The louder the market gets,
the more valuable the signal becomes.

Naming an industry before the industry named itself

Eight years ago "AdviceTech" was not a recognised term in the Australian wealth management industry. Vendors used disparate language. The conversation was fragmented, anecdotal, and owned by whoever happened to be at the next conference.

The campaign was built on proprietary research: 300+ Australian advice firms surveyed annually, producing data no competitor could replicate. That structural advantage sustained the programme across eight years without it becoming background noise.

What made it work

• Anchoring the campaign in research that competitors couldn't simply copy, specificity is what creates authority
• Annual "deep dive" themes (AI adoption, staff retention, client journey) to keep the campaign intellectually alive as underlying data moved incrementally
• Internal "book clubs" turning the sales team into consultants who could facilitate research-based conversations
• A companion Buyers Guide cataloguing 30+ technology suppliers, positioning the brand as neutral authority, not a vendor
• A monthly tech newsletter growing to 8,500 readers, maintaining brand presence between annual launch cycles

Results

• Brand associated with 'technology leader'
• 1,500+ white paper downloads per annual edition
• 2,000+ professionals reached per live keynotes
• 8,500 monthly newsletter readers
• Category term "AdviceTech" now standard industry vocabulary, owned by the brand that created it

Knowing the customer your client forgot to ask about

Wealth managers routinely make strategic decisions about service models, fee structures, digital investments, but often don't have the client research to back it. A consumer research content marketing programme changed that.

1,000+ Australians surveyed annually, segmented across four distinct wealth groups. Six dimensions profiled per segment. The result: a defensible, independently-fielded view of the "Advisable Australian" - their wealth attitudes, behaviours and needs.

What made it different

• Annual thematic deep dives: Women and Wealth, Millennials with Money, Responsible Investing - keeping media interest and editorial freshness year-on-year
• Supported by a fortnightly newsletter: distilling 50-page reports into single insights with immediate practical actions, reaching 8,000 subscribers per edition
• Email signatures as passive distribution: every commercial conversation became a research touchpoint at zero additional cost
• Research data directly integrated into sales decks and product development - using end-consumer insights to justify B2B platform features ("64% of your clients want this", not "here's our product feature")

Results

• ~1,000 white paper downloads per annual thematic edition
• 2,000+ keynote viewers per annual edition (in-person and virtual)
• Dozens of trade media mentions per white paper
• 8,000 fortnightly newsletter subscribers
• Research data directly influenced product roadmap, positioning and sales efforts

A podcast gave the founder a stage that scaled without consuming him

The original approach was the most direct one: get the founder on stage at events. Fully scripted keynotes, roadshows, conference appearances. It worked until he became CEO. The time demands of running an ASX-listed business became incompatible with the preparation load of a keynote circuit.

The podcast, a monthly interview programme with industry leaders and executives, required preparation, not rehearsal. Everything else handled by infrastructure.

The production system

• Dedicated in-office soundproofed studio; recording via Riverside; hosting on Libsyn
• External production partner handling editing and post-production
• Full transcripts via Rev.com published for long-tail SEO; each episode adapted into a standalone written article
• Dedicated internal producer with KPIs for release schedule and guest pipeline - the role without which no programme reaches 100 episodes
• Annual keynote speakers fed into guest pipeline creating a content flywheel between live event and ongoing programme

Results

• 100+ episodes produced and still in production
• 750–1,000 listeners per episode (engaged, professionally relevant niche audience)
• Founder positioned as primary connector and curious voice in the sector
• Each episode produced three distinct content assets: audio, transcript, written article

From passive sponsor to the brand that owned the room

Legacy industry events offered little more than a logo on a wall and a speaking slot - passive, undifferentiated, and offering no real advantage over a larger competitor with a bigger budget. The move was from buying a slot to designing the environment.

By partnering with a trade media company to co-design a new industry event, the brand moved from exhibitor to host - influencing the agenda, ensuring category exclusivity against competitors, and reaching a new audience

What made it distinctive

• Co-design model: partnering with media partner rather than simply sponsoring, gaining agenda influence and category exclusivity
• The stand as brand billboard, not a lead-capture booth - Investment in visual impact (interactive digital wall, motion graphics) engaging the full expo hall, not just active buyers
• Designer-curated team appearance: Replacing suits with tech-forward attire, visually signalling a technology-first culture rather than traditional financial services
• High-quality, functional merchandise (Raspberry Pi kits, Pareto timer cubes) replacing "landfill merch" - brand-aligned utility rather than forgettable giveaways
• Post-event nurture: every registration became a high-intent contact, followed with white papers and sales engagement

Results

• Owned the innovation narrative - the brand became synonymous with "what's next"
• Category exclusivity locked out direct competitors from the primary innovation event in the industry
• High-intent lead database built from event registrations for ongoing nurture
• Brand experience visible and memorable to the full audience, not just in-market buyers

Building the newsletter ecosystem that became the industry's weekly pulse

Most content programmes treat a newsletter as a distribution channel for other content. This programme treated newsletters as the product - distinct formats, distinct audiences, distinct editorial voices - built to fill the silence between events & annual research launches to keep the brand present in the daily reading habits of 16,500+ professionals.

