In this episode, I interview Amy Hopper, a sociologist and CEO of TOA Group, about the wellbeing challenges faced by agencies and software houses. The conversation highlights the importance of communication, collective wellbeing, and implementing processes for better flow of work, as well as viewing wellbeing as an investment rather than a cost.

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Episode Transcript

Azeem Ahmad (00:01.081)
Hello and welcome back to the Azeem Digital Asks podcast, the all round digital marketing podcast. We are fully back in swing with the new season, a few episodes down and I’m really, really excited for this episode today. We have got someone who is an absolute legend, Amy Hopper joining us today. Amy, thank you very much for joining.

Amy Hopper (00:24.137)
It’s a pleasure as always, as always.

Azeem Ahmad (00:27.117)
You cannot help but smile whenever you have a conversation with Amy because she’s just an absolute legend. But you’re here to see and listen from her. So I’m not going to spend too much time talking. We are going to be talking about something, a piece of research that Amy has done predominantly with agencies and software houses about some of the key wellbeing challenges that they’re having internally at the moment. I’m really, really excited to dig into this with Amy. But before that,

For those people who shamefully do not know about you, Amy, who you are, what you do, would you mind giving an intro to yourself,

Amy Hopper (01:01.698)
Of course. Hello everyone. It’s pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me on, Azeem. I’m Amy Hopper. I am a sociologist by trade specializing in the sociology of work and alienation in the workplace. But previous to that for my SINs, I’m an ex -marketing agency CEO and marketing consultant. So know very, very much about the area. I now run a company called TOA Group, which is a performance consultancy.

specialising in removing wellbeing barriers to produce higher performing teams.

Azeem Ahmad (01:35.839)
Nice. And again, that is why I don’t introduce people because I would not have done it as well as you did. So, yeah, look, as I mentioned, I gave a nod to this this study that you did and I think that’s probably the best place to start. So would you mind sharing a little bit about what that actually is and what actually inspired you to start looking into these sort of challenges that agencies and software houses having?

Amy Hopper (01:40.964)
Elevator pitch down!

Amy Hopper (02:04.848)
So, I mean, as part of TUA group, what we do is we are there to enhance performance, not just in marketing agencies, software houses, but all businesses as a whole. And the performance consultancy game, it normally comes from the angle of sort of like your traditional business coaching or your economics perspective, looking at the bottom line facts, figures, black and white, et cetera. Whereas we take more of a psychological and sociological approach to it.

So although the term well -being is somewhat bastardized, it means everything like doing yoga on a rooftop to drinking green tea, we’re seeing it as, no, we’re enhancing the performance of the team. It’s reflecting on the bottom line, improving efficiency, reducing turnover rates, et cetera. It’s just that we’re using well -being methods as a tool to do that. And as part of that, we need to make sure that we’re keeping our ears to the ground and actually

not resting on our laurels and thinking, well, we’re qualified sociologists, so we know this, we’ve read this study, but actually asking people what is going on, what is happening, what is happening for leaders, what is happening for agency owners, what is happening for the people in these teams, so that when we go in and we’re creating workshops and we’re creating new systems to be able to tackle these challenges and come up with solutions, that it’s actually reflective of what’s going on, not what we’ve just read in the book.

So after doing, I did a keynote for Gaida, the Grow Your Digital Agency conference. And it was a keynote on how to grow resilience within the agency, within yourself and grow your agency through those challenges. And some of the conversations I had afterwards were incredibly, incredibly interesting. So every quarter we decide to do, we do this research, we either pick a certain subject or we pick a certain industry. So we chose to do it within…

marketing agencies, software houses, we took 40 agencies in the UK, Romania, Hungary and Poland, interviewed the agency leaders and created this research packet on what was actually going on.

Azeem Ahmad (04:15.646)
Nice. So very thorough and very broad as well, not just in the UK. I have my own thoughts on it, but that’s for for a different day. So, yeah, look, I guess let’s just dive in. So what were some of the, you know, the main well -being issues that came out of this research?

Amy Hopper (04:25.967)
Yeah

Amy Hopper (04:38.252)
It was really interesting actually, because it didn’t really reflect on, regardless of size, regardless of country, and regardless of type of business, there were some really, really common threads that came out as challenges that all of them were facing. That all centered around, just as a foundation level, all centered around communication and the way that we communicate, particularly in the light of COVID. People coming back into the office got some hybrid working, some people…

fully remote first and communication was a huge, huge factor. it was coming up with things like some people were having a lot of issues, boundary setting, either people taking on too much work or not taking on enough and not communicating that to their team, therefore the flow of work gets upset. There seemed to be a lack of collective wellbeing, a lot more individualistic thinking rather than thinking of the team as a whole or the agency as a whole

the flow of work as a whole. And I think probably one of the biggest things we’re seeing, particularly with the smaller agencies, the smaller software houses, that they’re in that stage of wanting to grow or in that tipping point period between different size levels, there was this anxiety around needing to implement process.

and needing to implement change and create more processes for better flow of work and create better foundation as the business grew, but also not wanting to appear micromanaging and wanting that change to be implemented successfully with all of the team on board. That was a really, really big factor that a lot of the agencies I spoke to were having problems with.

paired with the, I think what we’ve all experienced, entrepreneurs experience that sort of perfectionism of I can’t let something go, I can’t let go of these reins because you’re gonna have to realise that there are going to be people that fall down, are going people that make mistakes as you let those reins go and thinking about the longer term effect of how positive that’s going to be for short term discomfort.

Azeem Ahmad (06:53.71)
Yeah, absolutely. I laughed because in a very similar way, I’ve experienced the same myself in the past. It’s hard to give up control of something that you sort of built basically from the the ground up pretty much. So. You’ve talked a lot about this and you’ve kind of nudged into a question that I’m going to ask you later on anyway, but in terms of what you found out from the back of this.

Is there anything that you sort of didn’t expect, something that surprised you in the findings? mean, you probably had some sort of idea of what you might find out, but was there anything that you saw and you just thought, wow, I wasn’t expecting this?

Amy Hopper (07:34.766)
There wasn’t so much things I weren’t expecting, but I suppose the thing that surprised me the most is that in the industry that we work in and in digital, we’re actually really forward thinking in general. A lot of us are on board with wellbeing, knowing how important it is, knowing how employee wellbeing and how happy people create better work. A lot of us are in that thinking. A lot of us have already invested in therapy.

and a lot of the agencies that I spoke to have their own structures, their own ways of working, or even provide therapy or provide therapy services to their teams, which is absolutely incredible to hear. I suppose one thing out of that that I found a little surprising is there is still this mindset of therapy or using therapy or using these, like the sort of services that I provide when things get

rather than thinking of it as a preventative service and investing in therapy and encouraging your team to use the services that you’re providing before it gets to that point. Like you don’t want to be, instead of running around putting out the fire, make sure the fire doesn’t start in the first place. making sure, using those services to keep yourself well and keep everything ticking along really nicely.

rather than using it as a fire extinguisher when you think, my God, everything’s on fire. And that’s probably like a big thing I found that was across the board no matter what the size.

Azeem Ahmad (09:04.129)
Yes.

Azeem Ahmad (09:09.648)
feel like that should be on a t -shirt instead

Amy Hopper (09:12.004)
Every time I talk to you, you like a quote that I say. Thank you. What was the last quote? Digital is the industry where you go to sleep an expert and wake up a

Azeem Ahmad (09:17.264)
It’s because you’re so quotable as a compliment, we should get t -shirts to say,

Azeem Ahmad (09:33.476)
Another one of mark that that’s gonna be all over socials next week. So We should start aside business of like, you know marketing quotes and t -shirts we could make it Anyway, we digress I apologize

Amy Hopper (09:34.744)
I love it, I love being questioned, thank you.

Amy Hopper (09:43.102)
Yeah, yeah.

That’s it.

Azeem Ahmad (09:49.592)
It’s quite interesting really and you can see me like nodding away. I’m just trying to absorb everything. You kind of touched on in one of your earlier answers, you know, between the sizes of companies. Were there any sort of major differences you saw in some of the challenges between the smaller businesses and the larger businesses or was there a lot of commonality between them?

Amy Hopper (10:09.796)
There was a lot of commonality between them, hell of a lot of commonality. suppose the small businesses, there was more of the challenge of wanting to give away work and that control and that perfectionism. I’d say with the larger businesses…

Amy Hopper (10:27.992)
they still have this huge communication challenge between, not only between different teams, but also between different ages. And when you’ve got different generations and the way that they communicate being very, very different. So the smaller businesses, they tend to be more interaction between people. People tend to know people more on a personal level.

