Multiple formats. So you need to kind of think about how people digest it as well.

Welcome to the Growth Engine. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Rebecca Hoburg, head of client marketing at Ninety One.

Rebecca, thank you very much for joining us today.

Thank you for having us.

So, Rebecca, let's let's dive in. I'm I'm keen to learn about your journey with Ninety One and and specifically the journey that Ninety One has has taken in sharpening its marketing strategy. And as I understand, you've you've narrowed the focus of your marketing. So can you can you give me a little bit of a explanation around that?

Yeah. For sure. When I joined Ninety One three years ago, the business strategy was quite broad. So we we worked with institutional asset owners as well as advisory clients around the globe.

Particularly in the UK, we had quite a a big advisory business. So at Ninety One on this the business side, we've gone through a scoping exercise of where are we fit for purpose in the market. And like I said, historically, we were more institutional and advisory. And due to the size of the firm, you know, to go deep advisory in some of these markets, you have to have infinite resources.

You have to have big big teams to to go deep even if you're just looking at the UK. You know, you've got you need regional salespeople all up and down the country. Yeah. And I think we realized several things, and I think some of what we realized were what we were not.

But what we are is an emerging market firm. So the business units both on the investment side and what we call client group, which is our sales team, they went through a sizing exercise to say, where are we fit for purpose in in the sort of asset owner space? So where are big asset owners globally allocating capital, and where are we fit? So as an emerging market manager, we really do have an edge there.

We are born and bred in emerging market with our heritage from South Africa.

And I think that is a massive differentiator when you look at our competitors. There are lots of competitors who are headquartered in the US, headquartered maybe in London, who claim to be EM experts, but we actually are born in an EM, market. Yeah. One of the the differences with ninety one marketing is we don't just go off and and do a bunch of things that that sort of is what marketing does.

We we we are a partner with the business. So marketing is at that table in those discussions. And as a result, we said, okay. How are we going to change our strategy to be so focused to help serve the needs of that exercise?

So that's kind of how we came to be much more focused on emerging markets.

I think you said this was three years ago, this the the the the initial I joined three years ago, but the initial bit was probably a year and a half, two years ago.

Okay. So that was when the strategy so the essentially, the company wide strategy has not accrued its focus.

Company ex South Africa.

Yeah. Okay.

So globally ex South Africa. Okay.

It was this this pivotal moment where they said, here's what we are gonna focus on, and here's what we aren't going to focus on.

Which is the the centerpiece of strategy, really, isn't it? Exactly. What you are and, more importantly, what you aren't. So I'm interested to know once that decision had been taken, what does the strategy look like in practice from a marketing perspective once you decided to make the make emerging markets the centerpiece?

I think what it did was it allowed us to focus our resources and efforts. First of all, we obviously didn't stop doing other things. You know, there are lots of strategies that we run that are sitting outside of emerging markets, but I would say that eighty percent of our resources was then, okay, we're gonna be focused on emerging markets. Yeah.

Really, that's content marketing. What are we actually going to be producing with the investment team? There's still a chunk on that twenty percent side that we do on a day to day basis, that, of course, we will service and we we still focus on, but it's on the the content development side. So what we did was we said, okay.

We're gonna go out and tell our emerging market story. When our salespeople speak to clients, when clients are looking to hire an emerging market manager, they need to think of Ninety One. We need to be the EM provider of choice.

So how these to these four hundred companies?

To these four hundred companies. And, you know, how do you do that? Yeah. Because, obviously, b to b marketing, not easy.

It's the measurement that I think is difficult. So how can marketing be part of that? How can we extend the reach of these salespeople? Because, you know, we say four hundred organizations, but within that, you have twenty, thirty people that you need to talk to.

Yeah.

So how could we free up the time of our salespeople to be spending time on those one to one relationships by keeping sort of a air cover and providing coverage for the organizations themselves. So we we, we took a look. We took a step back, within my team and within our investment marketing team, and we said, what have we done well, and what what has our challenge been? So ninety one, I think, is not unlike any manager that I've worked in. You know, the marketing team and your sort of corporate strategy team create beautiful thought leadership, Great pieces that people spend months on creating, and the content sent out to the to the sales team, and then it seems that no one's reading it. Or even internally, people say, I haven't read it, or I didn't even know it was produced. So we needed to to really understand why that was happening, because we have been creating great content for years.

