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Reconciling doing good for the world and working in marketing, with Nicola Telford of Impact Marketing Club
43 Plays2 years ago
There's a conflict in the minds of many people involved in marketing - how can we work in marketing AND make the world a better place? For a long time, making a positive impact on the world and working in marketing may have felt like two themes that it can be a struggle to reconcile.
In this episode of the untiled SEO podcast, we are in conversation with Nicola Telford, founder of The Impact Marketing Club. We explore the ways that The Impact Marketing Club provides a 'safe space' for marketing professionals to explore ways to ensure that our mission to make the world a better place is more than just a marketing statement.
Find out more about The Impact Marketing Club at https://impactmarketingclub.com/
Find Nicola on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicola-telford-views-for-change/
Podcast published by https://yeseo.io/ SEO Agency
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Transcript
Introduction to Untitled SEO Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Untitled SEO Podcast. Now this is predominantly an SEO related podcast but I also like to speak to other people in digital marketing who have an interesting angle or an interesting experience or who are just interesting and then I'll invite them on without any particular goal.
00:00:19
Speaker
So don't switch off yet, because despite the fact I told you this episode doesn't have a direct goal, I think it's quite important just to have conversations with people rather than just try and run face first at a destination and at an end point.
Meet Nicola Telford and Impact Marketing Club
00:00:34
Speaker
So till that end, my honoured guests, would you care to introduce yourself, please?
00:00:40
Speaker
course, I'm Nicola Telford. I'm the founder of the Impact Marketing Club, amongst other things at the moment. We're a community of marketers, in-house marketers, agency marketers and freelance marketers, all looking to explore impact and how that fits into our work because there's often conflicts in
00:01:05
Speaker
marketing and doing good. So we're coming together in a forum, we've also got events and clinics and different ways that we come together. And yeah, the goal is to transform marketing for good. So thanks for having me. You're welcome. I'm a part of impact marketing. But before we kind of go into
00:01:26
Speaker
more into the goals of what impact marketing is about.
Nicola's Unconventional Marketing Journey
00:01:30
Speaker
Can you tell us a little bit about your history and how did you find yourself in the marketing world? Let me say find yourself because I never meet many people who intended to get into marketing. No actually and I don't know if you know about this about me but so when I finished uni and I went into an HR grad scheme actually
00:01:48
Speaker
And then for a couple of years, I tried to be a lawyer. That didn't work either. But in all of those roles, I ended up more in the communication space or in business development or in an area of the business. I was just gravitating towards external comms or something like that. So actually ended up getting headhunted by one of our clients in a law firm that I was working at to basically start their marketing division.
00:02:16
Speaker
I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and I did that for a couple of years whilst trying to sort of work out whether this was the right thing for me and then spun out from there. I was doing some freelance work on the side and then started a marketing agency when I was about 24.
COVID's Impact on Nicola's Marketing Agency
00:02:34
Speaker
So yeah, so I fell into it and then
00:02:40
Speaker
around the marketing agency for a number of years, it got a bit wiped out by COVID, because we were we were specifically in the leisure and attractions, family attraction space. And then I was also having a bit of a like, we need to do something good here, like this isn't quite fitting with how I want to like show up in the world. And founded a startup called views for change, which still exists, but
00:03:05
Speaker
is not a major focus of mine at the moment because the club has taken on a life of its own. So a bit of a squiggly wiggly road there. And actually in my day-to-day job, marketing is a huge part of it, but it's not. I mean, I'm a pure generalist in a lot of senses. I do pretty much everything you can imagine. But marketing is the sort of angle for everything. And I think with a marketing brain. So yeah, it's kind of my life now.
00:03:36
Speaker
There's certain things that you mentioned there that I find quite a lot of people who have been in marketing for a long time have in common. And one of them is starting their own company quite young.
