Why B2B Websites Fail to Drive Growth (And How to Fix the Messaging) | James Bridgman

Many B2B companies are working hard at marketing but still not seeing growth.

In this episode of The Website Growth Show, Rana Shahbaz speaks with James about why most B2B websites fail to support business growth and how clearer messaging can change marketing results without increasing spend.

James explains why unfocused positioning, feature-heavy messaging, and internal misalignment stop websites from working effectively. He shares practical insights on simplifying complex products, focusing on outcomes instead of features, and creating a clear narrative that helps customers understand value quickly.

This conversation is especially useful for founders, marketers, and B2B teams who feel their website looks fine but does not generate momentum, trust, or meaningful engagement.

🔍 What You’ll Learn

• Why many B2B websites fail to drive growth
  
  
• How unclear messaging hurts conversions and trust
  
  
• Why outcomes matter more than features on websites
  
  
• How to simplify complex products for buyers
  
  
• The role of positioning in website success
  
  
• Why internal alignment affects external messaging
  
  
• How to avoid generic, forgettable websites
  
  
• What to prioritise above the fold
  
  
• How clarity shortens sales cycles
  
  
• One practical action to improve your website today
  
  

👤 About James

James is a brand and marketing strategist who has spent over a decade helping B2B and technology companies stand out through clearer positioning, stronger messaging, and more effective digital assets. His work focuses on aligning business strategy with marketing execution to drive sustainable growth.

⏱️ Optional Timestamps

00:00 Intro
01:40 Why most websites fail
03:30 Standing out in crowded markets
06:00 Why clarity beats clever design
08:30 Outcomes vs features
11:20 Simplifying complex products
14:00 Messaging alignment across teams
17:30 Website mistakes that confuse buyers
20:10 The role of storytelling
24:30 Product-market fit and testing
28:40 Channel selection for growth
33:00 Partnerships as a growth lever
37:00 AI, creativity, and marketing
42:30 One mindset shift for founders

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Transcript

Rana (00:00)
B2B companies are trying really hard at marketing, but not getting the results. Can you pick up a couple of points? are the commonalities you're seeing when the marketing fails? Yeah, sure. So I think a lot of the problems I see are just a little bit too unfocused in terms of what they're trying to achieve. My advice to most marketers these days is learn to translate between these different groups and learn to be empathetic to what they need to see the value of marketing. Because if they don't see the value of it,

you won't get your budget next year. Trying to put every point you possibly can on the homepage, probably not so good because people think, well, now I thought I understood what you did and now I'm halfway down the page and actually I'm not sure anymore. So being a marketer, people like your customers, they normally have a marketing problem. They come to you to solve marketing problems. So what is your favorite way or process to solve their marketing problems?

Well, I mean, how long is a piece of string? There are so many problems, it depends where people's starting point are. If you introduce AI across the whole organisation, in terms of demystifying it, is probably the biggest win. Yeah. But did you think AI will be able to replace our creativity?

Rana (02:03)
James, welcome to the Website Growth Show. I'm excited to learn Stand out marketing from you.

James (02:08)
Yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate it. It's great to be here. I think, you know, digital assets and particularly owned assets rather than other people's platforms, it's important to be able to market well using those assets without having to subjugate yourself to the whims of the algorithm.

Rana (02:28)
I agree. Can we start just to why you are helping businesses stand out with standout marketing?

James (02:34)
Yeah, sure. So I think I have in the past run an agency, myself, creative marketing and brand agency. But for the last 10 years, I've been advising tech businesses, scaling businesses usually, series A to D. And I've just gone back into consulting because I felt there was a bit of a space where, although there's a lot of freelance and fractional CMOs out there,

The one thing I've always tried to focus on is how do you differentiate brands in the marketplace? And with AI coming in with many different channels that people have to choose, I think the strategic understanding of how you differentiate yourselves is more important than ever has before. So I think a lot of businesses are struggling, particularly in the B2B space, which I do most of my work in.

