"We empower teams to transform operations." Nobody knows what that means. Own the room 🎤 • Most brand strategies describe what a company believes. "We empower teams to transform how they work." • Every competitor could say the exact same thing, which tells a buyer nothing. • A real brand idea describes how you compete, not what you believe. The test: if it can't tell you who your customer isn’t, it isn't a strategy. It's a mood board. Run that test on your own positioning before the next...
10 days ago • 1 min read
You're running ads nobody remembers. Here's why. Own the room 🎤 • An impression lasts hours. A memory lasts years. • Most B2B media plans buy a lot of the first and almost none of the second, then wonder why the spend isn't moving anything. • An impression is a moment of exposure. A memory is what makes a buyer think of you six months later, when the deal is real. Next budget review, ask which one each line is actually buying. What actually sticks 👇🏻 Memory forms through four things: Multiple...
17 days ago • 1 min read
95% of your market isn't interested right now. Are you talking to them? Own the room 🎤 • At any given moment, 95% of your market has no active need. • Yet most teams spend all of their budget on demand gen, optimizing for the 5% who are buying. • The most rigorous data in B2B puts the right budget split closer to 46% brand, 54% demand gen. • That gap is where competitive advantage lives. Bring that split to your next budget conversation. Why the 95% matters 👇🏻 The 95% who aren't buying today...
24 days ago • 1 min read
Your buyers already know who they're going to pick. It's probably not you. Own the room 🎤 • Most B2B deals are decided before the buying process begins. • Out of every 100 deals that open, 57 go to a brand already on the shortlist. • Only 3 go to a brand discovered after the search starts. • Your demand gen machine is built to fight for those 3. Say that in your next pipeline review. It changes the conversation. Where the battle is actually won Enterprise buyers do not start from zero. When a...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
I went quiet for two years. Here’s what I built while I was gone. A while back, I put out Big Brand, Small Budget. The idea was simple. Most B2B companies were spending everything on the slice of the market that was actively buying and ignoring everyone else. I showed you how to reach the other 95% without a Fortune 500 budget. A lot of you found me through that. Some of you shared it with your team and put the ideas to work. Then I went quiet. Not because I ran out of things to say. But...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Are you selling complicated or complex services to people who don’t fully understand the value of what they’re getting? It’s a common problem for a lot of software and technology companies, especially when the people who use their products (developers) aren’t the ones who actually buy them (business executives). This is a quick story of how we helped a highly technical organization clearly articulate their business value in a more simple and human way. Estimated read time: 2 minutes and 30...
over 2 years ago • 2 min read
Hey - I’ll be the first to admit that brand architecture isn’t a sexy topic. But bad brand architecture is a silent killer for many SME and Enterprise companies, because messy brand portfolios make it a nightmare for marketing teams to effectively promote their brands in a clear, consistent and compelling way. Morningstar, a $1.8b financial services company that provides global investment data, research and technologies, had a large portfolio that they were struggling to manage. A decade of...
over 2 years ago • 2 min read
We nearly destroyed 3 years’ worth of distinctive assets when re-doing our website and brand identity. This is one of the early directions we really liked. An early concept for our re-brand It looked sleek. Professional. Tasteful. Premium. But someone pointed out that it looked nothing like our current branding. And despite wanting to change our visual identity, this was a problem. Because after regularly pumping out social media content, guides, and reports, people began to associate us with...
over 2 years ago • 1 min read
Hi, it's Ian. There’s always a guiding thought going through my head whenever I write marketing content: “No-one cares about you. They only care about what you can do for them.” As general life advice it’s a bit depressing, but it’s also the perfect mindset for creating really good newsletters, social posts, and ads. Don’t talk about yourself - focus on what other people want and how you can help them. You might feel I’m breaking this rule by asking you to check out our new website. My...
over 2 years ago • 1 min read