Room 301: Why Every Marketing Strategy Should be 10% Bonkers, with Emma Clark

In this episode of Room 301, Rob Twells chats with Emma Clark, Director of Brand and Marketing at Opencast, for a no-nonsense look at what it takes to thrive in the world of marketing.

With an amazing 25 years of experience, Emma reveals her winning strategies, including the powerful 70/20/10 rule and why you need to embrace a bit of "craziness" to succeed. From tackling risk aversion to building bold, data-driven campaigns, Emma’s insights will challenge your thinking and inspire you to push the boundaries.

If you're ready to take your marketing to the next level, this episode is packed with ideas you won’t want to miss!

Watch it on YouTube

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Resources

Some of the resources mentioned in the podcast.

• Follow Emma on LinkedIn
• What is the Gartner Maturity Model for Marketing?
• Understanding the 70-20-10 rule

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Podcast Transcription

Rob Twells (00:00)
Hi guys, welcome back. I am joined by a very special guest today. I have Emma with me. Emma, how are you?

Emma Clark (00:06)
I'm good, thank you. How're you Rob?

Rob Twells (00:09)
Very well, thank you. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, I'd love for the listeners to get to know you a little better. So if you're happy to go into yourself, your background, how you got to where you are now, that'd be great.

Emma Clark (00:20)
Okay, great. So my name is Emma Clark. I'm Director of Brand and Marketing at Opencast. We're a National Technology Consultancy. So we build a lot of the stuff that people interact with. So we are at the heart of both government and healthcare. So if you've gone in and kind of done anything like a benefits claim or had to kind of go through a government process, a lot of our work is trying to make that as streamlined as possible, making that as easy as possible for people to interact with.

and also make it as fast as possible so people can actually get responses really quickly. For me personally, I've worked in marketing for 25 years now, which is absolutely terrifying. I think I must have miscounted somewhere along the way. So, seen a lot of different things come and go, seen a lot of stuff change. So when I started in marketing, it was very much about what you told people the company was. And then we've obviously gone through this massive transition where…

People have the right to reply. We've got social media, lot of brand is about kind of, you know, there's a lot broader audience of people able to talk about your brand. So that's been really interesting watching that change and watching people take control of their relationship with brands, which I think has been really interesting.

Rob Twells (01:33)
Excellent, thank you for that. then yourself personally, so how did you get into marketing?

Emma Clark (01:37)
So I did a degree in English literature, came out and started PR. So I did about a year in PR and really enjoyed it, but felt it was quite limiting. Wanted to switch, so I started in agency, wanted to switch over to charity. So I managed to find a marketing role in nonprofit. So I started as a marketing exec, kind of doing publications and print and stuff like that.

Our website was terrible. Nobody was really taking care of it. So I said, can I learn how to do the website? And they said, yes. So that then migrated me into a website management and that type of thing. And then off the back of that, I was doing a lot of customer insight and content and how do we explain things to people and how do we get the right information to people at the right stages? And then people started talking about content strategy and I was like, that's my job.

but I didn't actually know that was my job. I didn't have an official label for it. So, worked in content for quite a long time and then did a kind of transition out from content into more into brand, which is where I am now. And I've kind of flip -flopped between agency side and in -house, which I think is quite interesting. You get the two different perspectives. Hopefully it makes me better when I'm dealing with my agencies because I'm…

Rob Twells (02:56)
I think it, yeah, I think it does.

I think it does. A trend I'm seeing is that when it comes to getting into marketing, think people just muddle through they try a -bit of website design, they try a bit of brand marketing, they try a bit of social media marketing, they try a bit of SEO, they try a bit of PPC, and they sort of land somewhere that they have an interest in, and all of a sudden they're leading an entire marketing function five or six years later, and they've got all this responsibility to drive all the leads and sales and all that good stuff. So yeah, it's interesting that you've got the exposure to brand and agency. think that does give you a sort

Emma Clark (03:00)
So good.

Rob Twells (03:30)
a wider view of how to deal with an agency partnership and stuff like that, which is always quite good from my position. yeah, no, good to hear it. Well, look, we jump straight in. The first question we like to ask is called what's in your toolbox? Now, it doesn't necessarily need to be a piece of software, although it certainly can be. But for me, because I'm a nerd, you know, we're all busy people. We're leading teams potentially, we're leading marketing functions. We've got a lot of responsibility on our shoulders, which means there's a lot of things to do.