And therefore, I hate this phrase and I hate, don’t like it when people use it, but that there’s more of a sense of family, quote unquote. So people are often more aware of other individual struggles, whereas in the larger businesses, is this idea of sometimes you don’t know the face behind an email. So the collective wellbeing is not as high and it’s much more sort of individualistic, particularly if people are working from home.

seeing people face to face, having more difficulties with collaboration, boundary setting, taking accountability for work and sometimes that process of work, from getting it from the top of the funnel all the way through to delivery and payment, that process is becoming much longer and disjointed because the flow of communication is not as easy.

Azeem Ahmad (11:43.765)
Hmm. I’m going to pick your brains a little bit more about that later on. You just, you just got me thinking when you talking about different, different sizes of company and I wanted to ask you about geography as well, but I kind of wanted to do a two in one question if that’s okay. Anything that you saw that stood out based on

Amy Hopper (11:47.34)
Yeah, go for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amy Hopper (11:59.731)
and

Azeem Ahmad (12:07.749)
different geographical locations and then also as a free bolt on. I presume a lot of these companies work across different time zones as well. So did you see any sort of challenges that people had, especially when working in different sizes of companies, different locations and also different time zones as well?

Amy Hopper (12:31.684)
There was definitely a geographical difference for sure. The agencies that I spoke to, the agency leaders that I spoke to, and they brought up these challenges themselves and they said that in the UK, I know we have a lot of things and a lot of progress we still need to make, but in general, most people, particularly within the digital industry, are aware

well -being challenges, imposter syndrome, anxiety, depression, mental health issues and what they are, kind of how to recognise them and what needs to be done to do something about it. There is a general sort of base knowledge that exists and the stigma is reducing. People are able to have conversations like this about therapy, about their therapist. Whereas in Eastern Europe, and when I was talking to the agencies in particularly Romania and Hungary and Poland, that stigma still very much exists.

Azeem Ahmad (13:15.002)
Mm.

Amy Hopper (13:26.128)
And particularly when you’re talking about communication and flow of work, there are people that will take on work or won’t ask if they are having struggles, won’t bring anything up, won’t ask the question because they still have this idea of, I’m going to feel stupid or I’m going to feel as though I am weak in some way. If I ask for assistance,

Whereas a lot of the owners were getting very frustrated because they need this information, like they need to know. They don’t want you to take on something that you can’t do because then they know that’s going to create a larger problem later down the line. And it was about working with those owners and those directors to say, well, what environment are we creating here to make sure that people genuinely, genuinely feel psychologically safe in order to open

because a lot of these countries where you have to think, okay, well, one of the agency and as I spoke to, he said, I think the problem is that we used to be a communist country and there’s a huge level of distrust still with authority. And he said that feeds into our agency life, that feeds into our dynamic and our hierarchical system. So those are very, very difficult situations and have to be handled in a different way to how we would handle.

Okay, for sure.

Azeem Ahmad (14:55.597)
Absolutely and you’ve got me thinking about something which I definitely want to ask you about. It’s definitely an assumption on my part and I’m not the expert which is why you’re here and I’d love to hear your opinion on this. I don’t think that we can look at this topic in isolation so I was going to say how much of an impact do you think…

external factors play on people at work such as politics like in the UK we’ve had Brexit elections etc etc you just mentioned there about previously being a communist country how much of an impact if any do you think that these factors play on people’s well -being at work?

Amy Hopper (15:35.596)
It’s huge. It’s absolutely massive. It’s integral. I mean, you just even just look at the cost of living crisis, of course, the cost of living, there is going to be this general anxiety of a society before they even get to work and experience the their own challenges and or issues that may come up within the workplace.

And if you’ve got someone who’s coming to work and they can’t afford their rent or they’re working two jobs or they are having challenges with their family, they can’t get a doctor’s appointment, these are going to have massive, massive, massive implications on people before you even consider that they’ve got to do a job. And it’s something that we talk to leaders about with regard to when we do empathy training or empathy leadership training.

in that yes, people are there to work for you, yes, you have a company, yes, you have a job, and they’ve got a job to do, but at the same time, you need to be aware of what’s going on for that person individually and what’s happening in society as a whole, because being more aware of that, more empathetic of that will make you a better leader and will also get those people doing better work for you at the end of the

Azeem Ahmad (16:56.133)
Hmm, absolutely. Let me pick your brains a little bit further on that and then we’ll go into how organisations should tackle these challenges.

Amy Hopper (17:04.076)
Really.

Azeem Ahmad (17:05.285)
So when it comes to empathy, I had a conversation with a friend recently once and he’s a manager in a different organisation. He’s got somebody in his team and I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was just something like a document needed to be delivered from this person to another person. And he had sight of the document because he was CC’d into it.

Amy Hopper (17:26.681)
Yeah.

Azeem Ahmad (17:27.588)
person who created it he said has had some issues at home didn’t go into it but they didn’t deliver the document to the other person and that he basically said I’m not gonna send it on on that person’s behalf because that’s the job regardless of their well -being issues how often do you see like situations like this and how do you like how do you approach that like my first reaction was

That’s quite harsh, really. I know it’s a very specific situation. Somebody’s obviously having challenges. think about like myself when I’ve had challenges. Work is a nice welcome distraction for me. I throw myself into it. But to just be quite, in my opinion, cold and be like, look, that’s his job. He needs to do it. Where do you draw the line between being empathetic and then going overboard in speech marks?

Amy Hopper (18:16.778)
That’s a really, really good question. And it’s something that came up a lot in the research that we were doing in the leaders, managers, directors. Where is the line between wanting to be empathetic and understanding of someone’s personal situation and also at the end of the day, realizing that there is still a job to be done and there is still a business that has to run and function and make money.

Amy Hopper (18:47.576)
That question is something that one needs to be answered by each person, each business owner, each manager individually on where they believe that line is with their team and in line with the goals of the business. But also at the end of the day, we are all human beings. And although that, in that situation, I don’t know the complete context of that situation.

I would wonder what the person might say if the situation had been reversed. And he was the one that was having struggles that were not full of his own and had just made a mistake and not sent a document through. And we tend to find that in those situations where we have practiced empathy towards someone.

Azeem Ahmad (19:23.14)
Hmm.

Amy Hopper (19:42.392)
practice collective work being and shown our humanity and our vulnerability that when we are unfortunately in that situation which we are likely to be because the world dishes out its cards randomly and having shown that to someone else it is more likely that we will also receive that kindness for ourselves.

Azeem Ahmad (19:59.086)
Yeah, absolutely.

Amy Hopper (20:10.03)
which is definitely something that I’ve experienced in my life, for sure.

Azeem Ahmad (20:13.614)
Yeah, plus one, definitely. I don’t want to stop you because I’m learning loads from you. on that theme, how would you say some of the organisations have sort of tried to tackle these these well -being challenges? Are there any sort of interesting strategies and approaches that you’ve seen?

Amy Hopper (20:33.7)
One really interesting strategy that I saw was a really, really interesting agency and great agency owner and a lot of these, a lot of the things that were coming up, they were saying, okay, well, let’s look at how you’re hiring and the personality steps you’re hiring. And there was one guy that I was having conversation with, I shall mention his name, but he said that every single person that he hired, he

that he took out for dinner and assessed whether he enjoyed the dinner.

Amy Hopper (21:12.148)
And in that situation, I thought, okay, well, how does that work? He said, okay, well, I don’t hire so much based on skill. I hire on personality and I hire on whether that person’s personality is going to fit and mesh in with the team and how they’re going to fit onto that sort of board. And if I enjoy the dinner and I enjoy spending time with that person and I’m able to communicate with them, that’s the most important thing. So

based all of his hiring based on communication and based on whether he enjoyed the dinner and therefore created this system. And when I said, I was going through some of the challenges that other agencies are having, was sort of key communication, boundary setting, change in implementation, et cetera. I said, are you having any of these? He said, no, I don’t have any. He had a whole different set of challenges.

but didn’t have any of the others that resulted from communication. And I just thought that was a really, really interesting perspective. Obviously, it probably wouldn’t work for everyone, particularly the larger ones going and having to do like 200 dinners every month. But I just thought, oh, that’s really… Not something that I can really put in a workshop as a, should do this, this is a great strategy, but a strategy that he developed and worked really well for him and his agency.

Azeem Ahmad (22:13.776)
Hahaha

Azeem Ahmad (22:26.902)
I love that. You’ve just reminded me of something quite funny, which I’m going to share very briefly. Many years ago, I got to the final stage of an interview, right? And before the final stage, they made me do like one of these online personality tests. I didn’t think anything of it. The final stage was with the CMO and two other people. The other two other people were in the room. Beginning of the interview, the CMO walks in.

slaps down this like 10 page document on the desk, no hello nothing, he says right we’re in a situation here’s option A here’s option B I need you to pick one right now because I believe that you sit on the fence too much and you fold under pressure is that true? and I was like well hello nice to meet you too I was like I’d rather the dinner option than just believe in like an online thing which probably doesn’t tell you anything and I picked an option and I was like

What does this mean? And then he said, well, this thing says that you might fold under pressure and you’re diplomatic. You can’t pick an option. So the dinner option is a fantastic, fantastic shout. I love it. I might, I might steal it. So apologies to your president.

