The Marketing Forum Podcast

Ryan Webb is a conversion and optimisation specialist. In this short, taken from the full episode on Measuring the Impact, Ryan shares why he believes content first is the more effective way to build websites than design first. 

Listen to the full episode for more. 

How do you know that the content that you're creating is having the right impact? From creating content that gets engages your audience in the first place, to making sure that your website drives the right conversions, this episode welcomes two super knowledgeable guests to discuss the topic. 

Ilse Van Rensberg is Senior SEO & Content Exec at Cognism and Ryan Webb is a Conversion Optimisation consultant. We explore the principles, the tips and tools of the trade, to make sure your content packs the required punch. 

Demand Generation is not exactly a new concept but it seems to be one of those terms that you're either using all of the time or it's not really on your radar at all. Well used in B2B, it's a top of the funnel activity most of us just call awareness, brand building, loyalty etc

Kamkshi Sharma is a B2B marketer and demand generation enthusiast. She joins us to talk about the tactics of demand generation and the importance of alignment within the business for impactful results. David McGuire is Creative Director and B2B copywriter at Radix Communications and he shares his perspective as a copywriter receiving the briefs. What problems are marketers trying to solve, how hard is it to cut through the noise and why is content so much more important? 

This short with Bryony Benge-Abbott is taken from the full episode on storytelling. 

An artist and curator, Bryony shares how she thinks about the idea of entertainment in art, and the engagement of audiences with it and how it links with storytelling. 

This short with Sophie de Albuquerque is taken from the full episode on storytelling. 

A copywriter and children's author, Sophie shares how she thinks about audience, whether copywriting or creative writing and how to consider everything we need to know about them.

This short with Dicky Souray is taken from the full episode on storytelling. 

What can marketers learn from the practice of spoken word and storytelling? Dicky Souray, founder of SproutSpoken and spoken word coach, shares his thoughts.

Series One of the new format Marketing Forum Podcast is all about content. And in this episode we're exploring the art of storytelling. Storytelling is already well used across marketing and communications, but in its truest form it was originally tales told around campfires and passed from generation to generation.

If marketers seek to engage audiences, whether that’s as a commercial marketer or a communicator in a charitable organisation, can tapping into the tradition of storytelling engage audiences more effectively, or does the purpose of trying to communicate take over what is in effect a creative process. How can we tap into some of the practices of spoken, visual and written storytelling?

We explore this theme with three artists, Dickie Souray spoken word artist, coach and founder of SproutSpoken; Bryony Benge-Abbott, artist and curator; and Sophie De Albuquerque, a copywriter and children's author. 

Charlotte Williams is the founder of SevenSix Agency, launched as a direct response to the lack of diversity within the ad and influencer marketing sector. Charlotte is also an influencer herself. 

In this episode, (#30!) Charlotte joins us to talk about how her agency supports purpose-led campaigns, the broader influencer marketing space, brand and talent and where brands can start if they haven't yet integrated an inclusive approach to marketing.

Kim Range is co-founder at Bouran, a web 3 agencies helping companies and people engage with and deliver projects using new technologies including crypto, blockchain, NFTs and the metaverse. 

With a background in digital agency, Kim sees these new technologies as the logical next step in the development of digital. We talk about what they are, how brands are starting to engage with them and how we might think about engaging as marketers, communicators and creatives.

Kelly Frew is Director of events at P&O Cruises, looking after what I consider to be enormous events, from naming ceremonies to trade. She’s worked in events manager roles in the travel industry, including TUI travel and Thomas Cook, as well as being former Senior Events Producer for BBC Studios, with events for programmes such as Top Gear and David Attenborough documentaries. From organisation and creative, to taking risks and knowing your audience, this episode is a must listen if doing events are part of your marketing plan!

Joyann Boyce is an inclusivity marketing consultant running her own business, Arima and Co which delivers consultancy, workshops and training.

Joyann studied psychology and decided to follow an interest in marketing - she started off supporting small businesses with their social media and in making her own website realised she struggled to find stock images that represented her. From there the concept of Arima and Co was born.

There is a lot us marketers communicators and creatives can do to be more inclusive, from the language we use, to the images and context, and Joyann generously shares a huge amount of her knowledge with us in this episode. 

Michelle Mahdon is a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter Business School. An area of focus for her research and teaching is networks and networking. In this episode we talk about why network matters so much, the importance of approaching it strategically and why mapping your network can be a good place to start.

Grace Reith is Sustainability Communications Director with creative agency Bray Leino. She’s the former head of marketing for Origin coffee and a B-leader, meaning she’s been trained by the B-lab to help businesses becoming B-corp.