I'm just always very interested in how people cope with that, what their framework is for getting these things done, what tools they use, so on and so forth. So yeah, Emma, over to you in terms of how you manage your day and how you get through your tasks.

Emma Clark (04:13)
Excellent. So in terms of tools, it's one of those massive questions where it's like actually having a really wide toolbox is definitely really helpful. In terms of the actual tools that I use, I tend to be quite agnostic with some that I prefer and some that I like less, but generally they all work in a similar way. So for me, if I had to kind of drill down into this, I probably have kind of three core things that mean that I can do my job properly. One of them is data.

So that might be customer insights or customer data. It might be data about performance. It might be data about where we're putting the budget and the ROI and the ROAS and things like that. For me, having the business data is critical. So actually knowing the foundations of who the business is and kind of what it stands for and what the business strategy is, all of the brand strategy and all of the marketing strategy should be built on top of that.

as opposed to us coming along and saying, right, okay, we're going to do this cool thing, but actually it's not who we are. So I think that is crucial to understand the business and understand kind of what the business stands for and make sure that marketing isn't this thing that you slap on top where actually the customer experience isn't going to be that and you're over promising.

Rob Twells (05:31)
Yeah, yeah. And do you have certain metrics that you sort of keep a very, very keen eye on week to week or month to month?

Emma Clark (05:37)
Yeah, so we've basically in terms of metrics, tend to split it on three levels. So we tend to have business metrics, which are kind of like the key things that move the dial. So things around kind of marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, it's like, what is actually happening? Are we actually reaching the right people? Then I tend to have a set of brand metrics. So that will be audience perception, social listening tools, that type of thing. It's like, what are people saying about us? How well known are we?

Rob Twells (05:46)
Yeah.

Emma Clark (06:07)
What's our share of voice like things like that. And then we have the kind of common metrics, which are the things that people generally asked about. How many LinkedIn followers have we got? It's like, well, that should extrapolate up a level. So it's like LinkedIn followers for the sake of LinkedIn followers is not going to make a difference. But obviously if we've got an audience who thinks positively about the brand, then that should mean that we can hit the business targets. I think the challenge for any marketer in this type of space is

Rob Twells (06:31)
Yeah, of course,

Emma Clark (06:35)
like how do you actually get those data sets? It sounds amazing, it sounds really easy to do, but I think in most businesses, you either don't have the data or you have too much data and you can't actually find the key figures that you need. And I think that's an ongoing challenge. It's certainly…

Rob Twells (06:53)
been guilty of the latter one for sure.

Emma Clark (06:55)
Yeah, I think in almost every role I've had, it's never been that clear cut. So, there's a lot of conversations like with data teams to kind of find out where the data is and whether it's reliable and how it interacts and how the different metrics, if you change something over here, what actually happens over there. So I think that that is probably really critical for me. I think the other thing it's a bit weird to say that it's in my toolbox, but the right people.

is absolutely critical. So I've got a fantastic team that works with me that are amazing, really, really good marketers, really understand what we're trying to do, really authentic in terms of their approach and just kind of like super, super safe pair of hands, which can't ask for more than that. But I've also got really amazing colleagues outside marketing. And I think one of the challenges as a marketer is to not end up siloed or not end up excluded.

because I think marketing is its best when it's fully integrated into the business and actually has multiple touch points, not over with the sales team, but also with other teams throughout the business. So you can actually find the stories of what's happening and you're actually properly integrated into what the business wants to achieve and helping drive that forward.

Rob Twells (08:16)
Yeah, I know love that and I couldn't agree more actually. I spent, I'm a very sort of sales orientated leader. I've always been obsessed with this idea of sales and marketing working very closely together. And I think I managed to suss it a couple of years ago, probably 10 years into my journey of running this agency. But then I realized that actually sales and marketing working together is just the tip of the iceberg. It should be the wider team as well. So now we're on this journey of integrating the marketing team.

into the other areas of the business so they can understand what's going on, the stories we should put out. And that's really helped elevate the content in which we put out, the level of thought leadership we can put out, and also the buying from the wider team. The more buying you get from the wider team, the better your overall marketing function could become, the more authentic it becomes because you get different voices involved. It just makes for a better overall trajectory of content you can put out. I like to get different people involved, especially from a B2B angle. I'm sure you can appreciate that.

voices you can get, the different faces you can get, different perspectives you can get, it all adds to the marketing and I think secretly as well the likes of Google and the search engines like that as well, they like the different perspectives, it gives you something unique to put out to the world doesn't it. So yeah I really like that point, having a great team is definitely a very very key tool, I can definitely appreciate that.