I had a a previous guest, Malcolm Fried came on, and he was telling me about some of the thought leadership content that you create and the the pride that he was taking explaining that. But he was explaining also the the purpose of it about persuading to an an individual to shift capital allocation from one area to another. So Exactly. Every single detail needed to be absolutely point on in order for it to to do that. Because any any any slight error in it then it reflects on the capabilities of the company to actually manage that capital. So it's fascinating Exactly. Fascinating story.

Yeah. So I think it really does start with your content strategy. So, a, what are you writing?

What are you writing about? And it has to be accurate. Like, that's a given. So we took a step back and we said, okay. Why how how do we get this and be more effective and get that content into the hands of these four hundred asset owners?

And I think one of the things we talked about a lot in my team who really handles the distribution of that content, is relevancy. So we've all gotten an email from some sales list you've signed up to at some point, and you forget about it and you're like, what is this thing that I've received? I'm not even gonna look at it. However, if you've signed up for that list and it's something that you're interested in, you're gonna read it. Yeah. So because it's relevant to you. So we said, why not create content that is actually relevant to these buyers?

So as I said before, a lot of our assets are already in EM. Right? So those clients, we want them to allocate more capital. And then we also want to get new clients to allocate capital to EM.

So we wanted to create this triangle between our investment teams, our sales teams, and our marketing team so that you're really working together in a partnership. And it's it's not reinventing the wheel in many cases. So it's like, what are the questions that these clients are asking in meetings Yeah. To our investment teams?

And these these questions are coming in in in in meeting sales meetings on one to one emails, and then the sales teams are sending questions to the investment team all the time. And often repeated questions. And sometimes you get frustration saying, god, you've asked that question a hundred times. Let me send you the answer again.

Yeah.

So we said, let's collate all those questions that are actually coming from clients and create content from that. Yeah. Perfect. So we created a list of questions on the emerging market debt side, and we created a list of questions on our equity side, and we started from that. So we use that as a starting point, and we started creating content.

The the long form content that you referred to and that Malcolm talks very passionately about, still exists. That's the core stuff. That's the why should you allocate capital to EM? Why EM now? You know? And a huge challenge for us is the perceived risk of emerging markets over developed markets. So that's a core trend that goes for everything we do.

So we developed a content series called deliberating EM debt and deliberating EM equities. We started to churn out this content on a regular basis. So then when we acknowledge the challenge that we have had for years and many marketers have, I'm sure, which is you can't just create it and they will come. This is not like field of dreams. You know?

Yeah.

How do you drive people to actually read that content? So this again comes down to that real partnership with the sales team. We need to understand who you're talking to. So the sales team had to do a huge exercise within Salesforce, which is the the dreaded s word that nobody wants to own, to have really honed lists.

And those lists, in some cases, are only a hundred people. Some of them in some regions are five hundred, but they're small list. So we're dealing with small numbers, and that's a huge mindset shift for everybody. Yeah.

So once they got these lists, we said, okay. We're gonna create a regular mailing. So I I personally really just like newsletters or monthly mailings that you have to, you know, because you basically create something you have to fill every month. So we started off saying, we're going to send regular insights to our clients.

Not saying No. Because I just I've we've all been there where you have to suddenly feed the beast that you've created. So we started a client mailing around EM perspectives fixed income and EM perspectives equity. And we use those lists, and we so we created the content from real client need, and then we started to distribute it through this, EM perspectives mailing.

So that started working. You know, we were getting great cut through. We were getting good click through. People were commenting, oh, thank you for the content, but we also do plain text centralized mailings.

Okay.

So dear Rebecca from Joe, you know, how are you? And people surprised didn't know it was a central mailing and they're writing back. Thanks, you know, thanks, John. This is a great piece, which was a huge win for us and that helped us get the sales team on board.

Within those, are you then within the text based emails, are you then directing and saying, you know, oh, this article thought it may be useful, and then sharing links to them to pages on the site where the content's stored.

Correct. So for the plain text ones, it's like a much more conversational page on or whatever Yeah. And then a link to something. I saw this art we've just recently published this article, thought it'd be interesting because of x y zed. Yeah. Have a look. And then we said, okay.