Motivation for Starting a Business
00:03:46
Speaker
Now, I'm always interested to find out
00:03:49
Speaker
why people or, you know, what the motivation behind doing this is, I mean, my motivation was that I wanted to, actually, I wanted to tour more with the band I was in, you can't have a drink and play crappy bands and play to know more bands on a Tuesday, it doesn't work. So, what was the motivation? What was it that you wanted to change in your life or with the world even? Was it that grand or was it just something, tell me a little bit more about that.
00:04:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I actually remember I remember sitting at my desk when I was in a job and I I'm not the sort of person that particularly works well with like bureaucracy and structure and in this sort of traditional sense and like
00:04:34
Speaker
Well, honestly, I don't really work that well with authority, to be honest. I just like, I like to challenge things. And I felt like I was wrestling quite a lot with, like, you know, constraints in different ways in the job that I was doing. And I think with marketing, especially, like, you've got to be creative, and you've got to have the space to be creative, and you've got to create those spaces as well. So,
00:05:01
Speaker
If you're in a job that doesn't allow for that, then I think it's probably quite common that people will try and work out how they can do that in other formats. But it was always the sort of thing that I wanted to do when I was younger, to run my own business, that was a thing, and then this was a way to do that. I didn't think it was going to be that format.
00:05:26
Speaker
But yeah, it just sort of fell into place. I did some freelance. I got enough freelance work that I couldn't actually handle it and then brought in someone and brought in another person and brought in another person. And it sort of just grew from there.
00:05:41
Speaker
And also, I have more flexibility. I was talking to someone about this the other day. I actually have no idea how people do a job that's not flexible. If I have a day when things just aren't going that well, I'll be like, right, I'm going for a swim or I'm going to yoga, I'm going out and going for a walk or something.
00:06:01
Speaker
You don't necessarily always have that flexibility in a job. So now looking back on it, I think there was probably a lot of that sort of wrestling as well. I needed the space to be able to work in my best way as well.
00:06:16
Speaker
But it wasn't a huge decision. I mean, the people that live away my age, I'm closer to retirement than you are by some margin, I imagine. And the experience of my people, my age group is that they start a business either to escape from something they hate
00:06:36
Speaker
or to create something that they want to love. And I'm quite interested that your sounds like your agency developed quite organically.
Organic Growth and Mixed Feelings
00:06:45
Speaker
I mean, getting too much work is is the classic way of building a good agency. Would that be a fair thing to say? Yeah, we did. Yeah, it was accidental. But on your point of like the whether it's to get away from something you hate or to create something you want to love, like
00:07:04
Speaker
it was probably a mixture of both of those things, but without really realising it at the time. And I think, and I mean, maybe I was just restless at a really young young age, but it also, it actually didn't become either of those things really, because like ironically, you end up, not that I hated it, but like,
00:07:28
Speaker
because it was an organic sort of organism that was growing without me really putting much thought into what it was going to be and what it was going to look like, it ended up being a thing that I kind of hated and also wasn't doing the things that I wanted it to do to make it something that I could love. So I think, and I would be interested to know whether other people feel like that actually when they set out and it
00:07:56
Speaker
especially when it's an accidental thing, because I think these things can sprawl before you've even had a chance to look up and realise what's working and what's not. So yeah, it was completely sort of accidental. And now actually, interestingly, that I look at how we're trying to grow views for charity, we were trying to grow views for change, and how we're growing the club and stuff. And like,
00:08:22
Speaker
It doesn't work quite the same, the business model's different obviously, but it's also quite interesting that's like, why was it so easy before to just like accidentally grow without even realising that we were doing it? And I think we were kind of just sort of a little bit blind to how much we were doing. But when you're more intentional, it actually becomes sometimes more difficult.
00:08:45
Speaker
It does, because you decide a lot more of the things that you don't want to do. Exactly. So when I started, the joke was that you just bought keyboards, prodded at it, and money fell out. In digital marketing in the early 2000s, that was pretty much the truth. If you knew how a computer worked, you were kind of immediately elevated above.