Amy Hopper (23:34.146)
Yeah, well, it’s not mine. It’s not mine to deal with. I thought it was a great thing, but yeah, I like that. I think that’s kind of like monitoring your stress response, right, and whether you’re going to pick how you’re going to respond rather than whether you actually pick an option, I imagine. Different people have different ways of how they hire. I think also as well, the agencies I found that, or the businesses I find are most successful.

And also the businesses that tend to bring TOA in to do workshops and this kind of work. It’s the ones that really practice what they preach. think there is not so much in our industry, in other industries I’ve seen, there is sort of this tick box culture of, yes, we do wellbeing, tick. Yes, we look after people, tick. They’ve got therapists to talk to, done. Like Dun and Dust did, boom, wellbeing done, pat ourselves on the back.

And actually, it’s about practicing what you preach. that’s just, that’s not, Amy, come in and work with my team. I’m like, no, no, no, you’re part of this. This is everyone being involved in practicing what you preach from the top down. your, your, your team are not going to be, you know, working within their nine to five hours and not doing emails outside of work. If you’re in the office till, till seven, eight PM and they can see that they’re not going to feel safe.

talking honestly and feel like they’re in a psychological space in order to do so if you don’t do the same and you don’t foster that environment. So the ones that find that are most successful in that area are the ones that really get involved and show their vulnerability as well.

Azeem Ahmad (25:14.904)
Yeah, I love that. And you kind of nodded on to the next area I was going to ask you about in terms of leadership and how important they are when it comes to comes to situations like this. guess it’s a case of sort of practicing what you preach, I guess.

Amy Hopper (25:31.202)
Yeah, completely. And I think as well, it’s about realizing that, yeah, you’ve got business goals and you’ve got team goals and everyone is working towards those. But realizing that everyone is an individual and also no one loves your business as much as you do. I think it was a, dare I say, a Gary V video that I saw where he said, you’re gonna love your business.

You’re gonna love your business 10 out of 10. No one’s gonna love your business 10 out of 10. Stop expecting them to. But if you can get them to seven, you’ve done a great job. But realizing that people are individual, they’ve got their own individual goals. Not everyone wants to win. Not everyone wants to make a huge amount of profit. Everyone has individual motivations. If you can find out how people are individually motivated, what they want, whether it’s time off, whether it is more money, whether it

more personal development budget, whatever it is, find out what that is, then essentially you’ve got a cheat sheet to win and push people and your businesses as far as you want it to go.

Azeem Ahmad (26:40.099)
Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. I didn’t really frame it or think of it in that way in terms of, you know, 10 out of 10 and try and get people to a seven. So that’s really, really helpful. Thank you. Another quotable, I should say. It’s all good. It’s all good.

Amy Hopper (26:53.924)
I can’t I can’t have that one. That’s definitely a guy for you. I’ve nicked that. I’ve nicked that for sure. There’s this idea when we’re talking about this tick box culture as well as when I said treating people like individual particularly in the performance industry and you’ll get other performance consultants and they’ll have this amazing list of people they work with like we’ve worked with Olympians and we’ve worked with we’ve worked with

Manchester City Football Club and we’ve already… And I think that’s wonderful. Those are great people. But every single one, every single person on that team wants to win. They’ve all got the same goal. Sandra in HR, she doesn’t want to win the Premier League. Sorry. She doesn’t care. She wants to probably come to work, like have a good work -life balance, like do a good day’s job, feel like she’s made a difference and go home and see her kids.

Treating people like individuals is really, really important if you’re going to then focus them towards the company goals as a whole.

Azeem Ahmad (28:00.901)
I’m going to make it my mission now when I’m editing this podcast is find out who works in HR at Man City Football Club. Just send them a t -shirt and say.

Amy Hopper (28:09.444)
That was a quote I actually had, like Sandra in HR doesn’t want him in the Premier League. course she does it, doesn’t.

Azeem Ahmad (28:15.09)
I love that. No, you’re absolutely right. And again, I didn’t even think of it like that, which…

Again, although there’s humour involved, it’s actually really, really understandable. some of these things, certainly I’m finding having a conversation with you now, you don’t immediately think about these things. You just kind of gloss over them. But when you frame it like that, it does take you back a bit. And you think, God, this is something that I actually need to look at. We are rapidly approaching the end, but I’ve got two more questions for you. And one of them is literally this.

Amy Hopper (28:45.301)
I’ll for it, yeah.

Azeem Ahmad (28:47.705)
If there are people in agencies or software houses who are listening or watching this episode, they’ve already taken away so much gold information from you. But if there’s some advice that you can give to them who they’re looking to improve their workplace well -being, for example, what would that advice be?

Amy Hopper (29:07.658)
I would say empathy is the most important tool you can have as a leader or as a work colleague. And I would also say that if you’re looking to engage in therapy and or any sort of wellbeing practice or personal development practice to do so before the fire starts. To do it to…

to make sure the fire doesn’t start and keep you in a good place rather than thinking it’s something you only do when the challenge begins.

Azeem Ahmad (29:41.099)
I love that. Absolutely. then to sort of bolt on to it, because I’m sure in your professional experience, you’ve probably come across this stereotypical person who

Let’s say somebody’s watched this or listened to this and they go back to, let’s say, somebody in the board, CMO, CFO, CEO, whoever, they’ve gone back and they’ve said, right, I’ve watched this incredible podcast and I think we could benefit from having a workplace well being looked at and assessed and improved. That person will immediately say, sounds great, but how much money is it going to make me?

What would your advice be to those people to try and have these conversations with very number oriented, number driven, sort of, I would say, tough exterior, stiff people?

Amy Hopper (30:28.116)
Yeah, that’s a brilliant question because we get that all the time, particularly with well -being seen as woo -woo sometimes. It’s not a cost, it’s an investment. And it is the amount of, say for example, just the figures with regard to presenteeism, people coming into work when they feel they have to, when they’re actually ill, costs businesses twice as much as absenteeism. Just a simple fact of we did a workshop last year in

Two C -suite team members were about to leave because they didn’t like the culture and we did the series of workshops they didn’t leave and that saved the business 65 ,000 pounds just in recruitment fees and retraining alone. if you think how many people like that it’s about enhancing the efficiency and productivity of a business whether that is reducing the turnover rate of staff whether that is increasing E &PS scores making people just generally happier or it all has a huge

tangible and measurable effect on the bottom line. This is an investment. It’s not a cost. It’s going to come back tenfold into your business.

Azeem Ahmad (31:36.293)
I love that, that’s gold. Thank you very much for sharing that in a perfect way. Perfect way to round out the episode. But before I let you go, it would be a crime if I didn’t give you the opportunity to tell people more about where they can find, follow, connect with you and reach out with you.

Amy Hopper (31:40.314)
You’re very welcome.

Amy Hopper (31:56.27)
Brilliant. You can go to toagroup .co .uk, get in touch there, or please connect with me on LinkedIn at

Azeem Ahmad (32:04.568)
Legend I’ll share all of these in in the show notes. Amy Thank you very much for giving up some of your time today as always my friends been

Pleasure lots of quotables. I’ve got at least 10 which I’ve marked down for myself to listen back to so Thank you very much And yeah, I really appreciate it that about rounds up this episode as you’ve seen Amy is a fantastic guest absolutely love it Please do reach out to her even if it’s just to say thank you for taking the time to share Your just in general awesomeness and then the boring bits I always say at the end, please like write share and subscribe tell a friend

to tell a friend and we will see you on the next episode.

Amy Hopper (32:49.326)
Thank you guys,

In this episode, I interview Ryan Jones, the marketing manager at SEOTesting, about SaaS content marketing. We discuss the definition of SaaS and how marketing for SaaS differs from traditional marketing.

Ryan shares his experience of increasing organic clicks by focusing on content, educational blog posts, and building customer relationships. We also talk about the different stages of the marketing funnel and the importance of top-of-funnel content.

Ryan emphasises the need to talk to customers, build relationships with others in the industry, and continuously test different strategies.