And so I sort of felt that there was a really good opportunity there for me to help businesses sort of make their mark and really be a little bit more engaging than perhaps they would be if they'd just gone by the default route or followed what ChatGPT told them or whatever it is. think if 70 % of people are doing that then everyone's going to be very similar.

Rana (03:40)
Excellent. What are your couple of favorite ways to stand out or differentiate yourself when you're marketing as a business?

James (03:47)
Yeah, so I think probably the two dimensions, I guess, because of the way my business has evolved and my experience has evolved is through creative, so through design, messaging, video, whatever mediums they might be, but trying to be really lean into a really deep understanding of that and where its strengths are. So produce something that really is.

above the level that most people are able to produce. And this is not necessarily down to the tools. There's lots of fantastic AI tools now to produce all sorts of content. But it's the ability to understand what is actually good. And I think you need a certain amount of skill, training, experience to be able to spot what's really standing out in the market. Because as we've seen in the past, particularly websites, if you saw in the early 2000s that

every tech company looked like every other tech company, right? And it's very much now most AI companies look similar. If you swap the logo over of one website compared to another website, it wouldn't really make much of a difference. So I think the ability to go deep into that and then really understand what are those cultural references, what are those creative and design references that will come together in a way which is powerful is really important.

Rana (04:46)
Thank

James (05:03)
I think the other thing is that I've always done is try to condense complexity into really simple messaging. So a lot of businesses now have quite complex technical products and they're often founded by people who are deep into the technical side and that's why they founded it. They've got some piece of technology or coding or solution which is very niche but also very powerful.

Rana (05:04)
Okay.

Mm.

James (05:28)
But the problem with that is they get too close to the product or the service and can't take a step back and say, what does it actually mean? I think a lot of problems that I come across when I'm working with clients is they try and emphasize a whole ton of benefits that they list over all their collateral over their website everywhere. But they don't actually describe the outcomes for the clients. So the clients struggle to picture.

Rana (05:48)
Hmm.

James (05:52)
what the end result will be from working with this or hiring this solution, putting this solution in place. So I think it's critical to be able to put yourself in your mind of your customer or customers in order to be able to think, well, what is the outcome that they're gonna want to see that they have to imagine when they look at your product or your service?

Rana (06:13)
Yeah, that's a very good point. And you mentioned tools for this to be stand out videos, content, updations, and all other tools we have available. But I think most people struggle on a strategy level, how their service or product is solving end users' problem. So how do you come up with these ideas to be really stand out?

James (06:26)
Mmm, yeah.

Yeah.

Rana (06:38)
I was watching a video yesterday on a LinkedIn, a golf club, somebody shared it and the golf club, they are doing a beer tasting, you know, stunt. Manager is standing out in front of the golf club and the staff is throwing a beer on manager's mouth. Just a 15, 20 second beer challenge. they had on a one video, 22 million views on TikTok. So this is for me is a kind of, you know,

James (06:50)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Rana (07:04)
coming up with a strategy because when we started internet 20 years ago or 15 years ago the difficult part is to find something how to do something and the finding the tools now we have abundance of tools and information and everything the creativity is the biggest challenge I think what's your experience in that

James (07:14)
Yeah.

It is.

Yeah, so I think, mean, you say, you you started 15 plus years ago, I started when the internet was only just becoming a thing. So using Dreamweaver to code websites, that sort of thing, and troubleshooting. So the fundamentals are exactly the same, like...

Rana (07:31)
Mm.

James (07:40)
What's your messaging? Why should people care? So what is the great question, right? If you're in a meeting with a CEO and you keep on asking, well, so what? Why should your audience care? Why should your customers care? And I think it comes back to that. And then the creativity comes with how do you interpret that set of reasons for believing.

Rana (07:44)
Hmm.

James (08:00)
and they have to be core to your brand. if you build out a brand which has a consistent narrative and a messaging framework that makes sense, whatever creative execution you do around that, it will be consistent even though it looks vastly different, the messaging and the...

there'll be a connective thread which you've built around your brand which enables you to be more flexible. So in some ways you need to constrain yourself to a much simpler narrative line in order for you to be more creative. Because I think as everyone knows if you start with a blank piece of paper it's the worst thing, right? So what you want to start with is a structure or a framework within which you can operate and then you

can say, okay, where are the opportunities?