Emma Clark (09:34)
Yeah, absolutely. How have you found kind of doing that change then Rob, how have you found kind of making that shift with everybody on board or has that been a little bit more challenging?

Rob Twells (09:41)
Yeah, generally, think our businesses, and I'm not sure how it works internally for you Emma, but we're a time -based business. we, as you all know, having worked with agencies and been involved in agencies, when you get contracted to an agency, there's a certain amount of time that you're expected to give on a monthly basis. So when you turn around to the team and say, now we want to give, sorry, now we want you to give your time to our own marketing as well, you have to think about what the impact on the clients are there, what the impact on utilization are.

in terms of the percentage of time we can give to clients from somebody's full -time hours, so to speak. So you do have to make some adjustments. It does impact our ability to take on more clients because our availability is less because we're putting a higher percentage of time towards our own initiatives rather than just client initiatives. So there have been a few changes there in terms of how we manage time internally and how much time we delegate between the team in terms of contributing to our own marketing. That adds some challenges because

we were fundamentally, mentally had a model that allowed us to scale based on a certain amount of time per client, per employee. And that was put on its head as soon as we started contributing to our own marketing efforts, because we had to treat ourselves as our own client. We weren't going to pay ourselves. We didn't contribute to the top line revenue, so to speak. So that had some challenges. But in terms of buy-in, I think it worked really well. It helps when the wider business contribute to the business, because they know what's going on.

they feel like they're listened to as well. They're part of the journey. I think it's good to give exposure to your team as well. We've got a lot of really switched on people in the business and it's good for the business to leverage that of course from a marketing point of view. So when we have webinars, we even interview our own staff for podcasts like this. know webinars would like to get our team involved to put their thoughts out into the world which gives value to our potential customers which helps us generate leads. So it works all around really. You can't just have the same…

one or two people contribute to marketing, because people will get sick of it and your perspectives and ideas can only go so far, can't they? So, yeah, it's been a good exercise.

Emma Clark (11:43)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, yeah, I think it's one of those things as well that, like, it helps everybody appreciate that, like, the brand is everybody. So I think people go brand, that's marketing, too. It's like, no, all of us are brand, like everybody within the business, anybody that's got a touch point anywhere, either internally or externally, is kind of part of brand and part of the brand experience. And I think one of the things we've been really focused on trying to kind of get those different voices in.

Rob Twells (12:07)
Yeah, yeah.

Emma Clark (12:13)
when we're kind of like working through new pieces. So when I first started, the first thing that, first big thing that we did was to look at the purpose mission vision for the business. went through a process of, we knew what it was, we just didn't know how to articulate it. So it was already kind of fully embedded within the business. think everybody was living it, but then it's like, well, how do you actually…

find a phrase or kind of get it down to that really tight essence that actually means something to somebody. So did a session with the leadership team, kind of trying to unpick all of the different threads. And then me and Julian within my team, who's my external relations manager, kind of pulled together some kind of phrasing around it. And then we're super fortunate because we've got user centered design within the business. So we poached a couple of people from that.

And basically said, can you run focus groups with the business and take it out? And we just want everybody to be super clear. We got amazing feedback. It was really interesting because we asked people for feedback. They were super direct, which was brilliant. And then they all apologize for being super direct because they felt they've been a bit rude about it. And we were like, no, that's what we want. We want to challenge it. We want to make sure it's right. And then we went through another iteration and then that actually got launched out.

Rob Twells (13:25)
Mm.

Quite

Emma Clark (13:37)
So I think for me it's, yeah, that involvement of wider people within the business of actually allowing everybody to kind of like own the brand and it not sitting within marketing team because actually there's so many different touch points. A, we couldn't possibly manage it and B, we shouldn't be because actually the business is the people within it.

Rob Twells (13:42)
Hmm.

