The Joy of Marketing

Georgia started Potage, a food delivery company, in 2012. For the first 8 years they've only supplied London but have plans to start delivering across the UK. Georgia spoke to Andrew about how she's manage to grow such a successful company from her mum's kitchen! She also explained how Joe Wicks and Davina McCall helped boost their Instagram following to 20,000; the importance of a locally sourced, seasonal product line and the future plans for Potage.

Whitney Hawkings traded in a career in luxury fashion, for a career in luxury flowers. Her cut-to-order business model means customers are getting the freshest flowers possible, delivered the next day. They also discuss the importance of Instagram as a visual acquisition tool for Flowerbx, and why offline marketing doesn't work for the business. Whitney explains how having huge names like Dior, Louis Vuitton and Jimmy Choo as regular customers, helped boost their sales and smooth the transition into the US market.

Days are a UK based beer company who offer alcohol free beer. They currently have 2 products, a Lager and a Pale Ale, both of which are 0.0% alcohol. Aidan explained how their brand image, messaging and tone helps differentiate Days from the abundance of competition within the alcoholic drink sector. He also spoke about how the brand tries to "optimise everything for virality" and how, as a small company, they manage to use their on trade sales to boost their DTC sales.

Amy is the Director of EMEA Marketing at UserTesting.com. She joined Andrew on the podcast to discuss how user testing helps businesses to understand why certain things are happening within the business. She also explained how testing can be used by almost any department within a business and how it can help startup businesses before they've even launched a product!

Andrew spoke with Clarity's Product Manager, Ravi Yada to understand exactly how Clarity can benefit your business and help you increase conversion rates. Learn how it compares to Google Analytics, how Clarity can help identify website issues, and how to use it to check the rendering of your website across all platforms

Despite the rise of social media advertising, David explains why TV is still the most effective form of advertising there is. They also discuss, in detail, how Adsmart works compared to traditional TV advertising; how you can use Adsmart to reactive lapsed/lost customers and how, using the same data sources we use at Machine Labs, you can target very specific groups of people with your smart ads.

David has an impressive career in marketing and analytics working with companies such as Boden and Direct Wines before co-founding The Tapestry Agency. He speaks to Andrew about customer-centric marketing; how it's normal to lose money when acquiring customers, how David analyses customer data to determine how those customers are going to perform for the business; and the importance of triggered emails when targeting customers.

Based in Las Vegas, Savannah helps E-Commerce brands increase their sales through creative ads on TikTok. In this episode, she explains how TikTok is taking over both Facebook and Instagram for advertising in terms of scale and performance; how targeted advertising works on TikTok and the importance of an ad not looking like an ad! Savannah also talks about how she uses "engagement bait" to ensure success for her clients. If you're interested in exploring TikTok as a form of marketing or want to take Savannah's TikTok course to learn her media buying and ad creative tips and tricks, her website is https://thesocialsavannah.com/

Josh has plenty of experience in investments, having spent 5 years investing in SMEs prior to joining Coniston Capital.  He gives his opinion on what makes a great brand, the pros and cons of selling products through subscriptions vs. one-off sales, and explains the importance of CAC, AOV and LTV, collectively.  We also discuss the importance of having multiple marketing channels and why, as an investor, Josh does "not want to see any single reliance on one marketing channel," whilst touching on the advantages of user generated content for a business.

Jay Wright took over as CEO of Virgin Wines back in 2008 and has transformed the company into one of the largest online wine merchants in the UK, selling over 1 million cases a year. He explains how his previous roles led him to naturally take on the role of CMO as well as CEO of the hugely successful company. We also cover how Virgin Wines successfully recruit new customers through partnership activities, keep those customers subscribing and discuss the company's future plans (*hint it includes beer and spirits)

Lisa Creaven and her sister were both dentists in Ireland. They decided to launch Spotlight Oral Care bring consumer dental products up to date. They have built a brilliant business which quadrupled its turnover last year by challenging their giant competitors with a position as a beauty brand for teeth. She shares the marketing approach she used to build up a huge social media following and explains how to go about influencer marketing and how to integrate with paid and email. We also cover international expansion and the success of the brand in the USA and the rest of Europe.

Scott Brinker is the VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot and runs the https://chiefmartech.com (Chief Marketing Technologist) blog which is the authority on marketing technologies. He is the author of https://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Marketing-Practices-Smarter-Innovative/dp/1119183170/ (Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster and more Innovative). We discuss the way that technology and marketing are merging together and what marketers can learn from software engineers. We cover testing, iterative approaches and the importance of strategy. We also cover No Code for allowing marketers to create automations and workflows without needing to write code. We have a debate on the pronunciation of Zapier, the pioneering No Code platform. Finally Scott tells us about some the technologies of the future.

