A marketing plan your board can stand behind.

A referral from a steel manufacturer I'd worked with on organic growth. TekPak were the number one automation packaging manufacturer in Ireland and wanted to sell into the UK. They had no budget for paid advertising and asked for organic growth.

Their digital marketing was close to non-existent. The audit turned up a business with a genuine reputation and almost no way for anyone outside Ireland to discover it.

The competitor analysis was the useful part. In Ireland they were the obvious choice. In the UK and Europe they were invisible, and the companies filling that space were not better, just findable.

I had to convince the finance director and the owner before any of it happened. I took their historical marketing spend, the ROI on it and what it had actually delivered to the sales pipeline, and built a six and twelve month plan with KPIs attached to each stage.

That plan became the working rhythm. Weekly sessions with the FD to plan and prioritise, with an in-house marketing assistant executing alongside me.

The obvious move was to consolidate in Ireland, where they were already winning and where every pound of marketing would have produced a quick return.

I told them to go after the UK instead, where nobody had heard of them.

Consolidating would have grown revenue and capped the business at the size of its home market. The UK was harder, slower, and the only route to the scale they said they wanted. We built the ICP two ways, by UK region and by industry, so we were not trying to win the whole market at once, and targeted engineering, distribution and logistics specifically.

Print advertising, costing over £5,000 a month and reaching a small regional audience in Ireland plus some speculative spend in UK trade magazines.

It was producing roughly a twentieth of what organic was delivering. That money funded the website rebuild.

Not the social channels, and not the community work, useful as both were.

It was the website. The old one was buried in technical jargon, which felt right for a technical product and was the thing standing between a buyer and an enquiry. We rebuilt it so someone could understand what they were getting within one or two pages and then pick up the phone or send an email, which are the two things buyers in this industry actually do before committing to large volumes.

Technical products do not need technical websites. They need buyers who can self-qualify quickly and then speak to someone.

A full website rebuild, a B2B social presence on the channels their buyers used, and sustained participation in the engineering, distribution and logistics communities. Paid advertising came in after twelve months, once there was enough demand worth capturing.

The VP of Marketing came to me through a contact at Oracle, having also seen the content marketing work I'd done at TomTom. They wanted someone to shape their content marketing and digital presence properly.

Three years, two sites, two content teams and two audiences buying what was broadly the same product range. Weekly sessions with the VP of Marketing and the heads of marketing in the UK and North America. Nobody cared that I was in Stockport.

Data centre hosting, colocation and managed services, to technical buyers. CTOs and CIOs with infrastructure problems and budgets to match. Canada was the home market, the US presence was substantial because of where the data centres sat, and the UK was the smallest of the three.

Publishing for the sake of publishing. Blogs, case studies and white papers were going out regularly and producing almost nothing, because none of it started from a problem a CTO actually had.

Volume was never the issue. Purpose was.

Two decisions shaped everything after that.

The first was that content had to earn an enquiry rather than fill a calendar. Every piece needed to solve a problem a technical buyer recognised, which meant fewer pieces and more work on each one.

The second was that the UK could not be served the same way as North America. Same product, same company, genuinely different buyers. UK buyers are more reserved and want the point quickly, with no jargon and no padding, so the UK collateral went technical and direct. North American buyers responded to stats and to brand, and wanted a relationship built before a conversation, so that collateral went brand-led.

The strategy was universal. The delivery was not.

Case studies and white papers, distributed through email and social rather than left on the site to be found.

Enquiries almost doubled once those started going out. The weekly news content mattered too, but differently. It kept the brand in front of people between buying cycles, which is what made the case studies land when they arrived.

Underneath both sat a HubSpot database built deliberately for warm leads rather than cold volume, so what reached the sales team was someone who already knew who Cogeco Peer1 were and why they'd been worth reading.