Resources

Making the right choice comes down to balancing insights with intuition – something our CSO, Billy Hamilton-Stent, discussed when he sat down with ‘B2B Better’ podcast host, Jason Bradwell, to talk all things assumptions.

By Billy Hamilton-Stent I’ve never had much time for Robbie Williams. But I’ve just watched the trailer for his new biopic Better Man five times. For […]

Our Chief Strategy Officer, Billy Hamilton-Stent, took part in the new podcast series “In My Humble Opinion,” a collaboration between The Marketing Society and Publicis Groupe […]

On the back of our launch of B2B Lab, affectionately known as Otto. Our CEO, Jon Lonsdale and CSO, Billy Hamilton-Stent sat down with Ben Smith […]

By Jamie Fewery There have been enough blogs, articles and LinkedIn posts written about levelling up creativity in B2B marketing. So this won’t be one of […]

What happens when Brat Summer meets silly season in a B2B marketing office? We make a Brat Summer acrostic poem marketing playlist of course, plucked from some of the biggest and brightest albums of this year.

I’m not ashamed to admit that, when faced with a dilemma – work or otherwise – my first thought is often: what would Buffy do?

A story about brand and out-of-market buyers

SMBs: The backbone of business. The lifeblood of the economy. The heartbeat of Britain. Call them what you want, SMBs matter. But understanding what makes small businesses tick and how you can best work with them can be hard yards.

B2B Lab, affectionately known as Otto, is an AI-based application trained exclusively for B2B. It accesses multiple leading Large Language Models (LLMs) and live data feeds to deliver smart results, fast.

We’re excited to share some fantastic news. For the fourth consecutive year, we’ve secured our spot in the Top 100 Campaign Best Places to Work. It’s […]

Our CEO, Jon Lonsdale, talks about how work experience guided his career.

For the latest installment of Behind B2B – our series exploring the extraordinary people leading the way in our industry – we spoke with Tom Pepper, […]

B2B agency Publicis Pro has announced new creative leadership, re-energising its offer to clients with a focus on delivering extraordinary creativity in business marketing. James King […]

Here’s a question:

What about you and your business is extraordinary?

Dremio has appointed Octopus Group as its retained PR agency to support its ambitious growth plans for 2024.

Giving context can pigeonhole your brand and hamper growth. But at the same time, being too broad might make your brand feel weak or diluted.

Challenging the status quo, or in this case the most common marketing approaches, can be a bold but oh-so risky move.

The importance of long-term brand building for targeting future B2B buyers.

If you’re really looking to target the 5% of buyers ready to spend, then you’ll need something that can help focus your efforts more keenly: intent data.

For our latest instalment of Behind B2B – our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry – we meet Dean Lindsay, Customer Marketing Lead at Soldo.

Roctostock 2023: Rocto-Cirque-Du-Stockleil

10 client commitments defining how we will and won’t be using AI on your behalf

Read about our roundtable: Let’s Eat AI for Breakfast

B2B marketer by day, music photographer by night, Jason Miller balances his love of rock’n’roll with a zealous approach to marketing. Ahead of the release of his new book ‘Second Skin – A Metalhead’s Journey of Becoming’, Jason emerges from the digital mosh pit to talk about the importance of pushing the boundaries, and what marketing trope keeps him up at night.

This year we’ve been nominated as a B2B Agency of the Year at the UK Agency Awards, in the large category.

Matthew is the Head of Brand, PR and Content Marketing at LexisNexis – a legal intelligence company. He has previously worked for British Gas, US tech-giant RingCentral and an aviation scale-up.

First-mover advantage. From brand name recognition to loyalty, it comes with all sorts of competitive advantages. 

Sharp Europe, the European B2B business for the global technology company, has selected B2B marketing specialists Octopus Group as its Digital Marketing agency of record after a competitive pitch, run by Ingenuity.

Our head of PR, Toby Brown, recently took part in the inaugural Meltwater Agency Grind – a forum for agency leaders to share experiences and ideas to enhance how we all work. The session focused on AI and its implications for agencies. The session wasn’t recorded, but we asked Toby to share his thoughts to the questions raised in the debate and have shared the responses below

Here at Octopus, we’re most excited about business data and insights innovation, building generative AI into our workflows, the growth of b2b commerce and the shift back to business brand-building from a pure performance focus. All big opportunities that lie ahead.”

Check out the latest instalment of the Spilling the LoyalTea podcast. OG’s Chief Growth Officer, Nicola Pestell, joins Brad Blackmon (EVP of CRM at Publicis Commerce) and Melissa Berger (EVP of National Strategic Growth and Solutions at Digitas) as they spill the tea on B2B loyalty.