I was going to say I think maybe Opencast is slightly different to us because we're an agency and there's a lot of us at the of the day. I'm not going to shy away from that. There's a lot of us and we all do very similar things and often in B2B businesses and particularly in agencies it's actually the people that your customers deal with that make you different and make you unique. You can have a proposition, you can have a unique selling point, all that kind of stuff and that does help but actually it's the people that they deal with during the sales process or what they see from a…

a top of the funnel marketing point of view that makes all the difference. So if that's what makes you different, you should put your people in front of the marketing strategy, in front of the sales strategy even as well. We like to get our people involved in sales stage as well as you know Emma. We like to get as many faces around the table as possible because that's what gives you your uniqueness. And that's who they're going to deal with on a day -to -day basis if they choose to come on board. And that's the point of difference. And that's often from an agency perspective what potential clients judge you on.

They can say what they want. They're saying similar things to the next agency. They've probably got a similar pricing, but actually I might have to work with these for the next five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years in some cases. Do I like them? Do I like what they've got to say? Do I like their perspective? Do I like their ideas? Do I think they can communicate well? If you get a tick in all those boxes, that can be what makes the difference ultimately. So yeah, the more people can get involved in any stage before a client comes on board.

It adds a lot of benefit to all of us and I'm sure it will for any other B2B business as well. Anything else on your toolbox?

Emma Clark (15:35)
I think those are kind of the big two. I suppose the other thing for me is kind of looking at a maturity model for marketing. So kind of keeping benchmarking where we're at and where we want to get to. So we use a Gartner model, which we really valuable, which basically kind of tracks against a number of elements from kind of like

Rob Twells (15:48)
Hmm.

Emma Clark (16:01)
customer focus and data through to kind of like mobile and platforms and kind of multi -channel and things like that. And it allows you to track not only kind of where you are, but where you want to be. So I think that's really valuable for me, because there's a recognition that certain businesses are different. So for us, we're never going to be an eCommerce business. So anything that relates to that, people are not going to come online and buy from us direct off a website. It's not what we do. It's not how we source clients. It's not how they source work.

so the fact that you can actually kind of keep tracking and keep looking at how you're doing, because I think one of the things for me that is quite tricky is you've got all this day to day stuff going on. So it's really important to kind of take a step back and actually look at how far you've traveled because sometimes you're like, yeah, but we've got that thing and we haven't done this yet. And that still doesn't quite land and haven't quite hit that target. So I think it's really valuable.

not only as kind of somebody who leads a team, but also for the team themselves to be able to take that step back and actually have a look at how things are progressing, how you're actually, how far you've come and kind of recognizing success, because we all move at like 9 ,000 miles an hour. So actually taking those pauses to actually recognize kind of the work that you've done and the difference that it's making is really helpful.

Rob Twells (17:18)
gosh,

Yeah, I always think, you know, there's three sort of, three sort of timelines. One is the short term, what's happening this week. One is the midterm, what's happening this month and the longer term, like what's happening this quarter, this, even this year in some cases. I try and spend as much time as possible in the latter stages rather than worrying what's happening day to day because we've got excellent team members that I suppose worry about that and deliver on that and execute on that. So, but I have to admit, I do spend, I do veer.

I veer back into the short term, probably too often to be honest, but there we go. I suppose we're all guilty of that, aren't we? Well, look, I appreciate that. think that's… on Emma, sorry.

Emma Clark (18:01)
where I can.

was just going to say, think you have that pull back to kind of like, yeah, but I want to do the creative twiddly bits. Let me, let me go. It's like, come on. So yeah. You have to kind of hold yourself back from, ending up with too much in the tactical stuff. Yeah.

Rob Twells (18:10)
Yeah, yeah.

Get back in line, get back in line.

That's it, that's it. Yeah, definitely guilty of that. Well, look, I appreciate that. I think there's some really great things that we can all learn from there. Talking of learnings, you've been around the block, Emma in terms of marketing and your roles, and I'm sure you've had to fail quite a few times to learn from those failures and understand how to work going forward. And obviously, the tools you've just mentioned there, you know, you've…

you've been led to all those different data points, metrics, how to work with your team, how to delegate to your team members. Probably because you've failed so many times, I can only imagine. So yeah, anything to stick out to you, any particular failure, maybe a funny one, one that you had a particular big learning from.

Emma Clark (19:05)
Yeah, I think I've probably got two main ones. One is on a people side. I tend to be quite chatty. I tend to kind of talk as I think, so I don't necessarily take a step back before I'm about to something. And sometimes I forget that what I know in my head, actually somebody else doesn't know. So there was a classic moment with my team, one of my team members.

who fortunately now laughs about it, but didn't at the time, which was failing. So we were looking at her role, we were looking at her job title, because it didn't really reflect what we what she did. And we were trying to kind of get it remodeled over so that actually her job title reflected her role. And it was much clearer and she had a much better job description. So I had a few conversations internally, I checked everything.

