This episode features Michael Bernzweig hosting Phil Bacon, founder of Marketing Managed, as they discuss building a successful marketing strategy. The conversation delves into foundational marketing principles, understanding your audience, and practical advice for auditing and improving marketing efforts.
This episode features Michael Bernzweig hosting Phil Bacon, founder of Marketing Managed, as they discuss building a successful marketing strategy. The conversation delves into foundational marketing principles, understanding your audience, and practical advice for auditing and improving marketing efforts.
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Michael Bernzweig (00:01.062)
Okay, I hope everyone enjoyed that last session. Coming up next, have Phil Bacon. He is the founder of Marketing Managed, a fractional marketing leader helping engineering, manufacturing, and tech firms turn complex offerings into repeatable revenue. His client work includes Mara, Suncomb, and Magic Leap. And with that, Phil, I'm handing the mic over to you.
Phil Bacon (00:28.044)
Lovely, thank you, Michael. Today I'm going to talk about essentially going back to basics, and it's something that marketers and companies don't do often enough. They're always chasing the shiny. So if I told you the most useful marketing lesson I have ever learned came from a potato, you'd probably assume I'm going to try and sell you something. I'm not. I want to talk about the foundations that make marketing work.
the bits that are boring, unglamorous, and usually ignored until things go wrong. And to do that, we need the humble spud. Because a potato is the opposite of modern marketing culture. Modern marketing culture says be loud, be clever, be everywhere, be constant, and if something's not working, add more. A potato, on the other hand, says start underground, get the soil right, grow slowly.
store energy, survive the bad weather, and the last few years, it has been kind of bad weather in the marketing world, and then feed people constantly, consistently.
And that is the potato marketing method in one line. Unsexy foundations creating reliable growth.
Most businesses do not fail at marketing because they lack effort. In fact, actually they chuck loads of effort at it. They fail because they build marketing like fireworks. Bright, impressive, short-lived, then darkness, then panic, and then another firework. Here is what you need to look at though in the real world. When a founder says we need more leads, they go off and they run ads, or they post daily, they do a webinar, they buy a
Phil Bacon (02:20.75)
data list or they hire somebody to do SEO. And for the most part, something happens. There'll be a little spike in activity, there'll be a few inquiries and maybe a sense of movement, but that spike disappears. And then the ultimate conclusion comes that marketing doesn't work for us. well, frustratingly as a marketer, that is the same story we hear.
So we need to go back and we have to go back to where things were working well. Now chucking something in there isn't always the right thing. So.
Phil Bacon (03:07.886)
It's a bit like planting a seed into concrete and blaming the seed for not growing. Not the fact that you're trying to grow on something that's, well, inanimate. So it's the tactics. They're not the real issue. It's the real issue is that you're trying to build your marketing without any foundations. So I'm going to introduce the potato. We all know what a potato looks like.
Potato is not flashy, it's not rare, it's not trendy, it's not sexy, but it's one of the most dependable foods that humans have ever relied on. Why is that? Because it's designed to do three things extremely well. It's designed to grow in difficult conditions, store its energy for later, and feed people consistently. If you want reliable marketing, you want the potato.
not the firework. The most important part to this is the part that matters most is hidden. Potatoes grow underground. The work happens when you can't see it. Before anyone gets a meal, the soil has to be right. Marketing's the same. Businesses that win long term are not the ones with the cleverest posts. They're the ones with the best foundations.
So I'm going to talk you through the methodology here. And the methodology is pretty simple. Start right, develop, and grow.
and win. Anybody can do this. You just have to, sometimes you have to take a moment, stop and reflect back on what you've been doing and peel apart the bits that don't work until you get down to the root of it that goes, yes, this works. We will grow back, we'll come back from this point and work our way back up to where we were. And when I say where we were, this time you'll go in the right direction rather than building on nothing.
Phil Bacon (05:16.686)
So we're going to go through the method. It's five parts. You can remember this because it's exactly how a potato works. You've got the soil, which is your truth and positioning. You've got your seed, which is your strategy and choices. You've your roots, which is your systems, your data, your consistency. Shoots, which is your awareness that helps to build your presence. And you've got your harvest, which is the capture of the demand and the follow through.
Most businesses, however, though, they jump straight into the shoots and the harvest. They want content and they want leads. In fact, actually, almost every conversation that I have is, I want leads, but you have to go back. You have to go back way before that. You have to build up awareness and to build up awareness, you need foundations. So without soil, without seeds and without the roots, what you get is very, very fragile. And if you were to...