In a world where we are so focused, how do you go external with this? What could you do in the paid world? We're not a firm who has really done a ton of, you know, traditional advertising.

Sure.

And I think why is because of the amount of wastage that you will get Yeah. And the inability to measure that, advertising. Because you just you might hit those four hundred clients, but you also might hit three thousand that you actually can't service in a way you would like to.

Yeah. And you don't want leads coming in from those non ideal clients, which is just gonna suck up people.

Yeah. So thanks very much, but no, we can't help you. Yeah. So we really pulled away from traditional advertising. We still had some budget to allocate towards a paid activity. So we worked with a local agency, Fundamental, who have been really helpful for us in this journey.

And we said, look. This is what we're trying to do. We are only looking to target these, you know, however many per region, and we don't want the other bits. Yeah.

And their response was, wow. That's really targeted. That's going to be quite expensive for what you're getting. And we said, that's okay.

So it was getting our head around internally around quality versus quantity Yeah. Which was a huge shift.

And so basically, what we did was we provided the names of the companies and the job titles that we were looking to target regionally, and they ran that against publishers to say where could you get the most match. So Okay. I think we we went with anything over sixty five to seventy percent in terms of a match. Okay. Those were the publishers we considered. And in a world where, again, our budgets aren't huge, we said we don't wanna spread that across ten publishers. Let's look for two, three that we're gonna partner with.

Okay.

So something I've always had in my mind as a as a marketer is maybe it's the time of you time of life when I moved to Europe, but budgets have never been massive even when I worked at the likes of Vanguard. Yeah. We didn't have this multimillion pound budget. I never have.

So I always had a very strong belief that you wanna choose publishers that you can partner with. So most of the time, they're a tier one publication from a press perspective and a PR earned media. They've got great distribution from a digital perspective, and they often have an events platform as well. Not always, but sometimes.

Yeah. And so if you've identified who you wanna get in front of, you wanna get in front of them multiple times, not just once done. So we identified publishers that we wanted to get our content out.

They?

We work with the Feet. Yeah. So I'm speaking when I'm talking about this, it's Pan European and UK.

Okay.

So we work with the Feet, which I think is an obvious one. IPE, a very strong Pan European title.

As you get into Europe, it becomes quite regional. So we needed to sort of say what what's gonna give us the most bang for our buck. IPE in particular because we do quite a few events with them as well. And then I'm probably gonna forget, CityWire Wealth Manager Yeah.

Because we do events with them, but also they have a really good targeting capacity within their digital publications.

Goldmine, is that?

We didn't use Goldmine. I think Goldmine we have previously, but I would say that's a little bit more deep adviser. And I think, again, when we choose that media mix, we also work with our comms team to make sure that we're not choosing some obscure title. But, you know, we're we're pretty aligned in terms of what's the top tier that we wanna be in front of.

Yeah. We chose those publications that had interesting content distribution opportunities. So whether those were solace emails where we created HTML email that had their logo and ours, and then it gets sent out to their database. We also chose publishers we could geotarget.

Probably the most interesting one, what we talked about, is the Feet.

Is there anything you can show us on?

Yeah. Actually, let's see.

So, yeah, these are a few examples of what we've done, but probably the most interesting one here is the Feet. So it's not rocket science here. The Feet is a great publication. I think we all can agree upon that. They have a great editorial department. This is the only publisher that we've worked with that is hosting the content on their site.

Okay.

We provide three articles from our side. So, again, digging into the content that we've been creating. We send it to them. They lay it out. We provide an image. They put it on their website.

But the most interesting thing here is how they drive traffic to our content. So they drive traffic through there's, banners on their site. Excuse me. But they also target people through LinkedIn.

Okay.

And what fundamental was able to get and secure for us this time around was actually the ability for us to use our client lists to target via the Feet's LinkedIn channel Got it.

Which is quite different and interesting. So it's the first time they've done that.

It's also using our company and job title targeting, but in addition to the lists on on the back end, which has proven really, really positive. So, like, the the stats we've had on it have been well above their their industry benchmark.