00:09:07
Speaker
sometimes your clients. But it is a tale I've heard before from people who have worked in agencies and either significantly
Work-Life Balance and Personal Sacrifices
00:09:15
Speaker
changed the direction of their agency or come right out and gone back to freelancing. And I think it's a bit like people who really want to be famous, you quite often hear from them when they've become famous that, hey, this doesn't feel the way I thought it would, or it doesn't look the way I thought it would. And
00:09:35
Speaker
I think starting an agency for freedom is, well, there is a very rude analogy that I'm not going to say, but it's, I can't even think of a way to sanitize it, but starting an agency for freedom is not necessarily the result of the first start.
00:09:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. I did way more work once I started my own business than when I ever did whatever I did in a job because then it can creep into your life in every way. And actually, I've only recently started reflecting on how much
00:10:12
Speaker
I actually sacrificed in my life to do that without even realizing I was doing it. I was just not filling up the other cups in my life. It was literally like work is everything. And then suddenly I woke up one day and was like, shit, I've forgotten about like, you know, well, obviously I still had friends and things, but like putting that time and effort into my friends and relationships and family and like going away or like, you know, just like how do I show up for myself each day? I just was straight to the office, like getting as much
00:10:42
Speaker
bashed out as I possibly could, getting as much checks cashed and then I was like, until I fell asleep at night. You wake up, jump on the treadmill till it fires you off the back of it.
00:10:57
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. My experience, I'm in my second agency in 20 odd years and when I start this one, I start things very differently, which brings me to when you decided the agency model wasn't working for you or from you actually for that matter.
Shift to Impact Marketing and Purpose
00:11:18
Speaker
How did you come about developing impact marketing? How did that become a thing? I'm really interested in the process of whether you looked at the things you didn't like or whether you wanted to start something new and figure out where it went. Tell me what your thoughts were. So this is an interesting question because I think there was a lot of thought at the time, but I think on reflection,
00:11:44
Speaker
I'm not sure it was as intentional as we thought. So it was myself and Ozzy who, Ozzy still runs the agency, the agency still exists. So we sort of part of ways, I did one business, well, we did half and half for a bit and then we split half to each agency. It's worth noting that the agency was like niched in leisure and attraction. So during COVID, it basically got wiped out. So that is sort of quite a big part of like,
00:12:12
Speaker
forcing us to make choices about what we were going to do, because it's quite easy to just get like, you know, that hamster wheel piece we could have just carried on. And we did for a bit, you know, supporting those attractions when we thought that Covid was only going to be like six weeks or something. But we, but I was already, both of us actually were already going through a personal sort of
00:12:38
Speaker
I mean, it sounds so cliche and naff, but like basically like a purpose journey of like, as people, like who were we? What did we want to like bring to the world?
00:12:50
Speaker
like, was money what we actually wanted? All of those sorts of questions that were just, they were quite confronting at the time. And, and it was a weird, like, there was a six months period or so where there was, you know, in the universe is kind of just, and again, I sound like it's all bit airy-fairy, but the universe was kind of like showing up for that
00:13:10
Speaker
So I was meeting interesting people that were talking about what their purpose was as a person and how that then played into their work. And all this stuff was happening. And I was getting quite involved in activism as well. So I was getting frustrated with my work. So I was flipping to the other side and being like, right, I'm going to go and glue myself to something, which is another story altogether.
