Meet AI and Marketing Teacher, Will Francis

Will Francis is a recognised authority in digital marketing and AI, with 170k followers on social media and a 20-year career helping the world’s most loved brands grow meaningful connections with their audiences online. Having cut his teeth at MySpace and worked with brands like Samsung, Nike and Spotify, Will has been a part of the seismic shift in social media since before the term existed.

As an event and broadcast speaker, Will now travels the world sharing his expertise through talks and workshops for global brands. He specialises in explaining complex topics in an accessible and compelling way and understands how to keep audiences fascinated and inspired, even whilst exploring the more technical side of business and creativity.

Tell us about your business?

The modern digital marketer is often lost in a sea of fast-evolving tech, outdated assumptions and bad strategies. It’s hard to keep up, get results and prove the value of marketing internally. It’s a very real problem, with your average business losing money on their marketing.

I train digital marketers to be more effective, through courses I run at the big institutions in marketing globally and private in-company workshops. I also have a fast-growing audience in social media and a podcast who I educate every day through my free content about marketing and AI.

I show people how to build strong strategic foundations and then win tactically. I don’t just leave them with a load of interesting information and examples. I work through how they will apply what we learn and then get results for themselves.

At the moment a lot of it is around AI, and there are some exciting opportunities there. But as always with new tech, it requires some tuning out of the hype and getting into the hard work of making it useful.

What do you think makes your offering unique?

If it’s digital and complex, I can explain it clearly. People love how accessible I make digital marketing and AI, so they come away feeling smarter, not more stupid. It’s all about clarity and practical usefulness for me, that’s what I make myself the best at.

I’m a marketer but also a creator, so I understand the digital channels intimately. I have the strategic background having run an ad agency, but also the at-the-coalface tactical knowledge too.
But aside from that, when you’re teaching people, you have to be on a constant learning journey yourself. Never trust anyone who claims to be an expert and to know it all!

How has your offering and approach evolved?

Whilst I run more public courses than ever, there’s a surging appetite for private learning – either through in-company workshops or in small cohorts. I think people have realised that public courses are good for broad overviews, like reading a textbook. But private, tailored training is how you work out the exact solutions for your business or personal challenges.

So I’m being brought into companies more, often as an urgent response to AI and what to do with it, but equally to help get results from content marketing across search and social.

What can we see from you in the future?

I’m focussing on top-of-funnel audience growth for the foreseeable future, so more growth in social and video. At the same time I’m planning to launch a private learning community and my own courses. Owning access to your audience is crucial in a volatile technology landscape. Rented audiences in places like YouTube and Instagram are invaluable, and worth investing in, but unless you convert them into an owned audience you’re far too vulnerable to change.

Like many people these days I think about digital products a lot. If AI can code an idea into a working SaaS product, anything is possible. So I’ll likely be launching some prototypes in the next year or so. But as an educator, I’ll no doubt turn whatever I build into some sort of course, as it’s empowering others to wield the tech that gets me out of bed every day!