So just just to just to get my head around that, what they're doing is that you're creating a content. It's housed on the Feet site, but then they're promoting that content through their Feet LinkedIn channel. Correct. They're targeting those promotions to your individual companies that you've selected, those four hundred companies, and and even down to the individual role or or name of those.

Right? That is very, very Yeah.

You know, it's been something we've had to go through our compliance department and make sure that we we've done everything correct.

But if a client has a LinkedIn account that is tied to their work address, Got it.

Can target them. Yep. So if you've got it connected to your Gmail account, you wouldn't be targeted there. But it has proven really, really, really successful.

And can you do you get data back from the Feet to say, okay.

Like, from your list of x amount of names or company contacts that you've suggested we've reached x amount We aren't able to get down to the individual amount, the individual because they because it's because of GDPR in terms of who Yeah.

Getting what, we are just measured against their benchmark.

Yeah. Got it.

But maybe that's a good sort of stepping stone to talk about our LinkedIn Strategy for this. So, obviously, when you look at paid media, the in b to b, I think the most highly targeted approach is through LinkedIn.

So we identified that because LinkedIn is used globally.

We have quite a robust channel, and that's something you can really own. We've got a great creative team. We've got all of our own content. So we have been doing a lot on LinkedIn.

I'm interested to learn about the creative side on that, and and we'll come to that. But how are you finding what what's the what's the benefit that you're gaining as a business from being LinkedIn? Is it is it a broad awareness of the products? What how how do you measure that?

Yeah. It's an interesting one, I think.

As we look to develop this targeted plan, we spent quite a lot of time with our agency talking about institutional buying behavior. I think for years, people think you put you measure success by clicks. So you go into LinkedIn. You see something.

You click on it. You read an article. That does happen, but I think what we've noticed is it's happening less in the b to b space. So I don't know about you, but, like, if you go on to LinkedIn and a company feeds you an article, I'm not that inclined to click on it.

If you click on if you've commented on it and I know you, I'll stop and I'll read it and say, oh, that's quite interesting, and then maybe you might click. So there's a level that we still need to work on, which is LinkedIn advocacy, which I think is our our our focus for this coming year. But when it comes to the behaviors, it's it's we've got information that tells us that people dwell. So they look at the post, and they carry on.

I think, you know, the behavior, you're sort of swiping on the train as you go to work. You see something, you sort of read it, oh, that's interesting, and you carry on. Yeah.

So It still has value. Totally. I think it does. And I think in a world where you aren't spending a lot of money on advertising, that is kind of pseudo advertising, isn't it? Yeah. It's brand building.

Top of funnel awareness.

Exactly. Exactly. So with that in mind, we we said, how do we actually measure that? What does that look like?

Okay.

So I mentioned the the types of firms we're trying to get and, like, the targeting we were using behind the scenes, but how do we measure that? So working with our agency, we get a quarterly report, monthly report back from them that talks about how many impressions were served to the firms that we were looking at. So those impressions are in the thousands. So over the last three months, how many times did someone from x y and zed pension fund see your content online?

Got it.

And then in addition to that, what we've done with fundamental again is we've, applied a piece of software called LFIX across our entire global, website. And what it does is it picks up firmographic data of visitors.

So we put it on all of our pages, not just the EM pages. And and what that does, again, if your IP address is, associated with the company you work in, it will pick that up when you when you arrive at the site. So, again, this goes back to quality, not quantity. So we also in addition to getting sort of a beautiful doughnut chart that tells us the companies and and the times that they've been served the content, we're also then able to go in and self serve on our own website to show the amount of clicks and the amount of visits that have come from those companies that we're looking at. So that's given us a really different approach in terms of measuring success.

You did mention events. How how does your event strategy work and play into all of this?

Yeah. Good question.

We again, when we're looking at external event activity, so where we're going to go to a sponsored event, we put that same targeting overlay. Are we hitting the right people, and do we have an opportunity to present our original content to those people within the EM space? So that targeting has honed down the list of sponsored activity that we do to a smaller, more targeted approach.

Sometimes those are the same publishers that we're also doing other activity with. Other times, it's it's a particular event that we feel we must be at. So that's our sort of, paid con, events or sponsored events. But on the proprietary events, we launched well, we relaunched, actually. We had been doing something called EM perspectives for years. And I think post or during COVID, we had to shift our strategy.