What have we got in terms of the direction of travel? What do we know about what's worked in the past? What our competitors are doing? All those different things. And then you have to take that and condense it into a strategy which makes sense and persist. If you've got a strategy, not everything will work. You'll come up with two or three hypotheses. We think this will work because of X and Y. But you just have to test it. Keep on testing it and keep on going.

Rana (09:10)
I

James (09:10)
So that's the key really to just iterate on that idea and try different things. I don't know if you know Derren Brown, who's like a mentalist magician over here. And he had a great program where he sort of said, right to this guy, said, right, I'm going to.

teach you all these special techniques and sort of mental tricks to be able to bet on the horses and win a million pounds and we'll give you the stakes so there's no risk to you. So the TV programme followed this guy through all the way to the end and he won a million pounds and it's amazing how is that possible? can't be possible. And then Darren unpacked the whole programme.

Rana (09:44)
BOOM

James (09:51)
and they've just done the same thing with 30 different people, but they've just shown the one that worked. And we're in great temptation here of looking at a video and say, that's amazing. How on earth do do that? Must be genius. But it's not. It's either.

Rana (10:04)
Exactly.

James (10:05)
There's thousands of people doing the same thing. We just happen to see the successful ones. So you have to do a lot of tests and learning if you're going to give yourself a chance of really something that's going to stand out. And you have to be consistent about what your brand stands for and how it resonates with your target audience. Because otherwise, you'll find that you confuse the market and you've got less chance.

of really standing out. And some things are delayed reaction, right? So you might have a piece of content that gets picked up a year later and suddenly you can do something different with it just because of timing or because of some sort of share by an influencer or by a user at a particular event or whatever it is. So you've got to keep yourself open to that and that means the right strategy in the right place.

Rana (10:51)
I'm glad you mentioned that this is the whole reason I started this podcast and we are exploring these ideas because what we experienced, there are marketing frameworks out there, there are marketing guides, everything works, but not everything doesn't work for every business. There's no problem in the frameworks or in the marketing formulas, but the way implementation is the big thing. Maybe sometime the timing is not right. Maybe sometime you're...

James (11:06)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Rana (11:16)
What you are producing is not connecting. So again, every business tries a few things. And sometimes a things work, a few doesn't. So this is what we are exploring here as well. OK. Many B2B companies are trying really hard at marketing, but not getting the desired results. Can you pick up a couple of points? What are the commonalities you're seeing ⁓ when the marketing fails?

James (11:40)
Yeah, sure. So I think a lot of the problems I see are just a little bit too unfocused in terms of what they're trying to achieve. So they may have been told multiple messages coming through the company to the CMO or to the marketing manager. you know, they might have been told by the CEO, we need to, our only objective is revenue and then by the product.

head of product may be saying, well actually, but we want to really only focus on this particular feature. And, you know, the board may be sending something else. The CFO will say, well, you've only got half your budget this year. So, I think the ability to look at the strategy and to really talk in the language of these different people and to translate, you know, I think it's that old sort of adage, which is, you you can have everything you want.

but you can only have it at twice the very high price. Or you can have half the amount if you want half the budget. You can do it twice the time. There's always going to be a trade off, right? And I think you need the ability to be able to trade off some of these strategic priorities. Because at the end of the day, it's a business decision of where you invest your time.

But if you're leading the marketing function, you have to be able to articulate what those trade-offs are so that it's a decision that everyone takes, not just you. And I think a lot of the challenges are around clarity. Like if you find that, if you ask people across the business how they describe your product or service, if you get five different answers from five different people, you know you've got to fix something first before you even start.

So I think those are probably the most common things. So two things, guess, what I referred to before, which was how do you articulate your product or service in terms of outcomes, not just features and benefits? And the second thing is, are you consistent? Are you agreed? Are you aligned internally on what the product does and why it does it and what your North Star is in terms of the brand?