Rob Twells (19:38)
You

Emma Clark (20:01)
pretty well got everything signed off. Everybody said, yeah, that completely makes sense. And it was we were both in the office and it was probably about 10, five, 10 minutes before we were about to leave. And I said to her, have you got a moment, which is the worst possible introduction to anything ever with no context. And she looked at me and said, okay. And I said, it's probably a bit personal. Let's go grab a meeting room.

Rob Twells (20:21)
It's never good, is it?

Emma Clark (20:29)
And it was just like, and she looked at me and the look on her face. And as soon as she looked at me, I knew exactly what I'd done. And I was like, that was utterly terrible. So I then this super positive news that I was going to deliver, I then had to do with this massive backtrack because she thought she'd either do something terrible or was going to make a redundant or something like that. And I'm like, this is ridiculous. I work in communications. How have I managed to get that?

So definitely not my finest moment, definitely a huge learning for me. It's one of the things now if I'm going to send over a kind of pre, I normally send a pre -meet and I normally start it with what I'm talking about. So I will never start with, do you have a moment? I need to speak to you about this. It's a, I've, so and so, I think, you know, it's in a good space. I'd like to chat it through or I think there's an opportunity that we can maybe explore. Do you want to chat it through?

Rob Twells (21:16)
Yeah, yeah.

Emma Clark (21:28)
So I think that was a big learning for me of kind of, you're gonna deliver any level of news, but particularly if it's good news, don't start it like that. So yeah, that was it.

Rob Twells (21:38)
It's a really good point. think a lot of people who land themselves a senior role, particularly in marketing, they started out as a creator. They started out doing the doing and not necessarily having the skills to manage people and coordinate projects and strategies and all that kind of stuff. And all of a sudden you sprung into this role where you've got people to look after, you've got feelings to consider, you've got objectives to hit from a senior stakeholder point of view.

It's tough. You don't often get training for it either. I know for me that was the biggest challenge I've faced. I've always run an agency. I've always been responsible for something because I left university and set up a business. I don't really know any other way, but something I really struggled with was people management. How I communicated with them, how I gave objectives, how I delegated. I've been terrible at that. And would say only in the last couple of years I really learned how to

As we've grown and got more and more people with more experience than me, importantly, I've really learned how to deal with that. And I still make mistakes, of course, but it's interesting. A lot of managers, particularly in marketing roles, I find it's all of a sudden, because they're good at what they do day to day, they're all of sudden in control of six people and all these different metrics. So it's an interesting one. I think there should be more around that. should be leadership training if you're going to get put into a management position. And again,

We're guilty of that as a business. It's something that I'd like to do more of for sure. But yeah, I guess you were in a similar position. You were the person doing the website stuff, doing the communication stuff, and all of a sudden you've got all this responsibility and you've got team members to look after, holidays to approve and all that kind of stuff.

Emma Clark (23:20)
Yeah, I think I'm really fortunate that I've had like we do a lot of leadership training at Opencast. So we've got a leadership program called Amplify, which looks really interesting, like psychology, psychology of change, performance management, how to remove barriers so that your people can be the best that they can be, how to create psychological safety within teams and things like that.

Rob Twells (23:33)
Brilliant.

Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it?

Emma Clark (23:49)
how to manage teams when they change. So when you new people in and kind of like how to go through that process and accept the fact that the dynamic changes and that's okay. so yeah, so I've been really fortunate. think like for me, it's like the big learning is if you were going to put out a customer comms, you would not bang it out five minutes before you were going to go home with no prep. So actually if you can do it to your team, do the same thing, take a few minutes to prepare. Think about what the message

Rob Twells (24:11)
Right.

Emma Clark (24:16)
is think about how to get that message through. Think about how to give them space to kind of like feedback on what you're telling them, either celebrate with you or kind of reflect on kind of feedback that you're giving them. And I think the challenge for us is we're responsible for kind of like big business targets, marketing and brand targets, but we're also responsible for team. And sometimes that can feel like it's a bit of a friction point.

Rob Twells (24:39)
Hmm.