Ian Morrison is an expert on inserts (leaflets), using them brilliantly first at Donald Russell and then at Flavourly. It's an often over looked marketing channel but very effective. He starts by explaining what inserts are, how to buy them, tips for insert design, offers, a testing strategy and how to achieve huge efficiencies with swaps. We cover everything you would need to know to get started using inserts to drive sales in your ecommerce business. As mentioned in the episode, here is an an example insert produced by Ian, along with my comments: https://www.machinelabs.com/insert-design-that-sold/

One of things that separates the brilliant Direct-to-Consumer businesses from the ordinary is that they do a lot of customer research. In this episode I speak to research expert (and now Executive Coach) Natalie Thwaites. We cover the benefits of research, how to select participants to take part, the advantage of focus groups verses individual interviews, moderating the group ourselves or getting an outside expert.

Joanna Boag-Thomson is a partner at Shepherd & Wedderburn and an expert on the GDPR. In this episode she explains the rules for marketing in Europe covering the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations (PECR). We cover marketing to European customers from other countries, the changes in the UK since Brexit, when you are allowed to contact customers, legitimate interest and soft opt-ins, how to get consent and how consumers can opt-out. The discussion covers newsletter signups, marketing to customers and to checkout abandonments. We also cover the different rules for B2B, postal marketing and custom audiences for advertising. Finally, Joanna gives us a checklist for marketing to customers by email.

Freddy Ward is the co-founder and CEO of Wild and before that he was the Marketing Director of HelloFresh. In both roles he was responsible not just for launching a new ecommerce brand but for creating a whole new category. He explains the steps in category creation from explanation to the customer through to building a brand once competition emerges. He tells us how a cancelled media booking led to them accidentally finding their most successful recruitment channel. He also covers the importance of selling face-to-face for learning, on and offline channels, building brand loyalty, creating a moat and finally we talk about recruiting a growth team once it becomes too much for one person.

Anna Crowe is an SEO expert and Assistant Editor at Search Engine Journal. She's also Head of Content and SEO at Leadfeeder and has worked with brands including Dollar Thrifty Rental, Marriott, Kissmetrics and Moz. We cover how to choose keywords, Google's EAT framework (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust), search volume, link building (good and bad!), URL's, page structure, canonical tags and schemas. We also discussed the regular algorithm changes and Anna suggested following https://twitter.com/JohnMu (John Mueller) and https://twitter.com/dannysullivan (Danny Sullivan) on Twitter who both work for Google and provide semi-official advice on changes.

Drayton Bird started off his career being trained by Draper Daniels – the inspiration for Don Draper in Mad Men – he then worked his way to the top of the direct marketing world. His agency was bought by David Ogilvy and became Global Creative Director of Ogilvy & Mather Direct which was the largest direct marketing agency in the world. David Ogilvy said "Drayton Bird knows more about direct marketing than anyone in the world." Drayton is the author of several of the top marketing books including the classic Commonsense Direct Marketing and How to Write Sales Letters that Sell. He talks about the three graces of direct marketing, reveals how we got the nickname "Mummy Mummy Bird", shares the fool proof way to separate stated from revealed preferences and tells stories about working with some of the advertising greats. It was a huge moment for me to speak to my marketing hero, I learnt my trade largely from his books and I'm delighted he found the time to appear on the podcast.

Finbarr Taylor is the co-founder and CEO of Shogun, the top page builder app on Shopify and other platforms. Shogun was also recently on the list of most valuable Y-Combinator startups. There's currently 20,000 stores using Shogun to develop and test landing pages and Finbarr shares some of things that work for his customers. We also talk about some of the new ecommerce technology including headless for bigger sites that need more control or more speed. Finally, Finbarr shares some of Shogun's own marketing tactics.

Victor van Amerongen has been producing TV adverts for 29 years and, according to Televisual Magazine, has produced more adverts than anyone else. He has also specialized in adverts for e-commerce. We talk about advice for first-time advertisers, budgets, direct response and brand response, spot length, testing, response mechanisms, integrating your TV ad into broader marketing, ideas for creative and budgets. Victor has been responsible for the first campaigns from dozens of the top e-commerce companies in the UK so it was a great chance to learn from him.

Brie Read is the founder of Snag Tights and a size acceptance campaigner. Snag's sales are rocketing as they provide tights for women who can't find a good fit elsewhere while at the same time challenging perceptions with beautiful photography. She shares her success recruiting customers through social and Snag's rapid international expansion. It's a really inspiring story and another example of a business doing well and doing good.

Mark Scott, the co-founder and CEO, that's Chief Emotions Officer of Bella and Duke talks about his mission to improve the health of dogs and along the way building a £15m revenue ecommerce business. He competes with some of the largest companies in the world with equally enormous marketing budgets but stands out by taking a radical marketing approach. To show how unhealthy processed dog food is, Mark himself decided to live off processed food for two months to demonstrate the damage to his health. A real example of how the underdog can win.

Colin Gillespie is the Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of https://www.allresponsemedia.com (All Response Media) based in London with clients throughout the UK, Europe and the USA. They spend around £200 million per year on customer acquisition on TV, digital and offline.

Find out all about the Joy of Marketing for ambitious store owners. We'll be talking about what works and what doesn't to make your e-commerce store even more of a success than it already is. We'll be covering SEO, social, email marketing, paid advertising, the business side of e-commerce and cool technologies. You can find out more about the Machine Labs app which helps e-commerce stores sell more at https://www.machinelabs.com (https://www.machinelabs.com).