Rana (13:37)
Brilliant idea. Regarding the, as you said, most companies are missing the outcome. They are more focused on features and benefits. Do you have an example where you implemented this strategy and it's changed the marketing results?

James (13:50)
Well certainly I think I've worked for a couple of fintechs where we've really focused quite in a lot of detail on

simplifying the messaging quite a lot. A lot of the fintechs have quite deep, particularly where I've worked a lot, is in payments and that sort of transaction based solutions. They're often very deep into the technicalities of it because if you're selling to a larger organisation, a fintech organisation, likely to be regulated, likely to have big legacy IT systems, you need

go into that at some point. But you don't need to go into that until you have those deeper conversations. You don't need to put it out on the website. It's not the starting point. You just need to give people enough confidence to trust that you've got those bases covered. So to try and simplify those messages and really talking about, so OneFintech, were really talking about here's the moment in time of where your industry is. Here's the corresponding challenge.

that you're going to face for you as in the client. And here's how we solve that and transform that into a different experience for your customers. And trying to really focus down on that and then break it out into basically the same message, but for different use cases. So you've got a product page, here's how the product does it. If you've got a...

services page, here's how our consultants address that problem and break it down and try and, you know, here's what people say about it. All aligned to that core message around how we transform that experience from where you are now to where you want to be and overcoming the hurdles in the middle. A lot of it is about storytelling, but setting up in a way where people can read, understand or watch and understand.

the point quite quickly and easily and sort of take it on board because they're more likely to talk to other people about it, they're more likely to talk to their colleagues or share a document or whatever if they can describe it easily in a sentence or two.

Rana (15:51)
How did these things, these changes when you made on a website or a marketing collateral change the results, the numbers?

James (15:58)
Well, normally, think what I've found is if we've done so the couple of ABM campaigns I've done, we've typically reduced the customer acquisition cost by around about 40 to 60 % by that sort of process, which is quite a difference, but probably more significant if you're particularly marketing to enterprise clients, it's actually shortening the sales cycle. So going from.

Rana (16:23)
Hey.

James (16:23)
12 months to 10 months is actually very significant if you're a smaller business selling to a large business. That probably makes a bigger difference than actually any sort of revenue or conversion statistic because particularly for ABM strategies, you're only going after a small pool of people anyway, intentionally. And so I think it's more about how do you get people engaged quicker?

get people down to those detailed discussions which have to happen faster and how do you build trust quicker in that process.

Rana (16:55)
it. One thing you mentioned the outcome needs to be on a marketing collateral which is very important. Apart from this storytelling outcomes when you look at any business website what are the few you know big no-no's on your on your list when immediately you see that this should these things should not be on any websites.

James (17:13)
Yeah, I think for me, I think anything which is too generic. So I've seen a lot of websites where because they wanted to get up and running quickly, they may have used generic either AI generated images or stock images that I've seen elsewhere. Right. Or I've even used in the past. Right. So, you know, five years before. Hold on. That seems familiar.

I think the thing about a lot of websites is that they are the ultimate test of how you portray a brand because they basically usually have everything in there. They have a section about the company and about the culture and the values. They have a section on who the people are there. They have a section on the product and services that you're delivering. And there has to be all stitch and usually blogs or thought leadership content as well.

So I think the quicker you can have a route through for your different audiences to find what they need really quickly, the better. So clear signposting is great. Trying to put every point you possibly can on the homepage, probably not so good because people think, well, now I thought I understood what you did and now I'm halfway down the page and actually I'm not sure anymore. So I'm just gonna go look at someone else.

Rana (18:08)
Yeah.

Yeah, people don't have time, so attention span is very short. So you have to be very clear. One page should be conveying one point generally. Apart from the home page, you have to mention a few things. So that's the general rule of thumb.

James (18:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, and try and get as much

of that core messaging above the fold as possible. So on that first screen that arrives. Yeah, they're here.

Rana (18:44)
Yeah, the hero section.