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My website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.iamazeemdigital.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠

Ryan’s LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-g-jones/

Episode Transcript

Azeem (00:01.124)
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Azeem Digital Asks podcast. Really excited for this episode today. We’re gonna be talking about all things SaaS content marketing. And I can’t think of anybody better to discuss this with than my amazing guest, Ryan Jones, which is who you are here to see and hear from. So I’m gonna shut up, but before I do, as always, please like, rate, share, subscribe, tell a friend, tell a friend.

knock on your next door neighbour and tell their dog to have a quick listen as well. Thanks very much. Ryan, welcome to the show my friend.

Ryan Jones (00:37.438)
Thank you very much, Azeem. It’s good to be here, good to finally be on. I’m a regular listener, love season one and love the first episode of season two as well. yeah, well up for

Azeem (00:48.884)
him to say that but thank you very much. So for the people who are listening and watching who shamefully may not know about yourself would you mind just giving a quick intro to you who you are what you

Ryan Jones (01:04.078)
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, as Azeem mentioned, I’m Ryan. I’m the marketing manager at SEO testing. So joined just over a year ago. was April, 2023 that I joined to help scale the marketing operations. And yeah, to talk about all things SAS, all things testing. I love chatting, chatting all about that stuff on Twitter. I don’t know whether I can swear or not. I was about to say my usual phrase, but just about held it.

Azeem (01:31.223)
You can, absolutely. I’m the boss, so feel free.

Ryan Jones (01:34.638)
In that case, like chatting shit on Twitter about all those kinds of things. yeah, it’s side to be chatted to

Azeem (01:43.93)
Good, good. Right, let’s just dive right into it then. We’re talking SaaS and we’re talking marketing. But let’s start from the very beginning. I’m conscious that I’ve got a handful of listeners who are very new to the industry. So for those who don’t know, what is SaaS and how is marketing SaaS different to traditional marketing?

Ryan Jones (02:05.068)
Yeah, so SAS stands for Software as a Service. So the kind of top level of overview is if you’ve got a business and you have any kind of like online software that you’re selling, whether you’re selling it generally like one time basis or the most usual case is subscription base, which is the same as what SEO testing is. But if you run online software and you’re selling that in any way, shape or form, at least in part, you operate a SAS business.

which is, it’s different in some senses to traditional marketing and different and the same in other instances. I think the key difference is that SAS is, given that it’s almost always subscription -based, there’s a heavy focus on different KPIs rather than what you might look at in traditional marketing. So there’s a heavy focus on the number of leads that you’re getting, what your customer lifetime value is, so how much you’re making money -wise.

for each of your customers and then churn rate. how often obviously people are leaving and getting rid of their subscription. Whereas businesses that operate on like a one time purchase model. your biggest example is like Econ, for example, then they’re mainly focused on driving those like initial sales and then more and then like building customer relationships from there. So just like focusing on the customer relationships obviously for SAS, there’s a big focus on

engagement in the first sense, but then we also have to place a massive focus on keeping our customers happy like before they join us and whilst they’re with us and then even after they leave as well because there’s always a chance that they’re going to come back. Whereas some businesses might be more sort of focused on just getting as many people as they can in and they’re just keeping that funnel going with like the number of new people as possible.

Azeem (03:59.387)
Yes, that’s super important. think quite often people focus on the new, new, new, new, new without forgetting the people that they’ve already got. I am curious to pick your brains in the form that you filled in for the show. You mentioned that you increased organic quick organic clicks, I should say, by quite a huge amount. So it’s about two point three K to almost 11 K in just over a year. First of all, congratulations. That is seriously impressive, especially within such

Ryan Jones (04:28.686)
experiments.

Azeem (04:29.352)
around as well. So tell us all about it, how did you do it, what strategies really worked for you do you think?

Ryan Jones (04:37.614)
Yeah, when I first joined, yeah, to give a bit of context, yeah, obviously when I first joined in April, 2023, think the number of organic clicks we had in that month was I 2 ,383. And then last month, which was obviously June, 2024, we did actually cross the 11 ,000 barrier, which obviously I’m very impressed by and give him my ego boost as a marketer. I’m always up for that kind of stuff.

But yeah, going back to how we accomplished it, my first initial meeting with Nick on joining the business, Nick’s obviously the founder. We went through one of like the main marketing strategies for us is maybe trying to go against the grain of other marketers in a sense. And you mentioned it as well in the last point is getting excited and focusing on like every new and shiny thing that comes along. Whereas we we wanted to really drill down and focus on what works and double down on

So for us, we found that content was a big win, even with the limited content that was going out on the site before I joined. It was a massive win. There’s still lots of like high performing blog posts that we’ve got that Nick’s written and Tiago’s written before I joined. So there was a massive focus on increasing publishing cadence. I think our core values helped as well. We try and be a bit different. I’m not saying all businesses do this obviously, but one of our core values is

teach everything we know. So we don’t really, we don’t wanna try and gatekeep any information and we try and make sure that comes across in blog posts that we do. We’ll always mention that there are other ways to do so. So if we’re talking about like how to do a certain thing within SEO testing, we’re not just going to say that you can do it this way in SEO testing. We’re also gonna say that you can actually do this completely for free in Google Search Console. Your only problem

If you use Google Search Console to do it, might take you four hours. Whereas in SEO testing, it’s going to take you five minutes. And that’s where we draw in our sales, but we want to give access to as much information as possible, even if it means people just going and using Search Console on the initial basis. And then the hope would be from there, they realize how much time they could save by coming to us. Given that we’re in SEO.

Ryan Jones (07:00.642)
Given that we’re an SEO testing tool, obviously testing as well is big for us, testing what works and then again, doubling down on it. So a key example is we found that for our site, adding embedding videos in from YouTube really helps with increasing average position, click through rate, that kind of thing. So we now try and put a big focus on every sort of big blog post that we do. Tiago, who’s a bit of a video wizard, he’ll create a YouTube video for each of our blog posts that we’ll then embed.

And then I think an underrated one is relationship building as well. So you’ll be familiar with obviously a lady. We’ve got like a nice relationship with her. She shares a lot of our stuff just naturally, which can help purely from like an SEO perspective of like when she shares it on SEO FOMO and that kind of thing, we get a nice little backlink, but

Azeem (07:38.085)
Hmm, yep.

Ryan Jones (07:54.818)
organically taking, making use of her list as well as our list and that kind of thing for that stuff. think building relationships is a big win as

Azeem (08:04.611)
No absolutely and the point you made about time -saving is such a huge thing I’m conscious not

Deliberately ask a motive question. Does I I work in SAS as well? And I don’t want to add my you know own thoughts on this I’m keen to hear from you and that’s why the people are here, but the idea of time saving is Massive like literally if I’m looking for something for myself or anything Time has to be first. I want to be able to do what I do Faster than how I would normally do it because then I can focus on all the shiny stuff But anyway too much about me. Let’s go

to you so you mentioned there about your approach and a couple of things that you did I’d love to dive into that so how would you say that the approach is different when you’re talking about content marketing for SAS how would you say that’s different to other industries for example

Ryan Jones (08:59.67)
Yeah, yeah. So when I think about it, I think there’s probably sort of three main areas where it might be slightly different. One being the fact that with SaaS, as you’ll know, there needs to be a massive emphasis on educational content. So we need to educate our, basically our customers are gonna have a range of complex problems that they wanna solve. Obviously time saving being one of them. It might be stuff that current software that they’re using

isn’t doing the job. So we need to make a big part of our content and focus it on how customers can solve the problems that they’re gonna have by using in our case, obviously SEO testing, but like competitors of ours will do the same thing as well. So educational blog posts, like those traditional like how to guides, webinars as well. And then I think there needs to be an emphasis on

the actual benefits that you can get and use cases as well. So we will draw that down into ours, obviously time saving being the number one, but another big one is we feel like SEOs can feel a bit undervalued sometimes and maybe they struggle to show the actual value of our work. So obviously being a testing based business, we can allow customers to do SEO tests and then say, hey, I did this and it resulted in this very easily, especially when you KPIs

organic traffic and that kind of thing. But then for that kind of stuff, like to show the benefits, that’s where it then jumps into like customer success stories, case studies, obviously the traditional feature pages that all SaaS businesses need to have. And then personalization as well. Given that if you were to compare SaaS to e -commerce, for example, I always go back to e -commerce because I worked in e -com before. whereas like if you’re an e -commerce business selling, I don’t know,

home furniture or something, you’ve got this massive rate, like customer base that could be anyone. Like you do like customer buyer personas, you could have anyone from like a single homeowner earning 30 grand. Like they could be one of your customers. then it could be like a 60 year old who earns 790 grand or whatever. Whereas for SaaS, there’s probably a more specific.

Azeem (11:16.271)
Mm -hmm.

Ryan Jones (11:22.434)
customer base that you need to focus on. So for us, it would be like agency clients, in -house SEO executives, consultants, and then that’s who we generally try and focus on. So you need to then work on personalizing the content to suit that type of customer.