00:13:39
Speaker
But somewhere in the middle, I was like, there's, and I think I see this with some of the people I speak to now in the club and around the club. A lot of people have been through this and they've got this business that's working and it's great, but they don't like all of it. And they think that like they could be doing better. That's kind of the premise of what I was feeling, but I can't just do things like, I'm going to change who we're working with, or I'm going to change how we work, or I'm going to change
00:14:08
Speaker
you know, how we deliver a service so that it's more impactful or I'm going to do that. What I'm going to do is throw it away and start again. So I basically, we were working on Views for Change, which was a platform that integrated charitable donations and caused donations into ad campaigns. So every time someone clicked on an ad or watched an ad for a certain period of time,
00:14:34
Speaker
part of the ad spend was redirected to a cause that the brand had chosen. And the consumer would know that. So from a marketing perspective, there was an incentive to engage, as well as obviously the core sort of brand message. But then from an impact perspective, there was more money going to good causes from brands as a result. And that was one of the answers that we thought we had to this problem around
00:15:04
Speaker
The work we're doing isn't having a good benefit in the world. It's not doing the right things. We're just making money for people that want to make more money. So that's kind of how it started. And then over the period of time when we were working on Views for Change, we raised some money to deliver that. And I was speaking to so many interesting marketers.
00:15:31
Speaker
that they were all looking at this like how do we have a positive impact and we're also in this massive wave of people talking about B Corp and how like doing good is good for business and I actually realized in that process that the views for change is a great tool and it's like we'll bring it back to life at some point because there's definitely a market for it but
00:15:55
Speaker
There's a much higher level problem here, which is people don't really know what to do around impact, especially in a marketing space, because it's quite conflicting with like the actual goal of influencing people to buy. People don't really know how to prioritize that. People don't know, they feel isolated within their roles and how I felt, which was like, oh, I'm just on the hamster wheel. How do I do something good with what already exists?
00:16:21
Speaker
So I was like, right, let's bring this right back
Creating a Safe Space for Marketers
00:16:23
Speaker
up. Let's start the club, which allowed us to just start like talking amongst ourselves about this sort of stuff and asking the stupid questions and like making a bit more of a safe space to do all that sort of stuff. And I kind of wish I'd started that first, to be honest. But that's kind of what I was craving at the time. Other people telling me like we don't have a clue either. We're just trying to work it out as well.
00:16:47
Speaker
There's sort of two prongs to that. If you work outside of a very large agency in digital marketing or any marketing, it's quite an isolating place to be. So yeah, I think if you couple that with the desire to actually have a positive impact on the community and the world around you, it's a bit of a double lany really. I mean, when you came along and invited me to have a look at Impact Marketing Club,
00:17:14
Speaker
My attitude is just, yeah, whatever. I didn't think, hey, this is going to change everything. And it wasn't until you invited me into the Slack group and I start to see other people talking, I realized that just having that conversation can remove a lot of the social change guilt that I think you can have when you are looking for a way to make a positive change. I'm very much from a
00:17:39
Speaker
kind of from an anarcho punk background. So the people I came out with, the bands I played in, and everything is very more focused on that music, if anything, and always sort of felt a guilt of, yeah, but how am I going to translate that into the fact I'm helping companies
00:17:56
Speaker
rank better in Google and sell more big machines. And it's sort of like a self-imposed guilt. So seeing other people going, how do we do this thing? It's like, ah, I think we might be in the wild west of this still. I think this might still be early days. And without conversations like this, I don't think any of us are going to get anywhere. So it's OK to admit that we don't actually know what we're doing. I certainly don't. Anyway. Exactly.
00:18:22
Speaker
think I think and I think that's the like the critical critical part of like so when I started the club it was like I wasn't really sure what I was doing I was like let's just get people to talk and then I was like the more I thought about it firstly from a personal perspective I was like I'm not gonna position myself as having the answers here and no one actually should there's no authority on this piece like sure there's people like
00:18:43
Speaker
I don't know, add net zero or like, you know, the net zero people for carbon. And then you've got the there's people that are experienced or have worked on this and they're really great to draw from. But none of us are an authority. So let's just like talk about it because some things aren't relevant to some people, some things are more relevant to others. And I think having the conversation and creating a space to have that conversation is
00:19:11
Speaker
like I actually sort of didn't even realise how important it was going to be until I started having these conversations with people and I think there's
00:19:22
Speaker
There's so much to be drawn from that early stage, like we don't know what we're doing. And we've extended it even further so that people, if they are really embarrassed or they can't say this out loud, that we've got an anonymous space that people can use. And I just think the conversation is the catalyst for doing the right thing. And we have marketers in the club who I know are not
00:19:50
Speaker
They're not, you know, holier than now trying to trying to change the world like that's like I know that. And we're not trying to create like an echo chamber of people that all just like yeah great like we're gonna do everything perfectly.