It used to be a fixed income practitioners workshop, and that was successful at that time. However, as we look to build, you have to kinda have that balance. So this year, we did the practitioners workshop, but we also did a broader EM perspectives event. We did that in the UK. And I think this was an interesting one again about getting buy in from the sales team, which was we're not looking to fill the room with two hundred clients. We're looking to fill the room with high quality clients.

So our our measurement to start with was if we get thirty people who are high quality asset owners, that's a success.

Days.

Yeah.

I think we ended up with seventy five

Which was brilliant.

And that was an opportunity for put to put our proprietary content in front of these people, to have our investment teams front row and center, and to really get them to tell the EM story, which I think is incredibly impactful. And that wasn't just sending one PM. This was, you know, I think we had fifteen PMs who spoke, and we did a day on equities and fixed income. So we did that in the u in London, and then we've actually taken that concept on the road, which is something we need to do often.

So these are these are all in person events. Do you do digital events as well?

To a lesser extent Yeah. We do we we do some webinars. We've had various varied success rates with the webinars.

There's always a question about whether we could roll this out digitally. We have not yet done it. No. But it's it's in the back of our minds of should we do this when we're looking at the regions that kind of sit on the periphery?

Not sure yet. Not sure if we'll do it. Okay.

I'm keen to move dive in a little bit deeper into the content, and then we'll come on to the creative. So different types of formats that that you've used, learned, experimented with. What where have you found success with such a sophisticated audience with the institutional side?

One of the things that I've tried to talk with my team about a lot is people digest content in different ways. You know, you might prefer a really nice long form piece. I might be somebody who prefers a video. Yeah. Somebody else might want to listen to a podcast. So as a starting point, we've tried to say, when we create a piece of content, let's try and splice and dice and stretch that content as much as we can.

Into multiple formats.

Multiple formats. Yeah. So work smarter, not harder with the content because that's key. You know, I talked about scale.

I talked about the fact that these pieces of content have to serve multiple needs. So you need to kind of think about how people digest it as well. So oftentimes, we'd create a big piece, and then we'd create small pieces from that as well as maybe a short video on it, a synopsis. Or we'd start with a video and then create a sort of q and a from the video.

So we did that. But again, going back to Malcolm's point about the pride that we put into these long form really great pieces is, you know, we'll create three or four of those a year.

Yeah.

They're not one and done. It's not a moment in time. It's an evergreen piece of content that really speaks to the core of what we do as a firm. So we have this series of shorter form content running, whether that be in video format or short, content, but then we have these these core pieces.

And I think the challenge in a lot of people in b to b is you write these beautiful thought leadership pieces, but they're so long. You can't use them all the time. So when we look at long form content, we have to create traffic drivers or sort of I don't like the word teasers, but you need to have a reason to read on. And I think sending an email with a fifteen page paper is a little overwhelming sometimes.

So we have spent a lot of time on what those traffic drivers are, and that kinda goes back to our LinkedIn process and our approach, but also how we introduce those in in in email. So I think traffic drivers are are key.

Sorry. I I call them fishing hooks.

Yes. Fishing hooks. I think that's a good one, which is like, what's the reason to click? What's the reason to read on? You know, I think thought leadership has a has a place in a one to one conversation, like big long form pieces, but how do you pull out those interesting charts, those nuggets, those things?

You know, I think most of the time when we create a piece of thought leadership, we have one or two killer charts Yeah.

That should be, like, shown to clients, and how do we bring that to life and get it in front of them? So that's been a big challenge for us.

So I'm and and this is really when we're getting into the the creative side of the of the content. Yeah. And when I when I look at some of your content, there's a lot of data visualization in there, which is absolutely stunning. How did you get to that point with the with with the the the quality of the creative?

It's a good question. Social media team started working closer with my team, and we were saying, some we're not hitting the mark here in terms of our process for social media. I think a lot of of companies put social media as the last thing. So you get an idea for content, you create the content, and then how you distribute the content is sort of secondary.

And you have this group of, you know, really great content writers who write something, and the nature of the beast is that they write it. It's done. They move on to the next thing on their list. I think we all do that.

So what I have tried to instill in the team is that when we create the piece of content, what are those hooks? What is the distribution mechanism going to be? What is the traffic driver? So let's put social first.