Have you heard about Story Brand by Donald Miller? Story Brand framework? Yes. So we came across three, four years ago. So we use it a lot. it's a story framework. He used it, how to create a page. So basically every film you watch, you spend 90 minutes or so on the films when people don't have time. It's all because the films normally start with the problem.

James (18:51)
It does ring a bell, yeah.

Okay.

Rana (19:11)
every customer, every audience is trying to solve a problem. They're asking question in a Google landing on your website, trying to solve a problem. On your hero section, if they can see the end result, what they want, the story starts from there or a problem they are facing. Normally, that's how the story starts. So the hero section story getting in the prospect involved in a story is very, important.

James (19:25)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, I think, you know, a good story is the way that most things should be structured if you can. Whether that's, you know, a case study, you don't have to call it a case study, but it's basically a story of your customer's experience with your product. anything like that is a lot more powerful if other people talk about you than you talking about you. So I think anything you can do in that direction is definitely a positive.

Rana (19:40)
Exactly.

I agree. So being a marketer, people like your customers, they normally have a marketing problem. They come to you solve marketing problem. So what is your favorite way or process to solve their marketing problems?

James (20:11)
Well, I mean, how long is a piece of string? There are so many problems. It depends where people's starting point are. As I said, I think at the moment, I seem to be doing a lot of work in terms of what is that messaging? What is that? You know, what are your messaging pillars? How does it all fit together with your brand, your mission and your sort of North Star, if you like, and how does that translate into different assets? So I'm doing a lot of work with startups on how do you get a great investor?

pitch deck, you know, set up to raise money, because that's what they're looking to in the next sort of six months or so. Once you know, the MVP and they've got the sufficient data to prove that point. So I think the key thing for me when people come to me, it's normally something around clarity, that they're not clear on how they get from where they are now to where they want to be. Sometimes you have to do a bit of work with them.

Rana (20:48)
⁓

James (21:05)
particularly the CEO or the founders on is the vision where they're trying to get to realistic? Does it match with what the market actually wants and where the competition is? And you can't have all the things that you want all the time. So I'm working with one company and their main problem is, well, this technology could be applied to

every industry and what I'm trying to work with them is you need to pick one. Let's go through, let's evaluate how the biggest or most obvious benefit or the most the biggest gap in the problem that this is going to solve for which industry and let's start there and then expand. So land and expand is a good way of doing it and I think a lot of strategy is fine in theory.

Rana (21:31)
Exactly.

James (21:50)
But you really have to get to that point where you test it, you you survey audience. That's the other thing that sometimes provides a lot of clarity. You may think A, your assumption is A, but if you ask your customers, that may not be true. Even though how much you want it to be true, that may not be true. But I think for me, it's coming in and kicking the tires and working out, you know, how simple can we make this message? How powerful can we make the message?

And where does it need to show up? So what channels, what platforms? And what does that implicate for marketing planning, for creative, for design, for digital assets, for sales scripts, whatever it is, you know, looking at the entire customer life cycle. What are the implications for that if we go in that particular direction?

Rana (22:38)
Wow, there are quite a few, you know, puzzles of the of this marketing jiggle. So when everything works together, then normally marketing works. In your opinion, a product market or product service fit. How important is that in the success of marketing?

James (22:51)
Yeah, it definitely is. mean, I think it's one of those fundamental pieces, I think. I think you have to be a little bit wary in that sometimes the market isn't quite ready for what the product that you've got. And you have to be really careful on how you test product market fit because the confirmation bias and various other things, you can do some research and some testing.

and find out what you want to find out as opposed to what you need to find out. So I think you just got to be a little bit careful about how you test these things and be quite rigorous in terms of the methodologies you use, that sort of thing. But I do think it's better to get out there as soon as you have a viable product rather than waiting for the perfect product and get those first tranche of users to really...

really embrace them and hopefully they will embrace you so that you can really get into the weeds quite quickly in terms of what works and what doesn't work.

Rana (23:49)
Interesting. And once you have a product, you think it's a marketable, you should be marketing and testing it. What is your process here to know which channel should be using to test the marketing? Do you go by omnichannel, by try all the channels, or do you pick and choose the channel depending on the product?

