The Techmap Podcast

A common challenge for agencies is finding new clients. We seem to be in a continuous new business drive - prospecting, networking, cold calling, starting conversations and pitching. At the same time, clientside marketers are struggling to find their ideal agency partner from the vast number of agencies at their fingertips. In the UK alone there are over 20,000 agencies - or so I'm told. In this episode, I chat with Dan Ince, a freelance marketing gun for hire, about how he finds and recruits agency talent for his clients. We explore some of the best practices for agencies around pitching that will help them to look at this process through the lens of a client-side marketer. If you're looking for ideas for how best to approach clients and differentiate yourself in a sea of bland, vanilla looking, agencies, you should enjoy this episode.

We've never been more aware of our mental health. We're talking about it more than ever and HR are looking at it with increasing intent. After all, the marketing and advertising sector is plagued with mental health challenges. It's bound to be if you consider the ever-changing and stressful nature of our work and the colourful characters attracted to the sector. But, just because we're more open about our challenges and employers are talking about it more, doesn't mean anything is changing. Step in Aaron Harvey and his Made of Millions Foundation. Aaron is on a mission; to put mental health higher up the agenda at work. In his mindset, there is simply no excuse for not making the changes needed to address the growing mental health challenge in the workplace.

Business development is a constant challenge for marketing agencies. Most are on a constant hunt for new business and spend their time pitching to marketing directors, managers, heads of, CMOs etc. But in good old B2B marketing, we're forgetting about the other players in the decision-making unit. And the biggest players of all often sit in procurement. Particularly if you're selling to large brands. It's worthwhile spending a bit of time learning what makes procurement managers tick then, right? To find out how they negotiate, how should you engage them, what personality types you might find in procurement teams...and so on. I thought so and invited ex-procurement lead and now agency advisor MIke Lander, to join me on the show. My word does he share some value. If you want to learn how to better manage the challenges of selling to procurement pros, you're in the right place.

Patterns of consumer behaviour are changing; how we look for and engage with brands is changing too. Where we once used to look for features and benefits, we now look more for meaning. Where we used to want more blades in our razors, now we want razors made in a sustainable, ethical manner. We care more about the experience than the functional attributes of our products and services. But not every brand or marketer is adapting in time and we're seeing high profile casualties in all sorts of sectors. In this podcast, market researcher, academic and brand expert Dr. Emmanual Probst joins me to explore how brands can engage in a quest for meaning to stay in touch with our changing times. In the podcast, we explore some of the core topics from Dr. Probst's fantastic book, Brank Hacks - How to Build Brands by Fulfilling the Human Quest for Meaning.

A critical part of working in agency land is business development. For whatever reason, most agencies are always on the hunt for new business; it's like being on a treadmill that never stops. But just like the plumber who's toilet doesn't flush, most marketing agencies are lousy at marketing themselves. It's not that we don't know how...or is it? In this episode of the podcast, I interview the formidable Katy Howell from leading social media agency, Immediate Future. Katy's a true professional, and it was great fun talking with her as we explored business cycles, the impact of Brexit and uncertainty in the market, JVs/partnerships and so much more. If you want to learn about best practice when it comes to agency business development, how to build client relationships and what it takes to grow an agency from someone with 30 years agency experience under her belt, well then you're in the right place.

An essential ingredient of impactful marketing and communications is understanding your customer. After all, we're taught marketing is about putting the customer at the heart of your business. So how do you do that? That's where the 'insights' department comes in. These are the guys and gals that look at consumer behaviour and try to uncover some hidden gem marketers can latch onto — something to build products, services and communications around. For Anthony 'Tas' Tasgal - an ad agency planner, trainer, lecturer, speaker and author - insight is the art of combining psychology and biology, blending it up with a bit of creative inspiration, driven by light bulb moments from here there and everywhere, and there you have it - insight. Well, not quite. There's a lot more to it than that. Such as making sure you don't rely too much on data, considering the context of your research, and getting the balance right between data and creativity. Not to mention the need for someone to challenge your assumptions. If yo

You've probably heard about as much about 'millennials' as you can take, right? You've heard for years how the world is changing because of millennials, how they think and act differently, and what this means to you as a marketing professional. TV no longer works, radio's old fashioned and outdoor, well, forget about it. Millennials don't look at adverts. Well, yes and no. Millennials are interested in adverts, just not the feature led product promos we're all churning out these days. If you want to connect with millennials, you need to understand them and to do that you need to listen to Somi Arian. Somi and her Smart Cookie Media team have been exploring and understanding this world and what it means to marketers for years. Millennials have grown up as digital natives, and the next generation will be AI natives. This access to digital means they've had more choice, available more quickly, with more information than ever before. It's time to evolve or die, as traditional marketing approaches will soon go t

According to the PRCA's recent census, 89% of communications professionals in the UK are white, and 67% are female. In an industry tasked with creating impactful communications to reach an increasingly fragmented audience, that's not a particularly diverse pool of professionals to draw on. There are lots of commentators suggesting that building a diverse team is essential for injecting some much needed fresh thinking, which in turn delivers performance. In this episode, I talk with Rax Lakhani - a long time PR man and also Co-Chair of the PRCA's Diversity Network. We chat about why agencies need to think about diversity and the practical next steps for how to make a change. We cover starting at the top with the business plan to steps like blind reviews of CVs to identify new talent. It's clear there are significant commercial drivers for communications teams to think about diversity, which go way beyond box ticking exercises. Resources mentioned in the podcast: PRCA Census 2019: https://www.prca.org.uk/sit

Podcasting has been enjoying a renaissance in the last few years. There's been an explosion in the number of new shows - some good and some bad. It's easy for marketers to think podcasting is a low-cost media, but in reality, a good podcast takes time, effort, skill and budget too. It might be better for some marketers to treat podcasts as an advertising medium rather than try and become a radio on demand production machine. In this show, I talk with Howard Kosky, CEO and Founder of 4DC, a strategic podcasting consultancy based in London. Howard and I explore what makes a good podcast from a production point of view, but also how brands should approach this medium. It's not as easy as putting six shows together and expecting to get listeners - if you build it, they might not come and probably won't unless you spend enough resource on the project. Listen and enjoy. Howard shares a ton of great thinking and ideas for podcasters and marketers. Whether you're producing a show or are a brand wanting to explore t

Running a marketing agency of any flavour requires grit, determination, some serious smarts and of course, persistence. Without these ingredients, you will do well to survive, let alone thrive. But what if your ambitions are loftier than simply survival or running a lifestyle business? What if you want to grow your agency and achieve some scale so that you can exit with a decent earn out? Well, that's a challenge that a lot of agency owners tackle and with varying degrees of success. But if you're on that road, you'll enjoy this podcast episode with Kristin Luck, the founder of a growth consultancy called Scale House. Kristin is a serial entrepreneur having sold multiple market research businesses before setting up her consultancy. In this show, Kristin and I talk about the key ingredients of growing and scaling an agency business, from getting the founder out of the way, to systems, processes, culture and more. If you're interested in growing your agency business, there should be some good ideas in here for

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

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

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

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 emotion

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 ca

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: samue

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 ht

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 dec

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 com

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 y