Saas Marketer - B2B Marketing is Maturing

Hello beautiful,

(Are you blushing at that? 🥺)

We’ve got a very special newsletter for you this week, so I won’t keep you here long! If you remember, a couple of months back we released an interview with Marc Stoiber, in which we got into the heart of branding and marketing in the B2B world, but today we’re interviewing Patrick Ward, Vice President of Marketing at Formula.Monks.

This man is the bloody Godfather of marketing, and he’s the number one person you want to get advice from. Everything he says when it comes to marketing should not be taken lightly, and should be treated with the utmost respect.

So sit back and enjoy our wonderful interview with him!

Interview with Patrick Ward, Vice President of Marketing at Formula.Monks

Marketing is, ultimately, an arduously earned skill. On the surface it seems easy to do, but mastering it is a whole other story. We look at those who have mastered it with some wonder, both amazed and perplexed by how they do it, to the point where it seems like an unrealistic super power. But is it really a super power? What’s the secret?

Today we’ve got Patrick Ward, Vice President of Marketing at Formula.Monks (the tech pillar of Media.Monks) to give us some insight into the life of a marketer.

Q. Give us a quick snippet of who you are and your origins. What was your spider-bite moment into becoming such a great marketer?

Patrick: I started from an academic perspective - initially trying my hand at Economics and Finance majors and barely scraping by. It was truly the third time’s the charm when I shifted to a Marketing major and earned 2nd in my Consumer Behavior class of 500. Needless to say, I found a space that suited my natural strengths of curiosity and fascination with human behaviour.

Beyond that, I attribute the majority of my success to calculated risks - the most notable being my departure from my home country of Australia and its smaller advertising field for a shot at the big league in America. 

Q. Speaking of 'spider-bite' moments, what would you say a marketer's biggest superpower is?

Patrick: At its core, Marketing aims to understand how and why humans think the way that they do – which inevitably leads to answering the core question “Why do people buy?” This, at first glance, may seem self-evident, but so many departments in organisations are focused from their own point of view which leads to ego-driven messaging. This compounds across the whole organisation and, while it can create unity, culture, and a shared experience for all employees, inevitably a vision is created that is separate from the outside world - an outside world where the customer resides.

This here is Marketing’s superpower - it’s the one department that can be obsessed with the customer’s voice and bringing that market intelligence into the wider organisation to inform how products and services are created, how processes are formed to serve needs better, and how messaging will communicate the maximum amount of value to a customer. Before someone says “Sales does that too”, I’d argue it doesn’t impartially. Sales views all interactions with a customer through a lens of a financial decision making process (whether to buy a company’s specific product or service). A truly great Marketing Team is able to bring a complete picture of a customer and internalise that knowledge for all departments.

Q. What's your approach to creating a marketing campaign? Where do you begin?

Patrick: There is no such thing as good or bad marketing, only marketing that works. With that philosophy in mind, it’s critical to start with the outcome in mind and ultimately that leads to one metric: revenue. Focusing on the revenue helps avoid the biggest cardinal sin: sales and marketing misalignment that costs companies an estimated trillion dollars a year.

The next decision point is the time horizon of the initiative - do you require the results in a short, medium, or long-term time frame? My rule of thumb here is the shorter the time horizon, the more upfront investment is required for the initiative to be successful (e.g. paid media) while the longer the time horizon, the less costly the initiative will be over its lifetime, and the more inclined it is towards building a genuine moat (e.g. thought leadership).

Ultimately, both frames of reference are complementary, and a skilful marketer is able to deploy a  short, medium, and long-term initiative simultaneously - balancing the needs of the company to earn revenue in the immediate future with the efforts that will cement a company’s brand and differentiation in their respective industry and market for the long term.

Finally, before the campaign is launched, you must define what success looks like. All marketing is an experiment because what worked yesterday will not necessarily work today (even using the exact same channel). An astute marketer will let experiments play out to achieve the required data and learnings, but not let them last too long to unnecessarily burn budget. 
Compile all those campaigns together, and you have a strong foundational pillar of the business - a marketing function that drives the results that matter and accelerates the growth of the business and brand it represents.

To read the full interview, head on over to the SaaS Marketer website, where Patrick delves even further into the marketing rabbit hole, including what exactly the big difference between B2B & B2C marketing is, and how AI is going to play a massive role (for better or worse) in the marketing world.

Read on the web >>

As always, thank you very much for reading! If you liked this and want to see more or simply haven’t seen us before, feel free to head on over to our website where you can view all of our previous stories!

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See you next week 😎

Keep growing,
SaaS Marketer

P.S.

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