.com/katieeking

Search is one of those topics that's at the centre of digital marketing for many businesses, large and small. It's central because in essence search marketing is about putting your business/brand/product (delete as appropriate) in front of your customer at the exact moment they need it or at least are researching solutions for challenges they're facing or products they want. What better time to add that prospective customer to your sales funnel right?

The problem is, the world of search marketing is both complex and ever-changing. In English speaking countries, Google pretty much dominates, so you need to know how to play within its rules both for organic search and paid for search marketing. That's where the experts come in and that's exactly what Tom Jepson from Footprint Digital is all about. In this show, we explore the future of search marketing. We look at what's changing in consumer behaviour, how the technology landscape is evolving, taking in AI and machine learning, before discussing data-based decision making - the key to effective marketing, rather than relying on the HIPPOs. In fact, we cover a lot, touching on the world of attribution and the skills required to be a marketer in 2019 and beyond.

Here are the resources mentioned in the show:

https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/

http://www.webanalytics20.com/

https://searchengineland.com/

https://moz.com/

To contact Tom:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomjepson/

https://www.footprintdigital.co.uk/

Marketing and communications are all about change. Whether it's changing the perception of a brand in the marketplace; changing the value of a sales pipeline; or in the case of Girish and his clients, driving change in the behaviours of society. You read that right. Balachandran, who I worked with at large agencies in London, has moved to India and set up an agency that uses the skills he gained in blue-chip marketing and communications programmes to deliver positive change in society.

In this episode, we talk about some of the projects he's been involved in such as working with Sesame Street to address the growing problem of childhood obesity in India. We look at his work with CocaCola, Cisco, The Gates Foundation and a host of Indian start-ups too.

We also explore what it's been like for Girish to set up a brand new agency. The challenges of running a small shop, versus his background working for agencies owned by the big holding companies. Finally, we look at the media landscape in India and how that compares to the UK. It's a massive country with a complex media landscape, so there are some insights useful for anyone thinking of working in the subcontinent.

Resources Girish Mentions in the Show:

https://www.fhi360.org/

http://www.tmelive.com/index.php/articles/view/28/24.html

How to Contact Girish:

https://www.onpurposeconsulting.in/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/girish-balachandran-6935851/

This podcast episode is all about influencer marketing. Lucy Hall from Avviso Media and the UK's hit conference Social Day joins me to give a download on all things 'influencer'; what's the state of the industry, how are influencers regulated and what's happening to take influencer marketing out of the wild west and into the mainstream. We explore some case studies of what to do and what not to do (Listerine) as well as look at some of the new platforms that are helping brands and influencers to connect, such as the Tribe App.

The conversation flows into video too, and Lucy explains some of the latest developments with Facebook video and how Google is using AI with its YouTube Directors Mix product - which sounds incredible by the way.

Lastly, we delve a little into the agency landscape and how that's changed since the arrival and explosion of digital media, tools and technologies.

Lucy talks pretty fast (as do I) so buckle up and get your notepads ready. There's some good stuff in here that might help you move the needle on your next campaign, but you need to concentrate to catch it all. Enjoy!

Here are links to the topics and tools Lucy mentions in the podcast:

https://adage.com/article/digital/youtube-rolls-tools-customized-video-ads/310581/

https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/facebook-premiere-polls-badges-launch/

https://www.asa.org.uk/resource/influencers-guide.html

Here's where to find Lucy:

https://www.avvisomedia.com/

https://www.socialday.co.uk/

https://twitter.com/LucysHall