So we did a lot of discussion with the in industry folks, like, what should we do here? What are other people doing? Is there some kind something we're missing in the process? And we we ourselves did a little bit of an audit online to say who are the great people in infographics and and data visualization. And then from that, we hosted a day that we called a creative hothouse, which is a bit fit now, maybe, but where we invited not only, like, my distribution kind of team and our writing team, but we also invited our creative team.

Right.

So we have a large creative team and a multimedia team, internally. And one of the things I recognized was there's a few of us who know the content, who work really closely with clients, with the client group. We know what we want to achieve, and we say, actually, let's make a video about that. And we think exactly what we're gonna do with it, and then we just tell the team, the creative team, or the design team, or the digital team, we need a video doing x y zed.

And they go, okay. And they go and do it. Or we're gonna do a social media post. Can you find an image that's nice to use?

And I think we're doing a massive disservice to those people because a, if could you imagine a job where you're just told what to do, but you don't really know how it fits? You you're supposed to sort of understand the content, but you haven't even read it yet.

What if we were to put those people into the mix at the beginning and get their ideas? Because perhaps a video isn't the right format. Perhaps a visualization is or an animation. So with that kind of premise in mind, we hosted this half day, and we we looked for sort of industry wizards and data visualization, and we came across David McCandless who has written multiple books.

One of them, Information is Beautiful, which I'm sure you're aware of. Yeah. As well as, again, going back to the Feet, they have an absolutely amazing sort of data visualization journalism team. Fantastic.

And so working with my press colleague, my the my colleague who runs our comms team, she reached out to the Feet, and we got two incredibly good journalists from there to come in. And we had David McCanless and a couple other folks come, and we hosted a day to talk about, you know, your strategy is nothing without data. So when you're creating these long form pieces or short form, what is the data? What are you trying to say?

So we, you know, we took some of I think David's was a bit broader, around how you can use data to tell stories, how do you conceptualize data. And actually, half of the team then did a half day workshop with him, as well Oh. Which was amazing.

And then the Feet guys, they were incredible. They took us on their journey, talked us through a few articles that they've done. And probably the biggest takeaway that I personally had, they have a big chart that talks around or a big sort of takeaway poster that are the elements of a chart. So, you know, I think we sometimes fall into the habit of you write a you write a big long form piece. All the context is before, and it says in figure one, and it the title is figure one.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know? Can you take figure one and put that in a LinkedIn post and have people click on it? No. You can't. So you need to sort of collectively read the content before to figure out what are you actually trying to say.

Got it.

So we took some of the Feet principles and then the sort of how do you actually do it in the data visualization course, and that's been now instilled in our creative team.

And we've done a few test cases. Some of these big bot leadership pieces that Malcolm mentioned, we we were in the process of publishing a couple, and we use those as a test, and we created some really interesting content, which maybe I can show you Right. Here. So this one, we were talking about the the US dollar and are we has the current dollar cycle have we hit a a a new cycle coming?

And then this one, we so we've experimented with, various formats. This is a carousel, again, on the same piece, but taking that, same piece or one that was just before it, but taking a really complex chart. So, again, that killer chart in in the article, working with the lead, investment writer on this to say, what's the point here? In the actual thought leadership piece, you'll see that the chart is really complex.

We took it out. We stripped back the labels. We made sure it had a really punchy title, and and things were really obvious.

And then this takes you through a timeline Fabulous.

Which, you know, the engagement we've had with these LinkedIn posts has been, like, way above our benchmark. Yeah.

Yeah. So absolutely worth putting the time in and getting it right. Again, going down to quality, not quantity.

Yeah. And, you know, it's it hasn't been easy. The process is not by any means honed and perfect, because it's like breaking a habit of I'm done with this now. Move on.

And also getting people who traditionally haven't really done the social posts to get involved in that Earlier. So, you know, we often have PMs that are going on roadshows. We create these great slides, and then they come back from the roadshow and we don't do anything with them. So coming back to that principle of stretching your content, we decided that we would take the content from those take those slides and look at it and say, is there anything here that we could pull out as a killer chart, as something that could tell a story onto itself?

So by doing that, we this this is a really good example of of one that we did that was actually a very basic slide. It was a table. And we said, actually, what is the story behind this chart, and how do we bring it to life? And I think it's so important to be creative with your content.