Azeem (11:43.194)
Yeah, absolutely. Personalization is key and I think…

a lot of people in the SAS game maybe skip over that part for various reasons. One of the things I’m keen to learn from you about is different stages of the funnel, I should say. And I’d love to start with the top of funnel content, something that you mentioned in the form before we spoke.

was about top of funnel content. Why do you think that’s still important in your marketing strategy for top of funnel content?

Ryan Jones (12:23.406)
I the easiest thing to say is because for us it works still. actually had a minor sort of LinkedIn debate with, you might be familiar with, Guitardo over in the States. He’s quite big on LinkedIn and Twitter and that kind of stuff. And he put out a big LinkedIn post saying that top of the funnel content doesn’t work anymore. So naturally I had to disagree with him. I mean, we track, I like disagreeing with people occasionally.

Azeem (12:51.131)
Hahaha

Ryan Jones (12:53.518)
Yeah, we track the attribution for all of the people who will sign up for a trial of SEO testing. It’s a little bit messy, but one of the things we can see is, so anyone who signs up for a new trial will generally be able to find out what page they first visited on our site. Not necessarily the page that they were on before they clicked sign up, but the actual first page that they visited.

And we can see plenty of examples where they’ve clicked on a blog post that we’ve written that we’ve written exclusively for that kind of top of the funnel market. So a couple of examples of, we have a guide on some of the top browser extensions that you can use for SEO. So it’s like, it mentions our Chrome extension, but I think there’s a big list of 25 tools, I think maybe off the top of my head that we write about. And

Yeah, we got a lot of traffic and leads coming from there, but other examples include we’ve got like this massive library of GSC based content, given that we are to use GSC’s API. We’ve got like an article on keyword cannibalization tools that we can use. And in all of those articles, we mentioned SEO testing, but we also mentioned other tools as well. But yeah, I think it all just goes back to top of the funnel being important because it works.

And then at the same time is in order to start moving people through the funnel, you still need to bring in those people at the top of the, at the very top of the funnel and, then focus on it from

Azeem (14:33.274)
Yeah, absolutely. And no names mentioned because we don’t throw shade on this podcast, but that’s a very big point you made there. But when you’re talking about different options for things, not putting yourself first and also listing others is a really big point. Again, I’m speaking from my own behavior, but if I’m looking for.

anything and it happened upon a list. I’ll always look at who wrote it and see if they put themselves first because for me immediately that’s not objective. I want to see a list of everything by someone who does include themselves, which is fine, but not putting themselves as like number one. Let’s move on. Let’s talk about the rest of the funnel. You talked about the top. How do you adjust your tactics for them? Different stages of the funnel further down or in the middle? What do you do that’s different?

Ryan Jones (15:18.05)
Yeah, so we don’t necessarily change anything when it comes to different funnel styles or parts of the funnel. if you work in that sort of traditional, maybe not top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, but if you break it down into, I think it’s HubSpot’s model originally of awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and advocacy. If you kind of use those…

as you sort of starting points, you’re aware the stage is going to be stuff like your content marketing, social media, paid ads, even podcasts, obviously is a good example considering we’re here on a podcast now. And then from there, obviously consideration, it moves into webinars and demos that Nick does on like a weekly basis, case study stuff, email marketing, like we’ve got a big email list of current subscribers, as well as people who have obviously used SEO testing in the past.

and then have maybe left the tool, but still have been on the email list and then working towards them sort of making that buying decision. So that’s when like the free trial model comes into play, which is why it’s still obviously used by almost every SaaS business. Personalized demos, if it might be a bigger customer, extended trials. So like in certain instances, if I’m at an event or something, I might put on my LinkedIn.

saying I’m here and if you can come and grab me then you can get maybe an extended trial and then sort of obviously your sales follow -ups and then your sort of retention -based stuff, onboarding programs, customer support, we’re small team. There’s all of us who chip in on support on a daily basis, check -ins with people who, even if they’re just on trials, just like a check -in after a week or something and saying how are you getting on? Is there anything we can help with? Which I guess…

becomes more difficult as obviously you get bigger, but we’re still at the stage where we can do that sort of stuff. And then moving into different things as well. Like, so trying to gain that advocacy. One of our big ones is the affiliate program that we have, which obviously works and we get a lot of leads coming through from there. But so I don’t necessarily say we change it depending on which stage people are in. It’s just, have, we just make sure we cover every area.

Azeem (17:35.269)
Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. So let me dig in then because you talked a lot about your content marketing. What makes a successful piece of content marketing for you? What metrics are you looking at specifically to say, right, that was a success for us?

Ryan Jones (17:50.22)
Yeah. So that kind of splits into two things because whilst I don’t know, I’m trying to remember who I actually said this to originally, but I did make a comment once that whilst I am technically a marketing manager and sort of I’m the one responsible for different stages of I am still an SEO at heart. I think I may always be an SEO at heart, but yeah, my, my KPIs and the KPIs that we track are split into two. So we have

Azeem (17:58.458)
Yeah

Ryan Jones (18:19.692)
obviously purely SEO based KPIs. And then we have more sort of business orientated ones as well. So clicks, impressions, CTR, keyword rankings for different keywords that we might be tracking that kind of thing. That’s all, that’s all looked at. if it’s a specific piece of content that we actually put out, we maybe want to be able to look at it the next quarter and say, well, it was, it’s been published now for three months. It’s had this many people visit

It’s had this many referring domains. We’ve had a referring link from HubSpot or whatever it is. And that kind of thing. So we track that, but then we obviously naturally have to track the business stuff as well. as a more sort of bird’s eye view, we track obviously MRI or the actual number of people that we have subscribed, customer lifetime value. And then I think the big one for us is obviously churn is trying to keep our churn low.

Azeem (19:13.383)
Yeah, no, that makes sense. I’ve got a curve ball for you before we carry on. There are people who I’ve spoken to in the past who work in businesses and places where they want to see an immediate result from a piece of content that they’ve put out. So they’ll say publish a blog post. And then within a week, they’ll hear, right, what we how is this doing? Are we ranking? Why not? Why is it not success straight away? I wanted the success yesterday.

If you’ve been in that situation, what advice would you give to somebody who’s listening or watching right now is in that situation thinking, right, it sounds great so far, you’ve talked about three months, we’ll review it, but I work in a business where my boss or the CEO wants to see results like 20 seconds after I hit publish. What advice do you have for people in that position?

Ryan Jones (20:04.952)
Yeah, and I have been in that position before actually, one of my first agencies that I worked at, obviously not mentioning any names, but we were in that position quite obviously recently and it was, we published this and we need to see this much traffic in this amount of time, otherwise it’s a failure. And I think from my point of view, it comes down to maybe sort of a re -education.

of it and trying to educate whether it’s clients or live managers and that kind of thing and saying, look, we’re, we’re, we are right now just not in a position where we can publish a piece of content and have it rank in, in position one to three or whatever in that space of time. And I think unless you’re lucky to be in one of these like massively well -known industries with like, like websites with millions of using

And they’re lucky enough to publish a piece of content and they have that authority to have it ranking like kind of straight away. I think for almost every other business out there, it’s just not possible. So for us, may be, yeah, it’s about maybe education and saying, well, we don’t necessarily have to track traffic straight away from Google or Bing or whatever it is, but we can get, we can get, certainly get eyes on the piece of content.

And one of the models we try and follow is, I’m sure you’ll be familiar is someone I respect very much is Ross Simmons with his create once distribute forever model. And that works in obviously two ways. It’s you say you can have a blog post and then you can turn that blog post into, I don’t know, five LinkedIn posts, five tweets. You can do like a Twitter threads. I still call it Twitter and not X. will never change.

Azeem (21:50.343)
Same.

Ryan Jones (21:53.25)
But, and then you could do a YouTube video, you could do a podcast based on this blog, like a podcast episode based on the blog post. And it’s, you can get eyes on content without necessarily getting eyes on the content. If that makes sense, you can get eyes from other methods whilst that content takes the time it needs to rank to get backlinks, to do all that kind of stuff that needs to happen in the background.

Because even for us now, we might be like a highly authoritative company in the sort of very niche market of SEO testing, but it still takes a while for our content to rank. But whilst we do that, we make sure it’s shared in other places, on social media, we do our YouTube videos about it and that kind of

Azeem (22:42.587)
Yeah, no, that makes sense. Thanks for sharing that. A couple more before we unfortunately have to part ways. I think we’ll end it on the SAS points. It’s one of the focuses of the episode. Many certainly feel that SAS marketing, it’s a long game and it takes probably even longer than several disciplines to see any meaningful results. I’ve deliberately included that subjective part.

What would you say to people who think that is such a long game? What would you say to that?