The ecosystem

• IQ Lens - Monthly technology intelligence newsletter for financial advisers. Curated news that mattered, with a clear editorial voice. Grew to 8,500 readers. Kept the brand present between annual AdviceTech research launches.
• IQ Bites - Monthly long-form email that unpacked business trends, strategies, ideas, and frameworks. Helped business leaders navigate through the ever-changing.
• IQ Trends - Fortnightly insight-and-action newsletter distilling the Advisable Australian research into single, practical nudges. 8,000 readers per edition. Format: one insight, three practical actions, under five minutes to read.
• IQ Daily - Daily business and financial markets news. 10,000+ readers per week. Format: daily, curated list of news that matters.
• Best Practice Newsletter - Feature-focused newsletter for existing users of the software. Product education, feature adoption tips, and workflow guidance.

What made it work

• Each newsletter had a distinct editorial identity, different frequency and different target audience, and not five versions of the same content
• Repurposed long-form research reports to give them a much longer shelf life
• Email signatures across the entire sales team passively promoted the latest edition in every commercial conversation - zero marginal cost, consistent exposure
• Cross-promotion between newsletters extended reach to readers of one who hadn't yet discovered the others
• Best Practice was the most commercially underrated: it turned existing clients into power users, reducing churn risk and increasing advocacy

A critical strategic insight

• Owned media compounds. Performance media doesn't. Every subscriber acquired is an asset that keeps paying dividends, unlike a paid media placement that stops the moment you stop spending

Building a platform people actually want to use - with Jobs-To-Be-Done

Feature design without a framework is guesswork. This programme applied Jobs-To-Be-Done thinking to the design of new features and a full design system for a wealth management platform used by financial advisers, their clients, direct investors, and internal staff. Four distinct user groups. One platform. A framework that forced the team to ask the right question first.

The approach

• Start with the job, not the interface For each new feature, the team began by articulating the specific progress the user was trying to make. What does "done" look like for them? What are they hiring this feature to do?
• Design for four user types simultaneously The software served wealth professionals, their clients, direct investors, and internal staff. Every feature required mapping which users it served, where their goals diverged, and where they converged
• The 80/20 impact rule Focused development on the 20% of features that would deliver 80% of strategic impact, rather than building a wish list driven by internal priorities
• Design based on usage velocity High-frequency user tasks were designed for speed and efficiency; infrequent tasks (annual reporting, rare transactions) were designed for re-learnability and clarity

Design principles worth noting

• A global UI design system as the baseline - consistent components, page layouts, and interaction patterns that reduced cognitive load and accelerated new feature development
• "Simple vs. advanced" views - allowing new users to access a streamlined interface while power users could unlock richer functionality
• Challenge legacy functionality systematically - when creating new features ask what needs to stay, and what can be retired
• JTBD reframes internal debates - when the team disagrees on a feature, the question "what job is this doing?" cuts through more effectively than any prioritisation matrix
• A design system is a productivity investment, not a design project - the ROI compounds every time a new feature is built without starting from scratch

The 95% not ready to buy today. That's where brands are actually built.

Byron Sharp's research, and years of B2B market experience, points to the same inconvenient truth: the vast majority of people who will one day buy from you are not ready to buy right now. They have a vague awareness of a problem. They're in the early stages of a journey that might end in a purchase decision six, twelve, or twenty-four months from now.

Performance marketing - search, paid social, retargeting - is extraordinarily good at reaching the 5% who are in-market today. It is near-useless for the 95% who aren't. And here's the structural problem: if you only invest in performance, you spend your entire budget fighting for the same small pool of active buyers, mostly against competitors who are doing the same thing. You're competing on the last mile while ignoring everything that happens before it.

What brand marketing actually does

• Builds mental availability - the probability that your brand comes to mind when the buying moment arrives
• Creates a consideration shortlist before the prospect even knows they're building one
• Reduces the cost of the performance moment - if someone already knows who you are, you need less convincing, fewer touchpoints, and a lower CPA
• Compounds over time in a way that paid reach does not

How to apply it

• Ask: what percentage of my addressable market is in-market today? If it's less than 30%, you should be over-indexing on brand
• Measure brand separately from performance, they are different problems with different lag times and different success criteria
• Create content that earns attention from the 95% rather than interrupting the 5%
• Treat thought leadership, research, and owned media as long-term business investments, not just marketing tactics

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Owned media compounds. Performance media doesn't.

Every dollar spent on paid media produces results exactly proportional to what you spend, and stops the moment you stop. That's not a criticism - performance media serves a real and important commercial function. But it's a rental arrangement, not an ownership one.

Owned media (a newsletter, a podcast, a research programme, a content library) works differently. The first edition of a newsletter costs as much to produce as the fiftieth. But by the fiftieth edition, you have a compounding asset: an audience that trusts you, a body of work that ranks and circulates, and a brand presence that exists independently of your media budget.