So in a world where you don't have infinite resources and time to spend writing fifteen page thought leadership pieces all the time because it's just impossible, how can we do more with the content that we do have? So making every opportunity to take a piece of content that has been created, whether it's a slide, whether it's a quick email that's gone around with a chart in it, or or if it's a a thought leadership piece, how do we take those nuggets and actually stretch it into a stand alone piece of content? I think that's really key. And having the people internally and the creative team who actually can understand that content, and giving them that opportunity, I think, is really quite different than other firms been in.

It's a it's a fascinating journey that, Ninety One has gone on, and thank thank you for sharing that story. I'm I'm interested to understand what part of this journey has has been most rewarding from from your point of view as a as a marketer.

For me, it's probably, you know, you your experiences are where you've been and how those organizations are structured.

I think it's about the creative piece. It's it's about bringing other people into the mix. I think you can run a risk in a marketing team where you have a chosen few who really get it, who are really close to the sales team, who are really close to the investment process. And that's not everybody in marketing. You know, you have a lot of people who keep the machine going.

I team sports.

Exactly. And I think we forget about the back row often. And I think one of the things that Malcolm, myself, and my other colleagues and I have have spoken about is what ninety one does differently is we are making sure that we are creating a commercially conscious marketing team. And for me, that is giving those people who are the designers, who are the multimedia videographers, the opportunity to actually understand what we're doing and feel like they're part of the commercial success of the company.

And to me, that's that's huge. That's very different than any other firm I've been in. And it was always a challenge for me to try and explain to everybody to pass that knowledge down. This is what this is where you fit into the mix.

Whereas now, I'm really hopeful that the people who are, quote unquote, in the back row now feel like they're a bit more part of it. And and I think that's that to me will be really rewarding for myself, but for others as well.

And on and on the flip side, what's been the the toughest part of the journey, whether that's internal or external?

I think it's probably the whole concept of of quality over quantity. You know, I think I'm I'm an extrovert. I love having a party. Nobody wants a party where only five people show up. Right? You feel like it's a fail. So changing people's mindset from a breakfast with ten people is not a fail.

A breakfast with ten people could be ten tickets of multiple millions of pounds. So that has been difficult because there's just an inherent mindset in people that if there's not enough bums in the seat, it looks like you failed. And then also wrapping our head around what we will not do. You know, I think marketers are it's difficult to say no.

So sometimes people love saying no, and, like, you know, there's individuals who love that, but, like, my team is not is not that. So I think it's it's it's identifying where we really dig in and say yes and get people on board with that, and that comes down to partnering with the salespeople. We are seeing a lot less real weird scattergun. Can you do this random thing for me? Because the sales team has bought in, the investment team has bought in, and so are we. So that has been super helpful, but it hasn't been easy.

No.

And and I I guess from a from lessons learned along the way, this is this is probably a challenge that many marketers marketers are are faced with about trying to align sales with marketing and and distribution thing, isn't it?

How what what advice would you give for people that are are going through that challenge?

I think for me, it is get as close to the sales team as you can. Yeah. I often feel I I play a sort of a role across both, but I feel probably that I'm more a part of what we call client group than sometimes I feel I am part of marketing. Yeah.

They work together hand in hand. And I think even now, you know, there's days where I feel like, oh, we should be involved in that. Why aren't we involved in that? And it feels like a real hard grind to be like, hey.

And it's also uncomfortable to say to the salespeople, like, would have been helpful to be in that conversation. Yeah. Because if you don't include marketing in those conversations, you're you're one step behind. You're playing, you know, telephones because you're hearing it secondhand, secondhand, secondhand.

So I think, my advice would be push to be at the table. Yeah. At least have somebody in your team at that table. Yeah.

You know, in in some cases, that's Malcolm. Some cases, that's me.

And in other cases, it's people below me who need to get that opportunity. So I think any chance you have to be closer to the client and closer to the investment process, the better. And that's not always easy, and lots of organizations resist that, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. Brilliant advice. Rebecca, thank you so much for for coming along today, sharing your story and the and the and the journey that ninety one's been on. It's been a a fascinating conversation.

Thank you for having Thank you very much.

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