In this episode Grace joins Katie Sandow to talk about sustainability in business, and the framework that B-Corp can provide for doing that. Grace is phenomenally knowledgeable about sustainability and talks about the benefit to business both from an ethical perspective, but also why commercially it’s about future proofing.   Grace shares how marketers and communicators can take steps to avoid the nightmare pitfalls, such as green washing, and why successful marketers need to have really acute business acumen.

Helen Dunnett is a CRM consultant, working predominantly within the arts, marketing and charity sector.

In this episode, I pick her brains around the perfect way to approach CRM. Helen is normally approached when businesses and charities need a new system, but she tries to encourage her clients to start with a strategy instead, and look at both business objectives as well as customer relationship objectives.

We talk about how to avoid the classic errors, such as silos, over or under communicating and the importance of managing stakeholders, which I think is absolutely essential for all businesses these days.

I also ask Helen about her experiences of setting up as a consultant and she shares some of the lessons she’s learned along the way.

Mel Larsen is a marketer and coach founder of Mel Larsen associates and Dream Project Coach. 

She was marketing in the arts, cultural and heritage sector when she was inspired to become a coach after noticing how negative leaders were about their goals and thought, if they’re not feeling positive and inspired, how are they going to inspire their teams.  

Mel’s coaching business evolved out of a vision - a sudden clarity in the mind’s eye about what she wanted, and how good she was at it. Years later she’s proven right - she’s great at it and she loves it!   

In this episode we chat about why coaches are going to change the world, the importance of visions, and how we can challenge our own thinking to become better in business and life.

Iain McDonald is Head of Digital at Create, the brand studio for CNN International Commercial. Iain leads a global team of digital creatives, which produce branded content experiences for some of the largest businesses in the world of tech, digital, luxury and beyond. 

Iain shares some of the successful campaigns delivered through the pandemic as brands were forced to pivot on their usual approach to engaging with their audiences, the process of working with international brands and the strategic approach he uses when developing content.

The Marketing Forum collaborated with Wild Card PR for a live event in November 2021. Katie Sandow was joined on a panel by Kate Wild, founder of Wild Card, Judi Blakeburn Brand Director of Watergate Bay Hotel and Another Place Hotels and Georgie Upton, Managing Director of Wild Card to discuss the power of PR, how clients can get the best out of their PR relationships, who's going to tell our stories and some amazing campaigns that have delivered real results. 

Jon Cohen is managing partner at consumer insights company, Kindling and has spent 25 years helping businesses, government and charities better understand their audiences to help them to make good decisions. He's also the author of the book, Asking for Trouble, Understanding what people think when you can't trust what they say. 

In this episode, we talk about how SMEs can approach customer insights when they don't have big budgets, how the world of asking is so different to the real world and some top tips on improving question-asking. 

Emmie Kell is CEO of Cornwall Museums Partnership (although moving to Arts Council England in March 2022), a not for profit which exists to create positive social change through museums. In this episode Emmie shares insights around leadership, how she approaches it and why she thinks about it so much; the practical changes she has made in the organisation around equality and diversity and why she thinks learning is so important. 

Nicola Millard is Principal Innovation Partner with BT with 'Futurologist' as a previous job title. Nicola's background in psychology and work on customer insights makes her highly interesting to anyone with a marketing angle! We chat about the difference in engaging B2B and B2C audiences, why some of BT's research shows customers don't really care about channel and why she hopes we won't forget all the lessons we've learned from the pandemic. 

Crystal Carter is Senior Digital Strategist at Optix Solutions and an absolute font of knowledge on all things digital.

Crystal shares a plethora of insights with us on The Marketing Forum Podcast, from funnel marketing, being there for your customers at every stage of the buyer journey and coming up with new ideas when things don't go as planned...!

Alex Murphy is Head of Marketing for the Admiral Group. He started off as a digital marketer, pretty much at the beginning of the revolution and has worked across sectors and various sizes of businesses before arriving at a household brand. 

Having worked in both SMEs and larger businesses, Alex has fantastic insights into what each can learn from the other and the value of both skillsets. In this episode, Alex shares how he structured the team, how the go about building campaigns, how we can better segment customers and the value of empathy in marketers.

Christian Thomson was a professional surfer who caught the marketing bug from the Fatface team who sponsored him. After moving to Canada he started his own digital marketing business, which ultimately became Marwick Marketing. We chat about what it was about marketing he loved so much, how he grew us business from a one man band into the 2020 fastest growing business in West Canada, and what brought him back to Cornwall. 

Creative Director, Simon Minchin started his career at big brands such as Ogilvy, Saatchi and Saatchi in South Africa and McCann Korea throughout the 80s. He came back to Cornwall to work freelance, become a founding partner and Minchin and Grimshaw. 

We talk about the world of creative, discussing creative projects, advertising campaigns and selling ideas into clients. 

Poppy Naylor is a marketing and fundraising consultant specialising in the third sector. Joining Cancer Research UK on a graduate scheme out of University, she remained with the charity for 12 years and finished as its Head of Campaigns. 

