The Diagnostic Questions Every Marketer Should Ask When Entering an Undermarketed Sector

Speaker A: Hey guys and welcome to Social in 10. Your Monday morning ritual full of digital marketing insights to go with your coffee brought to you by the team here at Giraffe Social with a range of other industry experts. In this episode we're talking to Alistair Patrick. Alistair builds full funnel marketing functions from the ground up. He spent nearly four years as marketing director at Treatax Big Box, the FTSC 100 logistics property company taking it from the 12th to the fifth most recognized brands in its sector. He now runs Alexeye offering on demand marketing director support to scaling SME B2B businesses. We're getting his insights on the first principles of B2B marketing, essential diagnostic questions in under marketed sectors and how founder led business can introduce senior level marketing with unnecessary complexity. What are the first principles of building a marketing function in a B2B sector when marketing has historically been treated as a cost rather than a commercial driver?

Speaker B: From my experience typically in these scenarios businesses see marketing as promotion only and worse sales enablement I. E. Sales have built the revenue, own the relationships and marketing is like the coloring in department and enables them to do their job. In this situation the sales team's main blocker is opening up new businesses, new uh business and developing leads and they will have a view on how this should work. So the first thing I'd say is this, get close to that sales team, sit in their meetings, understand the deals won and lost and why that's the beginning of diagnosis. Then get out and speak to clients, interview them on Chatham House rules, I've done this and get them to open up and see how they see your business, who your competitors are, missed, uh, opportunities etc. Do this with several clients and the trends will occur. Lastly then study your competitors to understand how you are or can differentiate your offer, uh, position yourselves relative to them, bring. When you bring all this together it creates your marketing strategy setting a baseline to work from and objectives to drive for and everybody buys into that and can see the connection to the pipeline and the revenue it will deliver. For me at that stage the perception of marketing shifts from being seen as a cost to a commercial driver. Uh, a unit that deeply understands the business, the category and is the voice of the client in the business. I took this approach that to uh try to big box when I was marketing director there and bringing the board along on this journey is really key. I was the first marketing director there so they needed to understand the process, become invested in the outcomes and then could see the value it would deliver to the business.

Speaker A: How do you move a business from relying on relationships and reputation to building a structured full funnel demand engine that consistently generates inbound interest.

Speaker B: First you need to explain and prove the issue. Uh, company boards on a principle don't buy an expert opinion, they require reasoned argument. Whilst marketing has lots of frameworks and principles, the C suite want hard evidence that a new approach should work at Tritax Big Box. The unlock for me here was commissioning an annual brand tracking study to give us a baseline the baseline funnel of awareness, interest etc. How we compare to competitors brand attributes and so on. And um, this is undisputable data and it takes the focus off you and your word and focuses on the issues it reveals and justifies the investment you're asking for. It's really powerful. Um, the Tritax Big Box brand tracking revealed that our ah, general awareness was extremely low. Smaller competitors were higher up the ranking which really annoyed our CEO because he's very competitive. Um, it also showed our reputation needed to be improved. And so these two factors often meant we just didn't get on the first choice shortlist for relevant lead new business leads. So the argument to invest became invest in the future market. I create a brand campaign that would in time lead to an uplift and inbound interest and ultimately conversions which enabled Tritax to lease more buildings and quicker. This stuff ties back to Byron Sharp's key law of mental availability. Getting on that mental shortlist when a category is at a category entry point they're thinking about your particular product or service, the category that you're in and you come to mind that is fundamental. If you decision makers in your category know who you are, you're really going to struggle on relationships and reputation alone.

Speaker A: When stepping into an under marketed sector, what diagnostic questions do you ask to uncover the biggest commercial opportunities for brand and demand?

Speaker B: Speaking to existing and prospect clients is really really important. Their outside in view of your product or offer uh, is gold and often really doesn't match what you or the rest of the business believe. I found that questions around the perceptions of a business yield such interesting answers. What do you think we stand for? What is the best part of our offer? What is the worst? Why do you think that? Who do you think our competitors are? Because they're not often who you think they are. What else would you buy from us if we could offer it? What is the single thing we should improve? All of these start to yield really interesting insights and when you do it across many interviews they steady start to direct how to develop and improve on um, kind of two Aspects one, the brand of the business, how to make it more appealing, how to make it more differentiated, distinctive and more well known. And 2 demand for the business's product or service. Small improvements, better pricing, distribution in new channels, better customer experience to convert more buyers. But what I would say is that the bigger point to recognize about under marketed sectors is they're typically stuck in a mode where business performance is okay. They uh, use tried and tested new business approaches. Marketing is very much a support role and I find from working in what I call dusty, slightly unsexy industries like industrial and logistics, they often take this approach. But the thing is is that what they deliver is really, really important to society and bringing what that is to to the fore will help them drive more interest in their business. But I think those businesses are also recognizing that this approach won't last. That if a few key clients leave, they're in trouble. And also is as important is how prospect clients discover businesses has vastly changed. If you're not optimized digitally, particularly on AEO now or you're not actively promoting, you will struggle. These things are no longer optional and nor can sales teams cover all these bases.

Speaker A: How can founder led and owner managed businesses introduce senior level marketing thinking without creating unnecessary complexity or uh, overhead?

Speaker B: The short answer is early, right? Marketing in any business can't be an afterthought once everything else has been set up. Okay, we're ready, let's get someone in to help advertise it. This is the view that marketing is about promotion only. Not price, not product, not place. There's no strategic underpinnings there. And from my experience that's a kind of arrogance built in by the founder owner that they think they know that their new offer is just going to be a hit and marketing just needs to get it in front of some clients. Uh, I've seen this working with founders. Uh, in one instance using test market research I was able to set the price of a new product correctly. Unfortunately it was 30% lower than the guest RRP. Uh, but the business recognizes the findings were solid and then we reset the financial model around this. Given the rise in fractional senior marketers this reduces the overhead, right? And pays back significantly in getting that strategic foundations right from the start and not jumping into executional and wasting money. Right. A fractional CMO or as I call myself an on demand marketing Director can do three things quite quickly in the first sort of 90 days. Diagnosis 3C's analysis define the positioning in the ICP. Then you can get into strategy map the funnel, set the objectives, the channel plan, all that justify the budget and then you can get into the early stage of execution, get the base infrastructure set up, uh, the right martech stack, the dashboards, AI agents, partner agencies, freelancers, get that underway. You don't need a marketing team of five. One senior brain plus one or two executional people. Freelancers and the right tools is all you need. I've seen the biggest mistake quite often is founder led businesses go, that's too expensive. Let's get a marketing manager in. And they will get the things set up and promotion happening. But it's likely to be in what I call lots of busyness. There's no underpinning core strategy there. So when the question comes to us about the effectiveness of it and what it's doing to the bottom line, that uh, lack of experience will become clear.

Speaker A: And that's it for this episode of the Social Intent podcast. We hope you enjoyed it and thank you to all of our guests. Join us next Monday for our, uh, next episode and reach out to us on socials to discuss this further. Also, subscribe to ensure your week always stay starts with the latest insights from the world of digital.