Well, since I published my first thoughts on AI for creatives last December, the chat around ChatGPT has only got louder. (Other brands of AI overlord available.)

Despite a year of continuous change and the constant challenges, we face in our economic environment, all whilst recovering from the blows of the last three years. This year’s B2B Marketing Agency rankings are officially here to provide clarity.  

For the third year in a row, Campaign Magazine UK has named us a Best Place to Work! We take culture here at OG very seriously and believe it is a large part of our agency’s success, so seeing our name on such a prestigious list is an honor.

Staff wellbeing days have been around for a number of years now. We’ve all heard of “Wellbeing Wednesdays”, featuring free massages and smoothies once a month (a perk plenty of agencies have enjoyed).

To truly look behind the lens this LGBTQ+ History Month, we need to understand what the current lens looks like. Before, this would be the writer’s perspective in a piece of fiction, or the director’s camera, creating the gaze for a groundbreaking piece of television.

That’s constructive input from iconic, bar-raising drag queen RuPaul, during ‘commercial challenge’ week. This is the point in RuPaul’s Drag Race where competing queens attempt to solidify their brand identity.

That was the title of a 2019 BBC article, looking at how popular culture has engaged with the LGBTQ+ community like never before. It posed the question: was this progress genuine? While many could argue that any progress is progress – genuine or not –  others might see through queer inclusivity and portrayals as mere factors of consumer capitalism.

Queer media representation has taken many different forms over the years. Decades before the likes of Queer Eye (Netflix), PinkNews or non-binary and trans artists topping the music charts – positive queer representation was nonexistent.

With experience across multiple disciplines, Todd Latham has become an expert in all things B2B throughout his successful career. We sat down with Todd and discussed how being unsure of what you want to do when you’re younger can actually be a good thing – and why businesses are not as rational as we like to think they are.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve only gone and won B2B Website of the Year last night at the UKDEA Awards for our recent project with Charthop.

ABM is a staple part of many B2B marketers’ arsenal. But still, the amount of businesses who are still relatively inexperienced with ABM can be surprising. 

2022 has been a big year. The England football team won the Euros, two prime ministers left Downing Street, the UK economy took a turn for the worse, and Octopus Group interviewed some of the brightest minds in the B2B marketing world. 

Four PR leaders walk into a room. One data, one teleco, one fintech, and one health and security.

In the same way we encourage everyone to celebrate and uplift women, International Men’s Day is a day to promote a positive conversation about men, manhood and masculinity. And there’s a good reason why we should. One of the goals for the occasion is to raise awareness of predominantly male-affecting issues.

I don’t know about you, but after a two week holiday it’s sometimes tough to get your head back in the game. The memory of your holiday fading as quickly as your tan while you wade through an inbox that’s overflowing, all the while daydreaming of being back on the beach with a pina colada in hand.

With an impressive career spanning both agency and in-house, Paul Wooding is the mastermind behind a wealth of award-winning B2B PR campaigns.

If you’ve been poking around our website, you may have noticed we have a pretty sizeable PR team made up of people of different backgrounds, specialties, age, and experience (I for one have been in PR for more years than I am willing to admit outside of a pitch room).

Sodexo Engage, the UK’s leading employee engagement expert, has appointed Octopus Group as its UK PR agency to support its ambitious UK growth plans.

Last week we sent some of the finest dressed OG superstars down to the UK Agency Awards in hopes to bring home some gold.

It’s safe to say we were absolutely thrilled with the result. We only went and won Marketing Agency of the Year! Wow, what an accomplishment.

Rumour has it there’s a spirit of collaboration in the air. B2B brands increasingly want to work together, exchange ideas and share data. They want to be hubs, they want to be platforms, and they want to form and leverage strategic partnerships.

B2B marketing has a problem: information overload. Of course, this isn’t unique to the B2B world – we live in an age of information overload – but it still stands that there is an enormous amount of data available to marketers. The trouble is – this data is often underutilised.

As many of us know, sales and marketing don’t always see eye to eye. But for a leader like José, knitting the two together comes naturally. We sat down with Visa’s Head of Product and B2B Marketing Europe to hear how having one foot in both worlds helps him drive results for a major global brand. 

For some, this shift will be welcome. An automated B2B sales process provides ample opportunity for data analysis, which can be used to inform decisions about customer experience.

These days, the term ‘platform’ is bandied around a lot. You’ve got your communications platforms (Meta, Twitter), your innovation platforms (GitHub, Apple), your marketplace platforms (Alibaba, Amazon), your workplace platforms (LinkedIn, Fiverr), and your finance platforms (Visa, Stripe).

