Marketing Nuggets

Nobody teaches marketers how to do budgets. You get promoted, someone hands you a spreadsheet and a deadline, and suddenly you're responsible for one of the most consequential documents of your year, the one that determines what your strategy can actually achieve. I've owned and talked through marketing budgets for years, and this episode is everything I've learnt doing it for real:...

I was asked to build a brand campaign plan. Full one. In 48 hours. This episode is the honest story of what happened next, and by the end of it, you'll have a completely different relationship with that kind of deadline. You'll have a specific move for turning panic into a list the moment overwhelm hits. You'll know how to stop trying to build the whole campaign and start building o...

You know that strategy document? The important one? The one that has been open in a browser tab for two weeks while you firefight everything else? Welcome to Q4. For some of us that means planning season, budget season and the pre-Christmas deadline crunch. For others it means the peak: Black Friday, Christmas, and the biggest sales days of the entire year landing in a matter of weeks. Two complet...

The moment you get a team, the job quietly changes, and nobody hands you the new rules. You go from being brilliant at the work to being responsible for other people's. And if you're anything like I was, your instinct is to get more involved. More input, more time, more of you. It feels like good leadership. It's actually the fastest way to become the bottleneck your whole team has...

Here's a test for any marketing strategy: look for what it says no to. If the answer is "nothing" - it's not a strategy. It's a wishlist with a logo on it. Last week we did the questions that come before building your 2027 plan. This week is the part nobody enjoys and everybody needs: the choices. Killing the zombie projects that survive on habit. Retiring the channels tha...

It's October. Which means somewhere in your calendar, "2027 planning" is looming - and the temptation is to open a blank deck and start building. Don't. Not yet. Because here's what I've learnt building annual strategies year after year as a marketing leader: the quality of your strategy is decided before you build anything. It's decided in the questions you ask...

Your inbox owns your mornings. Take them back. You've heard about my 5:15 alarm. The lemon, ginger and turmeric tea. The cold shower. (Episode 122, if you missed the full tour.) This episode is not that. Because here's what I've realised since: my routine is not the valuable bit. The system underneath it is - and that system works whether your morning starts at 5:15 or 7:45, whether...

Most handovers are a task list. And most task lists quietly fail the person relying on them. This episode is about the four layers a genuinely good handover is actually made of, and the part almost nobody tells you: you rarely need all four. How many you need comes down to one thing, how long you're going to be gone. By the end you'll know exactly what your operational floor has to conta...

Every B2B marketer has stood in front of the same terrifying question: we have this budget... where does it actually go? LinkedIn? Events? Content? PR? Paid search? A bit of everything? (Spoiler: "a bit of everything" is how B2B budgets go to die.) In this episode - a natural follow-on from last week's launch playbook - I'm sharing how I actually make media decisions as a marke...

It's campaign season. So today you're getting my actual campaign playbook. Not the theoretical version, not something from a textbook, the exact method I use. You'll get the one page I write before a single asset gets built, the four boxes that tell me honestly whether a campaign is ready or just hopeful. The exercise I run to make sure a campaign sounds like nobody else's in t...

Two campaigns. One launch window. And no, it wasn't a calendar accident. A wider brand campaign, and an extension that slotted into it. Launching one without the other made no sense for the audience. Launching both together made complete sense strategically, and roughly doubled the work. This episode is the how. How I split one team into two mini teams and gave each only what they needed to k...

You spend hours preparing the deck. The data. The talking points. And about four minutes preparing the one thing that actually decides how the moment goes: you. In this episode I'm walking you through the full Confidence Stack - the four-layer preparation framework I use before every moment that matters. A big presentation, a senior leadership meeting, a pitch, a visibility moment. If you hea...

You've been telling yourself you'll go for it when you feel ready. The bigger role. The hand up in the leadership meeting. The idea you've been sitting on for months. Here's the thing nobody tells you: that feeling isn't coming. Not because there's something wrong with you - because that's not how readiness works. Readiness isn't a prerequisite. It's a...

I became Head of Marketing before 30. No roadmap. No one showing me the way. And somewhere between the boardrooms, the global campaigns, and the teams I was building from scratch, I realised there were four things nobody had ever taught me. Four areas I had to figure out fast if I wanted to be the marketer my career deserved, my team needed, and the business was asking for. Confidence. Visibility....

I spent a long time waiting for someone to tell me I was ready. Ready to show up differently. To take on more. To be in the rooms that felt more like me.  The stretch project. The seat at the table that felt more like me. And I kept waiting. And doing great work. And waiting a bit more. Until I realised that nobody was coming. Not because I wasn't ready. But because permission was never their...

We are seven months into the year. Which means one of two things is true right now. Either you're ahead of where you thought you'd be - which is brilliant and worth pausing to acknowledge. Or something has drifted, slipped, or quietly gone in a different direction to the plan, which is completely normal and also worth pausing to acknowledge. Either way, now is the perfect moment to stop,...

Finance. Operations. Sales. Senior leadership. There are rooms in every marketing career where you are the only person who thinks the way you think and everyone else wants you to justify, translate, and prove the value of what you do. This episode is about how to do that without losing your perspective, diluting your ideas, or turning into a walking marketing glossary. Because being the only marke...

Nobody tells you this when you start a marketing job: feedback is not guaranteed. You can be working hard, delivering well, showing up consistently and still be operating in almost complete silence about how you're actually landing. No one's telling you what's working. No one's telling you what isn't. And the longer that silence goes on, the more you start filling it with...

Comparison isn't the problem. Reading it wrong is. In this episode, I'm getting into the trap most of us fall into...watching someone else's career, feeling behind, and using their highlight reel to write a story about our own inadequacy. We're naming it, unpicking why it's so addictive, and, most importantly flipping it into something that actually moves you forward. Beca...

On your best days at work - the days where you get to your desk, you know exactly what you're doing, you get into flow, you make real progress on things that matter… what's actually different about those days? I'd bet it's not that you had fewer things to do. It's that you had a plan. You knew what you were protecting. You were in control of your time instead of your time...

Over a decade in marketing and I can tell you the exact moment I stopped being the person who delivered the update and became the person who shaped the direction. It wasn't a promotion. It wasn't a big campaign win. It was the questions I started asking. Most marketing managers are answering questions they should be asking. And that one shift - from answering to asking, is what separates...

One day, about 5 years into my career, my manager pulled me aside and said something that stung for days. "Emma, you're excellent at executing what's in front of you. But I need you to start thinking about what should be in front of you." I went a away defensive. I thought I was doing everything right. But she'd spotted something I couldn't see yet, something I now ca...

Here's something nobody puts in a job description. The signals you send before you open your mouth. Where you sit. How you hold yourself when someone else is speaking. The pace you speak at when you finally do. These things are being read by every room you walk into and most of us have no idea what they're saying. In this episode, I'm talking about the physical and strategic languag...

You've watched someone own a room and told yourself: they're just naturally like that. I used to believe that too. Until I figured out that what I was watching wasn't personality. It was something else entirely. In this episode, I'm dismantling the three biggest myths about presence. The ones that keep brilliant, experienced marketers invisible in exactly the rooms where they n...

Something went wrong. It doesn't matter what - a campaign that tanked, a presentation that died in the room, feedback that landed harder than you expected, a decision that turned out to be the wrong one. It happened publicly. And now you have to figure out what to do next. Not the debrief. Not the lessons learned. The other thing… the emotional reset that nobody talks about and nobody teaches...