James (24:08)
Well, I think the default these days, because there are so many channels, it's always going to be multi-channel, right? Omni-channel is usually too ambitious. Well, unless you've got a huge budget and a huge team. I would always start from the point of getting those really clearly defined personas of the different biotypes and not have too many of them. So, OK, we've got two or three key biotypes that we have to engage with.

Rana (24:13)
Yeah

you

James (24:33)
and our metrics will measure how much engagement we get with those groups. So the next step is then to say, ⁓ based on those biotypes, where do they hang out? Where do they discuss things? Where do they, know, where's the events they go to? Where's the, whatever it is, where the digital channels they use, what's the educational resources they go to to sort of keep up to date, whatever it is.

That will define which channels you go after. ⁓ It doesn't matter what skills you've got in the team, you have to start with the customer and work backwards. Not, I've got three people who do great TikTok videos, but that's great. If none of your customers are on TikTok, then what's the point?

Rana (25:02)
BAM.

Exactly. Got it. Got it.

from basically the founders who are looking to improve their marketing at the moment. Do you have any mindset shift that if they change, the results can be totally different?

James (25:28)
I think for founders in particular, I think there's probably two elements which I try and focus on. One is be relentless in understanding your customer. Don't let that go. I know you've founded the company and you've got the technology, but be incessantly curious and fixated on what the customers are saying to the point of taking, doing sales calls or...

listening in on customer service conversations or whatever it might be, that you give a better steer of where the business is than talking to all your teams, than actually listening to some of these customer conversations or go to events or whatever it might be. I think that's one point. Probably the other one is hire great people and trust them to do their job. Like don't micromanage.

You have a job, they have a job. There's enough to do. There's always enough to do, right? You need to hire great people and let them do their job within the parameters of the business strategy. Because I see too many founders getting stuck into HR issues and marketing issues and all these things and not at the superficial, does this fit with business strategy or is this going to get the results or be curious about this stuff? It's actually...

Oh no, I've seen such and such work really well, so we should do that. Without any trust of the expert who's been doing it for 15 years, who understands whether that works for that context of that business or not. So those are my two things that I would normally try and push founders towards.

Rana (26:59)
Do you have any example where you advise a founder that don't get involved with everything else and just let the people do what their job is and it changed the marketing results?

James (27:09)
I think it's not really, I'm not usually quite as blunt as that to be fair. I normally try and encourage people and empower them and try and define the roles. So if I'm doing a piece of strategy, brand strategy or something with a founder, I will be very clear, okay, you need to give this piece to the marketing team so that they can go and run with it. And while we work on this other one and you need to focus on this area.

Rana (27:14)
Okay.

BOOM

James (27:35)
So I'm not trying to say, you've done a terrible job, you know, please rethink it. I'm just trying to say, you'll get good results if you do this and focus and you focus on this and they focus on the other thing. I think a lot of it has come around when I've been working in-house is working quite closely with the HR director or the CHRO in terms of how do you develop culture? How do you develop a common sense of purpose?

What are the messages? How do you run internal events and internal motivations? How do you get teams to collaborate? So working with the HR and the people team actually is quite a good way to work with the CEO or the founder to sort of get them to understand that the dynamics that are going on within the business have to be approached systematically and professionally in order to make them work. when you're...

three or four people or even ten people, that's fine. That's just a group of people in a room or a pub or whatever it is. But when you get to 25, there's an inflection point. When you get to 100, there's an inflection point. And when you get to above about 200, 180 to 200 people, there's an inflection point. Because the nature of people themselves, and if you look at the different studies in terms of

Rana (28:33)
And...

James (28:54)
sort of how people interact with each other in groups will change depending on the dynamics and the size of the group. you know, we naturally have a group of about 150 people that we know reasonably well in our circle. And that's that is sort of the size of your small village, I suppose. And that's really what makes a difference to that.

Rana (29:09)
in.

Exactly.

how important is positioning yourself clearly for the effective marketing results?