Odigo, a leading global provider of Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solutions, has appointed Octopus Group as its UK PR agency. Octopus will support Odigo with commercially-focused earned media campaigns to support its UK growth strategy.

A couple of months ago, I would have firmly told you that I knew nothing about marketing, especially B2B marketing. But while my friends were out partying in Portugal during the summer holidays, I spent a week working at Octopus Group.

Measurement has long been the Achilles Heel of PR. Thankfully the days of AVEs are passed, but many have struggled to replace these comforting, if meaningless, financial figures with frameworks and metrics that make sense to businesses.

Listen to this brilliant instalment of the Agency dealmasters podcast series with OGs Managing Director Pete Hendrick. Podcast host Nathan Anibaba and Pete discuss the intriguing growth of Octopus Group and Pete’s fascinating career over the years. 

For the 17th instalment of Behind B2B, we’re speaking to Sakina Najmi, Vice President of Marketing at Tractable.

Learn about the importance of platforms within B2B and how platforms are dictating the future of growth.

It’s safe to say Roctostock – our annual company festival – has a mythic status at OG.

The Business Marketing Club podcast is currently running a series interviewing Business Marketing heroes. Dave Stevens, business marketer and chair of the BMC, sat down with our very own B2B marketing hero and chief strategy officer, Billy Hamilton-Stent.

Client-agency relationships often start like any other relationship: the agency wines and dines, the client checks out their options, a match is made and the honeymoon phase commences. 

User experience (UX) design has been increasingly thrust into the spotlight over the last five years. Marketers across both B2B and B2C are seeing a sharp uptake in interest around UX after businesses started to realise its importance – and crucially, how it can impact the bottom line.

Much like our previous Behind B2B interviewees, Addy didn’t always know what she wanted to do. From a Classics degree at King’s College to PR at the Edinburgh Fringe, Addy went on to forge a career in comms, working with the likes of LV, Barclays, and Bupa. Now Head of Group Communications at Admiral Group plc, we sat down to discuss her experiences, the stories she’s most proud of telling – and whether or not we should all be on TikTok.

We’re thrilled to share that we have been named as a Best Place to Work for the second year running by Campaign.

Company values sometimes send a bit of a shiver down my spine.  I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because they are so important to get right, but so easy to get wrong.

Last week, we attended B2B Marketing’s Martechopia event. It was packed with industry experts and sessions on how the martech space is evolving. Here are the 10 key takeaways that we found most interesting:

I’m OG’s first apprentice, social media executive, part-time fitness lover and full-time eater Mason Lucas! Assigned to the marketing team, I work alongside Giles Shorthouse (Head of Business Marketing) and Jon Lonsdale (CEO). In my role as the social media executive, I’m responsible for all the social media channels we run, as well as assisting with other aspects of marketing.

Like many of our Behind B2B interviewees, Jason’s trajectory (from aspiring film director to successful B2B marketing director) might sound a little unusual. But as our chat with Jason proved, a background in theatre puts you in surprisingly good stead to succeed in the world of B2B marketing.

After being postponed for several months (thanks Omicron), the BMC’s big community hall event was back with a bang, gathering a mix of in-house, agency and consultant B2B marketers to discuss what B2B can learn from B2C. 

Today is International Women’s Day, a day where we celebrate all that women bring to our society, as well as reflect on some of the challenges they face. The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is #BreakTheBias, in order to create a world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination.

The world of business is exciting. It’s exciting to be part of large-scale innovations that impact cultures, social trends and our day-to-day lives. And though business-to-business marketing is often overlooked in terms of creativity, packed inside is a plethora of potential for people to play with. 

“If you want something, dream, dare, do. If you want something extraordinary, dream, dare, do, with great mentors. If you want to learn a powerful lesson about yourself, become a mentor.”

And just like that, we’ve been part of Publicis Groupe UK for a year already! I’m reflecting on that anniversary this week, and remembering my excited thoughts from a year ago.

From a sports scholarship in the US to international marketing leader for Grenade, Emma Windsor has risen fast through the ranks of the marketing world – a testament to her passion for the craft in all its forms

Mailchimp had a big year in 2021.

Marketing in 1754. Allow us to introduce you to “The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director” by the famed furniture designer Thomas Chippendale.

Octopus Group has decided to re-structure its senior management team in order to improve the client experience and support further significant growth in 2022.

For 2022’s first instalment of Behind B2B, our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry, we meet marketing expert John Watton.