The compounding mechanics

• Each newsletter edition grows the subscriber base, which makes the next one more valuable
• Each research report generates coverage, citations, and backlinks that persist long after the launch
• A podcast library keeps accumulating SEO value as transcripts and articles compound over time
• Owned audiences give you direct access to your market without paying a platform intermediary on every send

The practical implication

• Every budget allocation decision should ask: am I building an asset or renting reach?
• Owned media requires patience as it compounds slowly and looks inefficient early - that's the point
• The best mix is not either/or: use performance to drive immediate results while building owned channels that reduce your dependence on paid reach over time
• The metric for owned media is not impressions - it's audience growth, engagement quality, and the percentage of your pipeline that entered through owned channels

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Agile isn't a process. It's accountability meeting adaptability.

Most marketing teams that "do agile" are actually doing a watered-down version of it - a task board with no retrospectives, stand-ups that are actually status updates, and sprint planning that's just a list of things that need doing anyway. The form without the function.

The actual discipline of agile marketing creates two things that most marketing teams don't have enough of: transparency about what's happening and why, and a structured mechanism for changing course when things aren't working. Done properly, it surfaces blockers early, makes trade-offs visible, and creates a culture where stopping a campaign that isn't performing is a decision, not a failure.

What agile marketing actually requires

• Two-week sprints with tasks sized to 2 hours to 2 days - anything bigger is too vague, anything smaller creates admin overhead
• Daily stand-ups that surface blockers and dependencies, not status updates
• User story format: "As a [role], I want to [action] so that [benefit/outcome]" - forces teams to articulate the why before the what
• Retrospectives every quarter on ongoing programmes: what should we start, stop, and continue?
• Genuine sprint showcases where teams share work in progress - which forces quality and creates cross-team awareness

The common failure modes

• Tasks that are too big ("develop brand strategy") - not a task, that's an outcome
• Stand-ups that become status reports - the format dies within a month
• No retrospectives - the team loses the mechanism for improvement
• Strategy and research time not included as legitimate sprint tasks - the "passion projects" and "thinking time" get squeezed out

More on building marketing teams that actually work: The Signal on Substack

Show me the incentives. I'll show you the martech stack.

Most organisations approach martech selection as a procurement problem: find the tool with the best features at the best price, implement it, and hope the results follow. The results rarely follow - not because the tool is wrong, but because the underlying process it was supposed to automate was never designed properly, the team using it was never trained properly, or the incentives that determine how people actually behave were never examined.

Show me an organisation with seventeen tools in its marketing stack and I'll show you a team that hasn't committed to doing any of them well. The stack proliferates because each new tool feels like progress. It usually isn't. It's usually an avoidance strategy for a harder problem.

How to approach martech properly

• Start with the process or business problem, not the tool - map what you want to happen, then find technology (yes, even AI tools) that enables it
• Audit what you actually use before adding anything new - most stacks have significant duplication and underutilised licences
• Involve the team who will use the tool in the selection process - adoption is a people problem, not a procurement one
• Measure utilisation, not capability - the question is not whether the tool can do something, it's whether your team actually does it
• Build for the process you have, not the one you aspire to - tools that require a more mature process than your team can sustain will fail

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The stand as a billboard, not a lead-capture booth

The dominant assumption in event marketing is that a stand exists to generate leads: attract attention, collect badges, follow up. That assumption drives most of the decisions - competitions designed to bring people over, merchandise used as bait, stand layouts optimised for conversation capture.

The problem is that optimising for active buyers ignores the vast majority of the room. The 80–95% who are not actively in-market will walk past your stand, form an impression, and move on. That impression - positive, negative, or forgettable - shapes whether they think of you when they eventually are in-market. The passive audience is your future pipeline. Designing a stand that works only for active buyers is designing for a fraction of the opportunity.

What designing for the passive audience looks like

• Visual dominance over functional complexity - a stand that stops people in their tracks is doing more work than one that requires engagement to make an impression
• Aesthetic that signals brand values - the stand should communicate who you are without anyone needing to talk to you
• Merchandise that earns rather than attracts - curated, quality items that reflect the brand, not generic giveaways designed to draw traffic
• Sales team appearance as brand signal - how your people look and carry themselves is part of the impression

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People don't buy products. They hire them for a job.

Jobs-To-Be-Done is not a UX framework. It's a strategic one. It starts from a simple but uncomfortable observation: nobody wants your product. They want the progress your product makes possible. The product is just the best available means to an end they were already trying to reach.

This reframe changes everything about how you design. Instead of asking "what features should we build?" you ask "what job is the customer trying to get done, and what would it take for them to hire our product - or a competitor's, or nothing at all - to do it?" The answers to those questions reveal a completely different product priority than almost any internal roadmap process would produce.

How JTBD changes design decisions

• It forces specificity about who the user is and what they're trying to accomplish - "financial adviser completing an annual review" is more useful than "adviser" as a design brief
• It surfaces the competing alternatives - including doing nothing, using a spreadsheet, or hiring a human - which reveals what you're actually competing against
• It makes internal disagreements about features resolvable - "what job does this do?" cuts through more effectively than any prioritisation framework
• It shifts the success metric from feature completion to job completion - did the user accomplish the thing they came to do?

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