From what drew her into fundraising and marketing to the common challenges for charities at the moment and how to deal with difficult boards and what the private sector can learn from the third sector, Poppy shares her experiences of campaign building, marketing and navigating.

Jon Payne is the founder of Noisy Little Monkey, inbound sales and marketing specialists based in Bristol, and marketing conference, Digital Gaggle. Coming from a sales background, Jon has great insight into building and running an agency. From B2B marketing stereotypes and how Noisy Little Monkey approaches working with clients, more than anything though, Jon is just a great person to chat with. He's funny, insightful and incredibly knowledgeable. 

In October 2020, Lucy Alexander, Head of Insight for the Financial Times joined The Marketing Forum for our live interview webinar. From how the Financial Times has built data-led decision making into its business and some of the changes that data has made, to how SMEs with much smaller data sets can still use it to drive better decisions. 

Gordon Seabright is CEO of the Creative Land Trust and before the CEO of the Eden Project.

Gordon has a host of business knowledge and has worked a lot with businesses which have needed an element of turnaround or transformation. We talk about the importance of marketing and brand in the turnaround process, why it matters how brands feel about themselves and the importance of internal and external communications in the process. From established organisations, Gordon found himself in a start up at the Creative Land Trust, and he shares with us his insights through the experience.

Judi Blakeburn is the Brand Director for Watergate Bay Hotel and Another Place Hotels. With a career spent in hospitality marketing, Judi has a wealth of knowledge on both the sector and the role of marketing in medium sized businesses. She shares her thoughts on the importance of marketing at board level, and how to be taken seriously in that space, as well as why SME marketers need to pay attention to Archimedes' Pi. We are huge fans of Judi at The Marketing Forum, and her passion for marketing and hospitality is truly infectious. 

This week Andrew and I dissect and discuss the Marketing Director and Finance Director roles within small and medium sized businesses. Looking at our own experiences, we chat about some of the challenging aspects of the role, where people get it wrong and why it's important to be okay with conflict and challenge.

In the first episode of the Business Leaders podcast, Katie Sandow and Andrew Knott chat business strategy, reflecting on their own experiences and looking to the excellent book, Good Strategy Bad Strategy from Richard Rumelt for learnings.

Debbie Warner found her passion for wine at Fifteen Cornwall. She trained and worked as a sommelier before launching the Wild Wine Club, outdoor feasts in the wild with guest chefs and of course, amazing wine. Following the success of the club, she decided to launch the Wild Wine School, teaching professionals and amateurs alike to grow their passion for wine. Debbie shares her stories of building her business (with a small baby in tow!), her marketing experience, Zoom-training with wine and a successful crowdfunder campaign which helped launch her venture. 

Jaye Cowle founded Launch Online, a digital advertising agency which primarily works with SMEs. With extensive experience in travel and hospitality marketing, Jaye chats to Katie Sandow about losing her confidence after having children and getting fired, before retraining with Google and launching her own business. 

Jason Clark is a director of DCA PR. He started his career in journalism with the Western Morning News after an Oxford education and it wasn't until later that he moved into PR.

I talked to Jason about his early journalism days, as well as what makes someone good at PR and how to manage those inevitable, and hopefully only very occasional PR crises.

Amy Shakespeare, Innovation Manager of Cornwall Museums Partnership joins The Marketing Forum Podcast to talk about tech & innovation.

Aine Carlin is a food writer and author of three cookbooks, Keep it Vegan, The New Vegan and Cook, Share, Eat Vegan. Aine join Katie Sandow to chat to The Marketing Forum about her career, creating a book and how to pick yourself up again when things don't go the way you expected.

Jeremy Mitchell started his journey with St Austell Brewery at the beginning of its renaissance and over 16 years he developed the marketing team, strategy and brand as the business grew. From Marketing Director for St Austell Brewery to now a Marketing Consultant, Jeremy joins Katie Sandow of The Marketing Forum to chat about growing a team, launching beer brands and the transition to consultancy.

In the final live interview in collaboration with Cultivator, Katie Sandow spoke with Rachel Hollings, Artistic Administrator of The Royal Ballet. Rachel joined us to chat about how the different departments and creative contributors that make up the world renowned performances of The Royal Ballet come together, talking about collaboration, brand guardianship, attracting new audiences and how the ballet dancers and broader team have faired through lockdown. 

The first ever podcast from The Marketing Forum is a live webinar recording from our collaboration with Cultivator. 'Personal brand provocateur', Lucy Dowson joined us for a conversation on personal brand, her own journey to understanding its role, the benefits and possible pitfalls. Lucy gives us some practical advice on how to start thinking about our own personal brands and we take questions from our audience of marketers, communicators, creatives, makers and micro businesses.