Ryan Jones (23:15.02)
I have a tendency to agree with them. I do agree with them. do agree with them because we obviously we talked about it a little bit earlier. We’ve had this nice sort of traffic growth curve that all SEOs want to see almost like if you look at it from certain perspectives, it can almost look like that hockey stick growth in terms of the actual clicks that we’ve been getting. But and whilst the whilst the actual business metrics are going up as well, the business is making more money and that kind of thing.

Azeem (23:17.35)
Yeah

Ryan Jones (23:45.196)
that’s a slower process. So I think you can look at it from two perspectives. So if there are people out there that says SAS is a long game and it takes a long time. And when you said meaningful, that’s where I then focus on the actual business metrics. So MRI, ARR, lifetime value, all that kind of thing. Because that, think, is the longer game. There’s different things that play into that. SAS has maybe a complex sales cycle or a longer sales cycle than certain things, especially

you’re at that higher price point. You need to do all this work on building trust, making sure that people realize that you know what you’re talking about and you need to spend time educating potential customers on obviously how to use the product and what the benefits are. Then you’ve got to go through like customer onboarding and all that kind of thing. And sometimes that might happen even before anyone’s actually signed up and put any payment details in. But whilst it is in my opinion, a longer game, I think

I there’s benefits to that. I think you can develop stronger customer relationships. You can have that chance to build a higher customer lifetime value, a chance to actually build a bit of market leadership if you really invest in all your time and effort into becoming one of the sort of authorities in your niche. And then obviously with the better customer relationships comes obviously the chance to improve your product as well. One of our big examples

We have a Slack group of all our customers. So obviously one of the main goals in there is, they can ask other customers, Hey, we have this problem. How are we solving it? Or I’ve done this test and seen these results of anyone seeing anything like different or has anyone seen the same thing? And then a big part of the, as of the Slack group is we can release new features and do beta tests is we can release features to certain customers and say, say in that Slack group, we’re releasing this soon.

But does anyone want to be a beta tester first and that kind of thing. And that’s been really advantageous for

Azeem (25:50.588)
Yeah, absolutely, I love that. I love the fact that you’ve built a community of your users and allow them to sort of talk to each other. think very few people I can think of are doing that, so it’s great to hear that’s success for you. Last one for you before you give me the all important details about where people can find you and whatnot.

There are people listening and watching this and they want to improve their SAS marketing strategy. What advice do you have for those people specifically? What can they do, let’s say for example, tomorrow morning after hearing this episode or straight after they press stop, what can they do to be better?

Ryan Jones (26:30.488)
think the biggest one is if you’re not currently doing it, you should start talking to your customers. That’s it, that’s a big one for us. Whether I’m at an event or on a Slack group or something, if I can have the chance to talk to one of our customers, then I will. Because at the end of the day, your North Star metric of are people gonna be happy when they sign up? Because they can tell you exactly how they’re using the product, exactly.

what problems they’re having that you can then work and solve. think your customers are definitely the biggest point. One of the things we try and do as well is, and we have a bit of a, a memorable random kind of name for it is we call them Sparkle crews. But essentially it kind of just means try and build a network of other people in SAS. Obviously I’m not necessarily talking about like competitors or anyone like that, but people who are in a similar space in SAS space

Azeem (27:22.674)
Hmm, yeah.

Ryan Jones (27:28.578)
just build that relationship so you can, like, if it’s WhatsApp or messaging them on Twitter and saying, hey, I’ve got maybe this problem, do you have any time to like jump on a quick call or have you seen this before or whatever? And you can ask them what they’ve been doing that’s working, which I’ve found a lot of people are more than happy to be in on that, especially if you’re not a competitor and there’s, for all the negativity that there is in sort of SEO, Twitter and whatever.

There’s a hell of a lot of positivity too. And people are all about building people up and, and, everything like that. And if someone has five minutes to help you, then they will. And I’m going to bring it back to testing because I work for SEO testing is, is keep testing different things. If you have ideas, it could be like the smallest thing, like it all, like the biggest, one of our biggest content wins is obviously adding videos into, into our blog posts. And that came almost on, on a whim.

and we did like a small scale test, realised it had positive results and now that’s like one of the staples that we do. just, if you have an idea, test it and if it works, then double down on it until it doesn’t work.

Azeem (28:42.441)
Yeah, no, absolutely. That’s a great piece of advice and testing is something that I don’t think people do enough of. So it’s a great view to end on that point. So yeah, look, thanks very much Ryan. This has been a fantastic episode. Before you go, can’t let you go without sharing like all the important details. Where can people find, follow, connect with you on social media?

Ryan Jones (29:05.762)
Yep. Two biggest ones, Twitter and LinkedIn. can find me. Twitter is at Ryan Jones SEO and LinkedIn is just, think forward slash Ryan dash G dash Jones. but yeah, as, as long as you’re not confusing me with the SEO of the same name in America, can me, you can find me pretty easily on, on, on social platforms.

Azeem (29:22.406)
Ha ha ha!

Azeem (29:27.826)
No, I’ll add those links into the show notes. And yeah, guess all that’s left to say is look, please do give Ryan a follow, connect with him, say thanks for sharing his knowledge and wisdom with you all. Please do like, rate, share and subscribe. We’re on Spotify video, which is where a lot of you seem to enjoy the video version. We’re also on YouTube as well. We’ll be back for another episode real soon. But once again, thanks for listening and we will see you soon.

Peace.

Reema Vadoliya kicks off S6, join us as we explore how AI is reshaping businesses, highlighting both the upsides and challenges. We discuss the importance of making data more accessible to combat bias in AI systems and the hurdles companies face in this effort.

Reema describes herself as a passionate business founder, storyteller, and advocate for inclusion in data. She has extensive experience in data strategy, analytical exploration, data collection, and governance. She’s on a mission to challenge the perception of data as a dreary necessity and draw out the real human stories that organically empower intentional inclusion in data and beyond.

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My website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.iamazeemdigital.com/⁠⁠⁠

Reema’s LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/reemavadoliya/

Episode Transcript

Azeem (00:01.6)

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Azeem Digital Asks podcast. We’re back for another season. I cannot wait. It’s been a long time coming, but I will not bore you with what’s happened in between. That’s a story for another day. Please also, you know, as usual, like, rate, share and subscribe. I’ve got a brilliant guest for you today, Reema Vardolia. I’m not gonna talk too much because you are here to see and listen.

to all of the good lists that they’ve got to share with us. So without further ado, would you like to introduce yourself to the audience?

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (00:34.922)

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much having me, Azeem. So I’m Reema Vadolia. I run People of Data. For the last seven or so years, I’ve been working in data and analytics, and I absolutely, truly love it so, so much, which isn’t how everyone thinks about data. But through all of the work that I’ve done, working at big companies and small companies and speaking at conference stages, I’ve not necessarily talked about my own personal experiences with data and…

how as a person who ticks a lot of the protected characteristics box on those supposed diversity and inclusion forms, that it just feels endlessly frustrated to be just put into a teeny tiny box. So that’s why last year I quit my job to start People of Data. And it’s all about collecting data inclusively in a way that we can represent the brilliant diversity and intersectionality that we all hold as individuals so that we can actually use.

people’s data to do good things and actually, you know, serve them well and build trust and make data maybe even like a tiny bit exciting for people. You don’t have to go as far as to loving it. But if I can make people even just a tiny bit excited, then I think I’ve done a good job. So that’s me.

Azeem (01:47.424)

Amazing, and that right there is why I don’t intro the guests because I cannot top that. So that’s really what we’re gonna be talking about today. And I’m really excited to get into this topic with you. I guess naturally the first place that I can start then we’re talking about some data AI. The obvious one, a lot of my audience are in businesses, have their own businesses. How do you think that AI impacts businesses either positively or negatively?

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (02:16.298)

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, AI, it depends how much you’re using it as to how you feel about it. From my perspective, I think it can be an incredibly time -saving tool. I think it can provide a bit of clarity and break some of the silos that you might have. I’m thinking about kind of more the chat GPT thing things at the moment, but even in tools such as Canva or, you know, other tools where you’ve got AI.

you know, quote unquote, working in the background there for you, it’s allowing you to interact with something other than just yourself. And I think that can be really, really useful to just break down some of those silos that occur when you’re working on your own. But I think some of the negative things are we sometimes trust it a little bit too much or take things that it says verbatim and allow us to

of stretch the truth a little bit or actually worse still is compound the truth and I think all the bias and the kind of exclusion that it can create really. So I think that’s kind of where we need to be cautious when we’re using it as with everything I guess the same and maybe this is too simplistic to compare it to but if you’re putting your shoes on you need to make sure that you don’t have a stone in your shoe and that you tie in your shoelaces. It’s you know everything should be used with a little bit of caution and risk.

assessment but certain things feels like you should be comparing that a little bit more.