When we launched our series Behind B2B, we had high hopes for hard-hitting stories, inspirational journeys, and industry-insider anecdotes.

This year’s Content Marketing Institute (CMI) annual report drills down into benchmarks, budgets, and trends for the coming year.

To give you a roundup of what’s what, we popped everything down in a handy report for you to read and refer to at your leisure.

For the twelfth instalment of Behind B2B, our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry, we meet TikTok’s European Head of B2B Marketing, Isobel Sita-Lumsden. 

The real-life rise of self-aware marketing machines.

At Octopus Group, we know what it feels like to have our work and our business supercharged. So here’s what we make of it, and how we see the next few years of B2B marketing shaking out.

For the eleventh instalment of Behind B2B, our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry, we meet ABM expert Andrea Clatworthy.

edex, a global membership organisation enabling responsible business and supply chain practices, has appointed Octopus Group as its UK PR agency.

An Octopede’s first Roctostock

3S Money, has appointed Octopus Group as its UK PR agency.

How can you make sure you’re getting the most from any marketing automation investment?

For the tenth instalment of Behind B2B, our series exploring some of the brightest minds in the industry, we meet Leeya Hendricks – CMO at Delta Capita.

As part of the A2Z of B2B Marketing from The Business Marketing Club podcast series, Billy Hamilton-Stent joined Antonia Wade from PwC, Colin Lewis from OpenJaw Technologies, and Laura Hughes from PayDashboard to talk planning.

For the ninth instalment of Behind B2B, our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry, we meet global marketing expert Annabel Venner. 

Three of our favourite tips for building more effective B2B marketing emails

We’re really excited to be the main B2B Summit headline sponsor of the B2B Summit on September 23rd

For the eighth instalment of Behind B2B, our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry, we’re talking B2B bravery with Mark Choueke – journalist, marketing leader, and freshly published author.

For the seventh instalment of Behind B2B, our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry, we meet Scott Brinker – the godfather of martech (and the brain behind that martech infographic!)

For the sixth instalment of Behind B2B, our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry, we meet Annette King – CEO of Publicis Groupe UK.

We’ve been ranked 7th overall in the 2021 Campaign’s Best Places to Work

For the fifth instalment of Behind B2B, our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry, we meet Karrie Sanderson – branding expert, Smartsheet marketing leader and experienced sailor.

In Spotify and WARC’s ‘Changing channels in B2B’ report published last year, they take a closer look at the shifting strategies of the tech and telco industries, delving deep into the themes within their marketing, and how that’s changed since last year and into 2021.

Find out about how we worked with SSE Enterprise Telecoms to rebrand them as Neos Networks.

For the fourth instalment of Behind B2B, our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry, we meet Joel Harrison – founder and editor-in-chief of the globally acclaimed B2B Marketing.

We really believe in the value of learning (we even have our own Brand to Sales Academy). So from in-house to internationally recognised, here’s some we’d recommend, starting with three that we all do at Octopus Group as part of our learning and development.

For the third instalment of Behind B2B, our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry, we meet Fiona Campbell-Howes – one of the UK’s leading B2B tech copywriters.

At OG, we celebrated International Women’s Day with International Women’s WEEK, where we celebrated the wonderful women of OG, and their essential role in our workplace […]

Across the last year and a half, countries with women leaders have received global praise for their effective handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Kamala Harris made […]

This week our CEO, Jon Lonsdale, sat down with Joel Harrison of The B2B Marketing podcast, and discussed OG’s recent acquisition by Publicis Groupe UK. The pair […]

Octopus Group has teamed up with two like-minded agencies – The Croc and The Marketing Practice – to collectively deliver an internal D&I initiative with a […]

For the second instalment of Behind B2B, our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry, we meet Brian Macreadie – B2B marketing evangelist and one-time aspiring astronaut

WOW. What a MASSIVE week it’s been for Octopus Group. After nearly 20 years as an independent agency, we’re joining one of the biggest agency groups […]

Over the weekend the Super Bowl once again treated us to some of the most talked-about, big-budget blockbuster advertising in the marketing calendar. Classic Wayne’s World […]

For the first instalment of Behind B2B, our series exploring the brightest minds in the industry, we meet Tyrona Heath – Director, Market Engagement at The B2B Institute @ LinkedIn.

Thomas International, the UK’s leading talent assessment platform, has appointed Octopus Group as its UK PR agency. Octopus will support Thomas across media and influencer relations […]

The health and wellbeing of our Octopedes have always been a top priority, with four specially trained Mental Health First Aiders on hand for staff to […]