James (29:21)
I think it's very clear and very important. think the thing about positioning is that it is all about clarity. There are so many people offering a very similar service and I think if you're in the industry, whatever it is, you may see the nuances between yourself and the competitors, but your customers probably don't. So in order to get that real clear positioning, it does make a huge difference in terms of how you...

come across and the clarity of your proposition and the likelihood that people are going to buy from you.

Rana (29:49)
I agree. you also, we were discussing before this podcast, you're excited about there is an underutilized marketing channel, which is partnerships. So the B2B companies can leverage partnerships massively to increase their, you know, grow their businesses. Would you like to explain what do you mean by partnerships and how companies can get benefit?

James (30:09)
Yeah, so

I think people don't really realise that there's a whole channel of going to market that's on their doorstep that they're not utilising and that's often

either their suppliers or some sort of partnership or some sort of aligned business that they work with on regular basis that will probably have access to a similar set of customers or be after a similar set of customers than you have. And actually just to be able to sit down with them and say, hold on, there's a significant overlap here. Why don't we work together and do something different? I think there are benefits there. So I think creativity is...

Rana (30:43)
Hmm.

James (30:48)
essentially about creating and combining different ideas together into new forms. And if you're working with people who think differently to you, then that's a great way of doing it. I think that's another reason for why diversity is so good, but that's another whole other podcast. And I think the thing about partnership is you'll be able to do more with less.

Often you'll be able to partner with larger companies that have a bigger reach than you, who may not be able to do what you do. So you may be more nimble than them. You may be able to do something on the street or, you know, more on the ground with customers that they would struggle to do, or there's too much bureaucracy. So I work with a fintech around their global marketing and we did a global campaign with Mastercard. But... ⁓

Rana (31:15)
and

Okay.

James (31:34)
That wouldn't have existed if Mastercard had just had a normal partnership with us. So we had a partnership agreement, but that was just for the product. But then I arranged to have a meeting with the global marketing team and said, well, we've got a partnership agreement, but we're not doing anything in marketing. Tell me what you as a team, global team struggle with and let's see if I can, you know, my team can.

can help out. And so we ended up, I pitched five or six ideas, they loved one of them, and it ended in a campaign that was across 31 countries. We got our brand next to Mastercard. Mastercard covered a lot of the cost and everyone was really delighted. And it deepened that relationship that started out as just a technical product relationship to make sure our products worked together better and became something more that was more qualitative.

that everyone felt better about and then we could go and have more discussions about different sorts of collaboration in future. So I think sometimes there's things in front of you which are opportunities, but you just have to be open to it.

Rana (32:40)
I could not agree more. these things worked for, know, magic for us as well in the past. And every time, whenever we are focused, we are delivering more to our existing customers. There's always, you know, new things you can do with them because you already have a reputation with them. There's a trust level and lots of less bureaucracy working with existing partners or existing customers. This is a very lucrative area to explore partnerships.

James (33:00)
Hmm. Yeah.

Rana (33:07)
Any ideas, any suggestions to founders who don't know how to start looking these sort of opportunities? Any ideas which worked for you, which you can share?

James (33:15)
Well,

I mean, I think that, I mean, they're everywhere in a way. I think, think about your best customer, your best supplier or your best collaborating organisation. So who do you work alongside? Who, what technology do you use in your platform? So for example, you know, I know Microsoft have very, for small businesses, they have very pots of funding. If you're using the Azure platform in the cloud.

for your technology, there are various partnership programs with Microsoft which you can approach them and say, well, we're using your technology, we'd like to talk about it more. Can you help us and support us? But on a smaller level, you may be using a particular hosting company or something and you notice that they're going to an event which is related to your target market. And you say, well, why don't we have a stand together or why don't we?

why don't we talk about how we work together on a speaking slot and try and pitch for a speaking slot or do a bit of PR together or something on a particular case study. There are lots of different ways of doing it, but I think if your interests are aligned in terms of the outcome and the types of customer that you want to engage, then it makes total sense. I think it's having that openness

to have those conversations and just listen to what the other side wants, not just be all about you is probably the key factor. So it's just like, okay, if I can make sure that they get a great result out of it, I'm gonna get a great result out of it as well.