Emma Clark (24:43)
For me, I always say my main job is to make sure the team's okay. And then the secondary job is to make sure that I'm kind of like delivering on the rest of the stuff, because actually if my team isn't okay, we can't do anything. And then that's going to hit every other metric. So I think it's a fundamental part of the role, but I think you're right Rob. think I'm really lucky that I've had a lot of investment in the business to help me do that.

Rob Twells (24:44)
Yep, yep.

100%, yeah, sounds really, really good. And going into the, yeah, I've tried to learn more about leadership stuff, particularly in the last three or four years as we've grown into a bigger agency. It feels like we've taken the next step in terms of sophistication as an agency. So I've had to improve my own leadership skills with that. And the psychology of it is really interesting to me. I've been so guilty in the past of just because there's something that I deeply care about.

doesn't mean that somebody else deeply cares about it as well at the same level, you know, and don't get upset because they don't deeply care about it at the same level as you as well and stuff like that, taking things personally. So yeah, the psychology of it is super interesting. I'm sure we can share notes on that all day long. Well, that brings on to the main event. So for anybody that doesn't know, the name of our podcast, Room 301, was born out of…

a 301 redirect. So for anybody who's done SEO in the past, you know exactly what a 301 redirect is. It's also loosely based on the old BBC program Room 101, which me and Emma were having a bit of a chuckle about before we started recording. But effectively, we are lumping things into Room 301 that we don't want to see again from the marketing world. What bugs us? What's our pet peeve? What would we not want to revisit? What do we hate about marketing? So over to you, Emma. Tell me what your pet peeve is.

Emma Clark (26:31)
Excellent. How many do I get?

Rob Twells (26:34)
we're at 26 minutes. Let's go with two.

Emma Clark (26:37)
Okay, perfect. Okay, so my first, I think my first one is marketing only being seen as promotion and all of the impact that that has. So people then come to you going, we've got this product, we need to put it out to market. go, have you researched the market? Do you actually know what customers want? Do you know what competitors are doing? Do you actually know that there's a need for that particular product?

Rob Twells (26:39)
That says to me you've got at least five.

Emma Clark (27:05)
Have you done your pricing model? I can't sell it like that. That is not gonna work. Like actually you've just taken 20 minutes to explain the pricing model to me and I've got that much copy to actually explain that pricing model. Have you actually got foundations in? Do you know what your positioning is? Do you know how everything's integrated? So I think one of the really frustrating things for me in roles where marketing is just seen as promotion is marketing is far too late in any of these conversations.

So I've literally had circumstances where I'm like, okay, well, we probably need to tweak it, but we've got a load of time because, know, this will be about six weeks away and they go, no, we're launching it tomorrow. It's like, but definitely eight weeks ago. And you're like, and you didn't want to tell me. So I think businesses limit the impact that marketing can have by seeing it as just the pretty stuff. It's like the very tip of the iceberg, the stuff that you see on social media

Rob Twells (27:46)
that old chestnut.

Rob Twells (28:03)
think if you're not if you're not in it as well I think you can make the mistake of we've done it once before why can't we just we know what to do but to do it again

Emma Clark (28:11)
Yep.

Rob Twells (28:14)
But in a short amount of time, we can speed it up because we've it before. It doesn't really work like that. There's a lot of work that goes into any campaign. As you say, it's weeks, if not months of effort. So yeah, OK, that one goes in. Happy days.

Emma Clark (28:29)
Thank you.

Rob Twells (28:32)
Number two.

Emma Clark (28:34)
So my second one is risk aversion. So I have worked in marketing teams where everything has to work and it's exhausting and it just means that you can't try anything new. So the tried and tested is like every ROI has to be, you know, super good and it has to be whatever level we specified. And for me, that does not

create psychological safety for anybody working on it, because it's terrifying because what happens if one fails? I think you don't explore new opportunities. I think you can't possibly test anything. So the way that I like to approach it is doing a bit of a budget split. So one of the things that we used to talk about when I was agency side is the 70 -20 -10. So 70 % of your budget is on the bread and butter. You would not turn it off.

If there was a gun to your head, you know it works. You've got all the metrics. absolutely something massive will fall over if you take any of that away. And obviously for that, you need the data to make sure that you actually know the answer to that. The 20 % is the stuff that you know really works, but you don't know what happens if you put it into a new market or you don't know if you apply it to a new product, for example. So it works on this, but if I move it from this industry to that industry.