Azeem (03:42.72)

No, absolutely. I love that analogy. I’m absolutely going to steal that. So I’m just letting you know in advance. Thank you very much. You talked about accessibility and making data more accessible. You also touched on bias as well. So how would you say that making data more accessible would help to combat bias in sort of AI systems and tools?

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (03:48.33)

Yeah, cool.

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (04:08.842)

Yeah, so I want to start off a bit about talking about what accessibility really is. So I’m going to read this definition here. The way that I see it and kind of the definition that I think is appropriate here is it’s the practice of making information, activities and or environments sensible, meaningful and usable for as many people as possible. And I think there’s a few key things in there is like sensible, meaningful, usable for as many people as possible. So when we think about that,

In a data perspective, what I mean is it’s like the practice of making data sensible, meaningful, usable for as many people as possible. And I don’t believe that data is seen in that way at the moment. What I see and what I hear when I tell people also that I work in data and I do it with a smile on my face, people are just like, I don’t like data. It’s not, you know, I’m not good at maths and

Or what, what does data mean really? And like, you know, I don’t really trust any sort of data. And then we start talking about AI sometimes too. But for me, data accessibility is about making it not just fun, but yes, sensible, meaningful, usable. So when we think about how AI works to again, hugely oversimplify here is it takes information in does some sort of processing based on the information that it knows and the context that it knows, and then it spits out an output.

And that output there is entirely dependent on two things. One, which data has gone into it and two, how it’s actually processing that data. So the thing is, is if we put in information that’s not sensible, meaningful, usable, then what we’re doing on the outside, on the output of the AI is getting, you know, non nonsensical, not meaningful, not really usable data and information, but we don’t understand how.

not sensible, not meaningful, not usable that information is when it goes in. So for me, what I’m really talking about with data accessibility is how do we make sure that that data is actually representing, representing all of people’s like brilliant intersectional identities. And right now when we use protected characteristics to define someone, we’re not really looking into who they truly are and, you know, what do they represent and, and, and

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (06:26.858)

you know, the brilliant fun things that those boxes just can never capture really.

Azeem (06:33.76)

Absolutely. You made me think of something there because as you were speaking, I was thinking a lot of people probably don’t consider that. I think so. I mean, feel free, feel free to disagree. But I think a lot of people don’t consider what they’re putting in quite quickly, not quite quickly, quite easily because they just want the easiest answer that comes out of it. I don’t think a lot of people consider that. Why do you think that’s the case? Why do you think people just don’t really think about that? Those signs of things.

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (07:03.018)

think it’s a little bit of the dopamine factory wanting a quick win and having the opportunity to do all of that those things I mentioned, you know, like get the creative output, get that feedback really, really fast, get the time that you save. But I think there’s just something around if you’re saving hours, hopefully, from using some of these tools, then how do you just redirect five to 10 minutes of that to do some of these checks and just just

just have a little pause there and just think about what it is that’s actually kind of going on in and around that interaction that you’ve had there. But I think the reason why is because we are just as humans, like there’s so many things that compete for our priority and our time that to do a due diligence check with your data and your AI is just on a long list of things to do, you know, because then if we go back to that shoe analogy, would we go back and check that the shoe is definitely made in an exact

right way, like you have trust with a brand that once I put my shoe on, the sole is not just going to suddenly fall off or that when it rains, my feet are going to get entirely soaked. So I think it’s about, there’s a trust that is just given automatically in some of these spaces. I think we, not enough people are looking to get their trust earned in this domain, which yeah, we trust tech a lot. I think that can be a good thing and a bad thing, right?

Azeem (08:24.416)

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I couldn’t, I couldn’t agree with you more sometimes probably too much if I think about my own behaviors, but the episodes a lot about me. So apologies for digressing. Right. We’ve talked a lot about data accessibility. The point that you’ve mentioned that the term that you’ve used quite a lot from a, from a business point of view, what challenges would you say that businesses face when they’re trying to improve this? And how would you think business businesses can.

to tackle these issues.

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (08:55.818)

Yeah, I think when I talk about accessibility, inclusion, diversity, it can be really easy to think that’s just HR’s role. But with all of this, and when we’re thinking about people’s information, we’re not just talking about your team and who’s in your company. We’re thinking about who are your customers and how do we understand who they are. And also that might be your external stakeholders, like your funders or…

know, it could be anyone. It could just be someone that has awareness of your brand. And I think that’s where businesses really need to care about data. I think that’s a point that’s been given plenty of times. And, and just to touch on it briefly, data is information. It gives us access to knowledge. It allows us to go kind of past just gut feeling. And so this is all really, really important because it allows us to make really good and like, you know, evidence -based business decisions. And so why people should…

care about this is because if we can understand truly who our stakeholders, who our audiences are, then what we can do is start to serve them better. And what does serving them better mean? It means meeting our organizational goals. To put it the most simply, what does that mean? It means that we’re getting the money that we’re seeking to earn from our audiences to make the business keep on running. So I think this truly isn’t just a nice to have exercise. This is really, how do we understand?

what we’re actually doing and the impact that we’re doing in an inclusive way, because there’s some really interesting statistics out there about, you know, Gen Z and the accountability that they hold for two brands to say, okay, if I’m going to work at your company, I really need you to have a really solid and actionable diversity and inclusion plan. Otherwise I don’t want to work at your company. It’s really easy for someone to go on TikTok or Instagram.

and just write something online and, and completely just trash a brand. So how do we build trust with these people in, you know, like a digital world that’s so fragile. And I think what that comes from is building trust. How does that come is in the interactions that we have the one way ones that are an individual just handing over that information. We need to make sure that we’re actually being clear as to why do we need this information? What are we doing with it?

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (11:13.386)

GDPR in theory does help with this, but I do see a lot of cases, unfortunately, where people are just saying, well, I need this data just for a board report, or I need this data just for information purposes. But that’s not actually a very clear reason. That’s, you know, I think we need to be adding a lot more clarity on how and why we’re using data.

Azeem (11:32.928)

Yeah, definitely. I’ve done an episode in the past purely purely on data where we had a conversation about very something very similar to what you just said. Somebody asked for data to make their theory work. So rather than being led by what the data actually says, this person in their request said, I want you to find the data that tells this story for me, which is strictly the truth, which, excuse me, kind of leads me on to

The point about regulation, and you’re talking a lot about AI and stuff as well, which brings me quite nicely to the point, or the question I should say is, we’re probably a bit too far down the road now, but you know, lever say lever, do you think that AI should be regulated? And if so, who do you think should be accountable to ensure diversity in all of the models and training sets that are out there?

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (12:30.058)

Yeah, the short answer is absolutely we need regulation on this. The more complex answer is that it’s really difficult to know who’s the right person and who’s the right body that exists as an organization that can keep up with the pace of change in this. I’ve spoken to some people who work in, you know, cyber security, who on a literal daily to hourly basis, sometimes are changing their slides before a presentation conference because it’s just changing that fast and

Yeah, I wish there was some way we could kind of slow it down. And I think there have been a few signs of that happening with some, you know, document signed from, from big tech leaders kind of saying, maybe we should slow this down a little bit. But I think the challenge that we come to is curiosity is there to see what we can do with AI and the curiosity sometimes wins over the, should we be doing this? And it’s the, can we be doing this? That’s the question that normally gets answered.

I think yes, absolutely we need regulation. I think there’s some really interesting organizations that exist like the Alan Durin Institute has a lot of brilliant research that’s going on there. I know there’s obviously the European kind of organizations. I think it was just this morning or yesterday that I was reading about their EU AI something or other organization being built. I definitely should know what it’s called, but

I’m sure that will be available. But yeah, I think it’s about holding each other accountable and understanding what the risks are to not doing that. And I think the risks are talked about well enough. Yeah.

Azeem (14:10.88)

Yeah, absolutely. And if it does come to you after we record, we can always share it in the show notes. That’s not a problem at all. There’s so much there. My head is just literally going around and we’re sure that even once we part ways and I edit this recording, I’m going to regret not asking specific questions. So I’m probably going to have to tap you up for a follow up blog post. But naturally, we’ve talked a lot about sort of where we’ve come from.

where we are. Let’s move on to the future. So when it comes to this sort of area, the topics we’ll be talking about in terms of AI and data accessibility, where do you see things heading in the medium to long term future?