Rana (34:43)
Fantastic suggestion and brilliant ideas, James. We are discussing how to grow a business. we just touched upon many things, but in your expertise, in your experience, any question I should have been, I should be asking you, I should have asked you about growing a business, which I haven't. And you really want to share with the people who are listening.

James (35:03)
I think probably the elephant in the room is AI, right? So I think I've been looking a lot of what is the future of marketing with AI. And I think we'll end up more and more with an engine in the middle to do the day-to-day stuff, the more average things, which does a lot of that sort of engine wheel. And then with a creative team and a deep analytics team either side.

Rana (35:07)
Hmm.

James (35:27)
and with some sort of AI orchestrator in the middle to make sure that AI engine is running properly, not infringing data controls, is not lying about stuff, all those sort of things, and it's working productively. And I think you need the deep technical expertise because you need to have enough expertise to know what's working, what's correct, and what's incorrect. You can't just trust AI to do everything, never be able to do that.

And then on the creative side, because everyone will be using AI, the last thing you want to do is produce what everyone else is producing or make it feel like it is. So you need that creative engine to keep that going. And then to knit those things together is really critical. So I would say when you're thinking about how you develop your marketing team and your marketing function, I think it's great to really... I mean, a lot of the research seems to suggest that...

If you introduce AI across the whole organisation, in terms of demystifying it, is probably the biggest win. You don't have to train everyone to be AI experts, but you should train everyone to understand what it is, what its capabilities are, what its limits are, so that people feel more empowered to use it when appropriate. And that way you'll get a bigger amount of benefit. But I think at the moment there's a lot of froth.

in terms of this AI activity and I think just be sensible and stick to basic principles in terms of what's going to create value for you, what's going to make you stand out, what's going to enable you to align the business model to what you're doing day to day and I think really focusing on that I think is going to be really key in the next 18 months.

Rana (37:06)
Another great advice, and creativity is the key. think we touched upon at the start as well. So we have all the tools, all the information available. But do you think AI will be able to replace our creativity?

James (37:14)
Yeah.

Well, no, by definition it can't because, well, not the LLMs anyway. know, those models are based on mathematical prediction of the next thing in the line. So it's good at following instruction. It's good at condensing and summarizing. It's good at producing what an average person would produce. But as a marketer, I never want to produce an average piece of content.

I never want to produce an average campaign. I always want to produce something that is exceptional. So I don't think I feel particularly under threat for that piece. So I think, you know, focus on what it does well, which is the middle zone, and make sure you get the right specialists and the right people with talent and flair to do the rest.

Rana (38:00)
Any last piece of ideas or frameworks to be different marketer or being standout in the current market?

James (38:08)
I think if you want to do great marketing, fundamentally you have to align the business strategy to the marketing activities. And that's the challenge, right? So it's not the same. People don't always speak the same language within each company. So a technical founder will speak differently to a CFO, to a marketing person, to a HR leader. Marketers touch all of these different.

Rana (38:23)
Hmm.

James (38:32)
aspects of the business. So my advice to most marketers these days is learn to translate between these different groups and learn to be empathetic to what they need to see the value of marketing because if they don't see the value of it you won't get your budget next year.

Rana (38:47)
Very important and I think excellent advice to finish on. James, I really appreciate your time, your expertise. I think there's lots to learn from these suggestions. Where people can find out and connect with you if they need help with standing out with their marketing.

James (39:05)
Yeah, so I have a website standout.consulting that you can have a look at. I've got a lot of my articles on there as well. You can get in touch or get in touch on LinkedIn. I'm also a keen photographer, so you can check out Creative Explorer on Substack, but that's more reflective. It's not really commercial, but yeah, so any of those places are fine.

Rana (39:24)
Excellent, and we will put all these links in the show notes as well so people can find you as well. James, once again, thank you very much for your insights and sharing your marketing experiences.

James (39:36)
No problem, Rana. Thanks very much. Appreciate the chat.