Does it work the same? It's like, don't know, but let's see, because it might do. So that's a, it's not super out there. It's not completely bonkers. But actually we still don't know because we haven't actually tested it in that space. And then the 10 % is let's go wild and see what happens if we do. And for me, what I always say is your 10 % budget is your learning budget. And if it goes brilliantly, then your 10 % moves into.

Rob Twells (30:13)
Let's be bonkers here.

Emma Clark (30:24)
become part of your 70 % and that's how you grow and that's how you don't stagnate. Because the challenge with marketing is if you keep doing the same thing, like the market moves around you. So it's not like, we can do that. We've tested it and it works. It's like, it works at the moment. If you don't keep experimenting and that stops working, you're in a really, really bad place. So yeah, working where there's kind of risk aversion and everything has to work for me is just exhausting.

Rob Twells (30:36)
Yeah.

No, I really like that. We practice that for sure. We've spent the best part of this year just trial and error, trial and error. And I don't think you can really grow and scale a marketing function without that trial and error. Because you don't know what would happen if. You need that if. Let's do this thought experiment. But we're an agency. work with small companies that don't have huge budgets. So the appetite to risk even 10 % of that is quite low at times. And it does make it quite challenging. And as you mentioned there about the psychological safety.

For the team, for potential churn, for us as a client as well, it is difficult to deal with for sure, but it's massive part of marketing that trial and error. Even the most wildest of ideas sometimes can work, you just never know, you? But I love the idea of the 20%, I've not heard or explored that one before where it's kind of like, kind of like what if we applied it elsewhere, I that's really quite cool, really quite interesting as well. So, no, I really like that. yeah, risk aversion for sure should go in, I think. Yeah.

needs to be trial and error. It has to be there at of the day. What would you say to a business that maybe their budget wasn't big enough to warrant a 10 % bonkers budget, should we call it?

Emma Clark (32:04)
Yeah, the bonkers budget. I think that's always really difficult. I think one of the things that we used to do was kind of like, had a client once who had the phrase, so we used to talk about stealing stuff and the client used to say borrow with pride, which I've now nicked because I like it. But actually look and see what other people are doing. A lot of the time kind of working with smaller clients, there will be businesses that have got massive levels of investment where actually you can

Rob Twells (32:22)
You

Emma Clark (32:33)
steal stuff that they've invested in. So e -commerce sites being a prime example, go and see what Amazon does because they have a lot of money and a lot of investment and 20 years of data telling them that this is probably the best way of doing it. As a starting point, at least go there. So if you're going to try something risky, maybe look to see what somebody else is doing and also look to see if you can do it at minimal costs. So it might be that actually what you

Rob Twells (32:37)
Yeah.

Emma Clark (33:02)
needing to do is put it out organically. So you've got a bit of your team's time and you've got kind of like, yeah, a bit of risk on that, but you're not kind of like hiving off a big chunk of budget. And then if it looks like it might work, then maybe that's kind of like the next progression in terms of, okay, what happens if we promoted this or sponsored it or, you know, actually put paid behind it and gave it a bit bigger audience. Is it actually gonna kind of like work?

Rob Twells (33:08)
time rather than, yeah.

Emma Clark (33:31)
So that would be my kind of gentle approach. I've worked in charities, I've worked in places where the budget is very, very minimal. And therefore, yeah, you, I think that experimentation and being creative about how you're experimenting is probably the best approach to do that.

Rob Twells (33:51)
No, I totally agree. think if you haven't got the cash, then let's try and trade some time for sure. So, well, okay, I really appreciate that. I really enjoyed that conversation as well. Great to have you on. So I really appreciate your time. Where can our listeners find out more about yourself or Opencast?

Emma Clark (34:09)
So Opencast, you can come to our website, which is opencastsoftware.com .com. We're also on LinkedIn and Instagram. I have to say that because otherwise Louise will get very upset she manages our social media. In terms of me, probably the best place to look me up is on LinkedIn. I am ridiculously old school in terms of I don't really like social media very much. I definitely shouldn't say that given what my day job is, but I don't tend to use it. So LinkedIn tends to be my main platform.

Rob Twells (34:39)
Brilliant. Lovely, I appreciate that Emma. Thank you for your time and we'll see you all again soon.

Emma Clark (34:44)
That was great. Thanks Rob.

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