00:20:05
Speaker
because that's not what this is about. It's about how can we make incremental improvements to the work we're doing and change our perspective and create an impact mindset so that when we're faced with a new project or a new campaign, we're thinking about how we reduce stereotypes in marketing. We're thinking about, is this the most carbon efficient way to deliver this message? Are we actually meeting customer values and needs rather than
00:20:33
Speaker
just selling to people because we want to make money, all of those sorts of questions, and it's a vast array of them. If I can change a couple of people's mindsets in terms of how they approach things, then I'm happy.
00:20:55
Speaker
Yeah, the time is now. The time has come for this.
Joining Impact Marketing Club
00:21:00
Speaker
We're well past assuming anyone who's interested in
00:21:04
Speaker
in the space around them and I'm specifically saying that because in my mind it's not just the physical environment, it's the communities and people and humans and it's fairly holistic really and I don't think anyone can now deny that this is the time we need to start figuring it out absolutely. So what's a good way for people to get involved with impact marketing?
00:21:28
Speaker
Well, so actually you've caught me a good time, but I feel like I don't know what people might listen to this at different times, but right now, as in 21st of February, we will be 23 just to be clear. Yeah, sorry 23. In the next two months or so, I'm going to be announcing like
00:21:49
Speaker
Basically, I've been doing loads and loads of member interviews over the last since New Year, and I'm going to be announcing a whole host of new formats that we're going to have in terms of how people can get involved. We're also going to be announcing local chapters. So to encourage face-to-face interaction as well, we're going to have
00:22:12
Speaker
chapters in various cities or localities that different members will be sort of championing. And I mean, the core of what we started with was our Slack channel, and that will always be the core of it, because I think that's where, you know, it's easiest for people to just like dump a quick question or do this here. But and also can connect directly with each other. But we also do we're doing meetups, we have
00:22:40
Speaker
hot seats where brands sit in a hot seat with a particular challenge that they've got and then people jump on a call and support them in untangling their problem and yeah basically there's loads of stuff. I'm also starting and this is probably about time to ask for your feedback and sorry I'm about to swear but I'm also starting a new format which will start in London but we will move
00:23:06
Speaker
broader from there called the fuck up supper club um and it's going to be it's going to be a dinner apart like basically a dinner party um and it will be we'll invite someone in
00:23:23
Speaker
to basically talk about the things that they've fucked up on their impact journey, to really start that, like, people feeling safe to say, we haven't got this all right, and we're not going to get this all right. And I'd rather share that and learn from it. And then, obviously, to spare on conversation for other people at the dinner to, like, share their fuck-ups and stuff. And then we'll learn from each other in that regard. So, yeah, come along, please. We'd love for you to be there.
00:23:52
Speaker
That sounds absolutely great. I think what we'll have to do is get you back in a few months when all these things are launched to kind of tell us a bit more. In the meantime, I really appreciate this conversation. Nicola, it's been really interesting and I look forward to seeing how Impact Marketing Club develops.
00:24:12
Speaker
Well, thanks for being a part of it. And thanks for having me on your podcast. And yeah, love what you're doing as well. And it's really great to be able to talk about this with your community. So I appreciate it. Very, very kind of you. We'll put the links in the show notes. But for anyone listening to this while they're driving or walking to work, go to ImpactMarketingClub.com. That's really simple. That's really rememberable. Right, isn't it? ImpactMarketingClub.com. That's brilliant. OK, I'm going to say goodbye, Nicola. Do you want to say goodbye?
00:24:41
Speaker
Yes, thank you so much. Goodbye.