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (14:54.346)

Where I hope that we get to is we can move past protected characteristics as a way to in kind of commercial businesses understand who our audiences are, because I don’t think those questions tend to be specific enough to actually understand how, as an organization, we can serve individuals. I think in public sector spaces, it’s a completely different conversation and there’s still…

I’m still always forming my thoughts on what the right approach there is, but I think kind of within arts and community spaces in particular that we really need to question how we’re collecting this information. And the way that I would love to see that go in the future is we’re asking much broader questions that sure aren’t maybe uniform across all sectors, but it’s giving us an opportunity to really say, like, this is the impact that we’re having. This data collection method of

of using people’s protected characteristics is decades old. It’s arguable as to whether it was fit for purpose a few decades ago, but I think now, especially in such an intersectional society, not just in the UK where you and I live, but across the world like this, so much diversity, which is brilliant across society. So we need to really create a space where we can understand what that looks like and how we can identify the challenges that exist.

Yeah, the short answer is basically a nice, inclusive, friendly way to collect information where individuals don’t question why they’re handing over that information because it’s just very clear to them. And there’s a bit more of a culture around saying, yeah, I’m happy to hand over this data because I trust that you’re going to do something good with it. Whereas right now, I think we’re quite far away from that.

Azeem (16:46.112)

Yeah, absolutely. The trust point is something I was just going to pick up with you on briefly. Do you think that with all this advancement and steps forward in terms of AI and everything else, do you think, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. Where do you think that leaves people’s trust? Do you think that we are less trustworthy now or are we more trustworthy?

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (17:09.194)

complicated. I think it depends on who you are. I was listening to a podcast recently talking about whether phones are bad or just the culture around the internet is bad because those two things are really quite separate. And thinking about how the conversations that can happen on social media create challenge to our narratives. Those things aren’t bad necessarily. But I think

Azeem (17:10.432)

Ugh.

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (17:37.418)

around trust in data where we’re at right now is that people just don’t have a clear understanding of why we’re using it. And they don’t feel like they have any choice and choice and control are really big things in trust. So yeah, I think that’s where we’re at. And you can see it ironically to bring in the protected characteristics across certain demographics around ages. You can see that some people are a lot more trusting because it doesn’t it doesn’t websites are sometimes designed in a way.

where it doesn’t feel like you have a choice but to hand over the information. I’m thinking about some of the flight booking websites. It feels like you’re not having a choice as to whether you can book a seat or not, but you have to and it will cost you 15 pounds or whatever it is. So yeah, I think it kind of comes to that trust and control and people’s experiences as to how that is. But it’s, yeah, as with any negative experience, the negative experience is normally shared a lot further than the positive. So people do hear about those.

times where people’s data is being used and unfortunately abused as well.

Azeem (18:41.856)

Yeah, definitely. My mute button didn’t want to unmute then. We’re rapidly coming towards the end of the episode, which I’m frustrated about because I could literally talk to you for hours about this stuff. Before we do that, I’ve just got a couple more questions for you. One I’m definitely going to put you on the spot for now. We’ve talked quite a lot in terms of AI, data accessibility, diversity.

But is there one thing that you wanted to talk about or discuss that I haven’t asked you about yet? And if so, what is that?

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (19:15.722)

That’s a good question. I think for me, it’s trying to think about how we storytell data for me. Part of the reason why I love it so much is I truly just see it as like an adventure and a place to explore and a playground to take all of the information that’s there and think about, right, how do we build a story from this? How do we say here’s what’s going on? So I would love for people to see data in a different way. And if you’re not comfortable with the word data, think about it as information where

So every single day, probably every single second, I imagine I’m not a bio, biological kind of scientist, but we’re taking in so much information all of the time and we’re processing so, so much in our brains. So I just want to kind of reframe data as not something that just exists in spreadsheets or bar charts or pie charts or whichever chart you prefer, but something that you can create really bold, clear narratives of that allow you to

get more understanding. I think there’s a difference between data and like that kind of information part of things over here and the understanding that you can get from a really brilliant story. So yeah, if you want to get a little bit excited about data, then it’s a, I think hopefully I can make people feel that way.

Azeem (20:32.608)

Amazing, I love it. Just before you go and before you share all of your social details and whatever, let’s distill it down into one thing. So everything you’ve been speaking about over the past 20 minutes or so, what’s the one thing that you’d like people to take away from this episode? Whether you want to hit stop recording and let’s start to reflect on what they’ve seen or heard. What’s one thing you’d like people to take away from this?

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (20:58.474)

that data doesn’t have to be scary. It can definitely seem overwhelming and like we don’t have that control and trust and, and opportunity to kind of have an influence in how we use data. But I really want to get to a place where data is not scary for people and they can understand that they do have control, that it’s something that impacts all of us. And yeah, that it’s really not something to be nervous about because

and I think that will come from the fact that we will hold organisations to account when they’re asking for information.

Azeem (21:33.536)

Love it. Fantastic. Yeah, my mind is going 100 miles an hour now with lots of stuff that you’ve discussed and I’m sure I’ll have more questions afterwards. So be ready for a couple of emails. But yeah, before I let you go, firstly, thank you so much from me and for the people who are going to listen to and watch this in advance. This has been incredible. Before you go, though, please do share where people can sort of find you and follow you on social media and also be sure to check the show notes because I’ll drop all of these links in as well.

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (22:04.426)

Perfect. Well, yeah, thank you so much for having me. I’ve had a fun time chatting. I am normally on LinkedIn doing lots of things, talking about data on there and, and yeah, starting to share my excitement over there. So you can find me, Rima Vidolia on LinkedIn. Same for people of data, people of data on LinkedIn. We’ve also got Instagram, which I can’t remember where the underscores are, but people of data on there and soon to have a few other things coming up. But for now.

LinkedIn is probably the best place and I would love to chat to you about your data, how you feel about data and allow you to kind of enable some success and unlock the information that comes from collecting really good and meaningful data, which is come from a place of trust as well.

Azeem (22:51.68)

Amazing. Love that. Definitely do collect because she’s an absolute legend. I’m very glad that our paths crossed earlier this year. So yeah, thank you very much. This has been absolutely incredible. Yeah. And I think that wraps up this episode. So a massive thank you. As always, the boring stuff, please do like, write, share and subscribe. We are back. We are so back. You can expect much more content and you’ll be seeing a lot of re -read all over.

my social media soon because I’m going to be promoting the hell out of this episode. So if you’re not subscribed, make sure you subscribe already because we’ve got way more content coming and I’m going to get a whole load of content out of this episode. Literally, I could do a whole month based on what you’ve just said. So thank you so much. And yeah, stay tuned and we’ll see you for the next episode.

Reema Vadoliya (She/her) (23:43.946)

Thank you.

What Fiona Bradley doesn’t know about organic LinkedIn success, probably isn’t worth knowing in my opinion. This episode will not teach you how to grow on LinkedIn by posting about the injured dog that you ignored on the way to a job interview, only to find out the dog WAS the interviewer. Instead, Fiona helpfully shares tips and advice on post formats, how to engage, and being authentic to achieve growth on the platform – you definitely don’t want to miss this one.

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Fiona describes herself as a content master, business owner, slow runner, bendy yogi and writer. She runs a Leeds-city centre-based boutique Content Marketing Agency “FB Comms” with a sense of humour, who’s mission it is to create killer content with service that slaps.. not in the way that hurts.

As always, if you enjoyed this, and previous episodes, please like, rate, share, and subscribe to the podcast – it all helps!  

Useful Links

Podcast page: ⁠⁠https://anchor.fm/azeemdigitalasks⁠⁠

My Twitter page: ⁠⁠https://twitter.com/AzeemDigital⁠⁠

My LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/azeema1/⁠⁠

My website: ⁠⁠https://www.iamazeemdigital.com/⁠

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Fiona’s LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/fiona-content-marketing/

FB Comms: https://fbcomms.co.uk/

Katy Powell, one third of the leadership team at Bottled Imagination shares her story on what it’s like to be a female business founder in the marketing industry, as well as the challenges she has faced.

*As a reminder, you can now also get this podcast in video form, on both Spotify video, or YouTube.*

Listen/watch now, right above the subscribe button, or pick your favourite listening platform from this list:

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Described as “an expert in all things PR, thinking up ideas that take over the internet and putting brands front and centre in trending conversations. Nothing distracts her when she’s in the PR zone – apart from a Britney Spears megamix” – you’ll easily be able to see (and hear!) why this is one episode that’s not to be missed.

As always, if you enjoyed this, and previous episodes, please like, rate, share, and subscribe to the podcast – it all helps!  

Useful Links

Podcast page: ⁠⁠⁠https://anchor.fm/azeemdigitalasks⁠⁠⁠

My Twitter page: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/AzeemDigital⁠⁠⁠

My LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/azeema1/⁠⁠⁠

My website: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.iamazeemdigital.com/⁠⁠

Katy’s Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/katyvpowell⁠

Katy’s LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/katy-powell-333717127/⁠

Bottled Imagination: ⁠https://bottledimagination.com/