If something happens, if there's a change in the market, if your marketing hasn't got the solid foundations, it could all disappear overnight. If a channel were to turn off tomorrow, and that was your primary channel, would you know what to do without it?
Phil Bacon (06:38.51)
So let's walk through each of these sections. Soil, that truth and positioning. Soil is not fun at all. It's the part that nobody really wants to pay for, but it determines everything that we do. In marketing terms, soil is who you're really for. What problems do you actually solve? Why anybody should trust you.
what you will not do and who you don't sell to. And most businesses skip this and they try to sell to everybody, not their target market. Doesn't matter, we'll sell to you anyway. Which creates confusion in the messaging, which sounds a bit more like, well, porridge for another food analogy.
However...
When you start looking at it and you hear messages like, provide high quality solutions, we're customer focused, we deliver excellent service, it's not a position, that's just noise, background noise. Being more specific though is the soil that you want that solid ground to grow from. And here's a few takeaways you can use straight away. What pain do we remove?
and make it simple. What do you do differently and not just better? This is your USP. And what is the cost of doing nothing? And that's the cost of doing nothing for your customer. If you can't answer those simple questions, the soil is weak and everything you build on will wobble.
Phil Bacon (08:20.558)
You got the seeds. Seeds is a strategy and choices. Soil is the environment. Seed is the decision. A seed is a commitment. It's choosing one direction instead of 10. In marketing, seed is strategy, not a document, a set of choices. Real strategy sounds like we are focused on these two customer types. We're prioritizing these three channels, and we're saying no to this market, even if it's tempting. We're building trust for six months, not chasing quick wins for six weeks.
Most marketing plans because they are a list, not choices. A list looks like we will do SEO, LinkedIn, email, webinars, partnerships, PPC, straight away. This is not a strategy. That's anxiety written down. A strategy should reduce activity while increasing results because the seeds are finite. You cannot plant everything at once and expect to be able to have a harvest. Then we look at the root systems.
So this is systems, data, and consistency. It's a hidden infrastructure that makes your growth possible. Again, it's not a sexy part, but it stops your marketing from becoming guesswork. And in practical terms, your root system includes clean, trustworthy customer data, a CRM that reflects reality, not hope. And clear definitions. What is a lead? What is qualified? What is not? And that's sometimes really difficult to pin down.
and you just have to keep asking yourself the same question over and over again until you can define it. So what's your follow-up process that happens afterwards as well? Once you've captured somebody, what do you do with them? You've got some basic measurements that need to happen as well, and then what marketing problems are not actually root problems?
While we're in the root section though, we're looking at leads. Leads are low quality because the offer is unclear. It's a soil problem. Conversion is poor because the follow-up is inconsistent. Root problem. Pipeline is inconsistent because awareness is sporadic. It's a shoot problem. Roots are where adults do marketing. And here's the uncomfortable truth. If your business cannot respond consistently to demand,
Phil Bacon (10:39.244)
you should not be spending heavily to generate more demand. So you can't service what you've got. It's like pouring water into a bucket with holes. Your shoots, that's awareness that compounds. Now we get to the visible parts, shoots. Shoots are what people think marketing is, content, social campaigns, and events. But in the potato marketing method, shoots have a job to compound trust, not to entertain, go viral, or keep up. Compounding means
saying the same valuable thing in many useful ways, teaching the market how to think about the problem you solve and being present long enough that people recognise you before they need you, building familiarity that when the moment comes, you're the safe choice. Don't forget that only 5 % of potential buyers are ever in the market. And if you've got five competitors, you've only got 1 % of that market that's going to be potentially even buying from you. So.
This is where businesses sabotage themselves. They post when they feel like it, they change their messaging all the time, they chase trends and they try to be clever. Potato marketing is not clever, it's consistent. If you want a practical rule though, stop creating content to impress strangers. Create content that helps your future customers make a decision.
So we move on to the final stage, the harvest. Harvest is demand capture, turning attention into action. This includes your clear offers, clear next steps, lead magnets that actually help, email nurture that respects people, conversations that diagnose, not push, and then you store them. Potatoes are stored, that is part of what makes them reliable. In marketing, store means keeping the relationships warm, following up properly.
building retention and repeat business, creating systems so you're not constantly starting from zero. Most businesses are obsessed with harvest and they ignore that next stage is they, what more can we do with a customer? They win the customer and they disappear, they stop servicing them. And then six months they start panicking about pipeline again. This is where you start to look at your customer service team as part of the marketing mix. A mature business.
Phil Bacon (12:50.124)
has marketing that keeps feeding the system, not just acquiring, but retaining, expanding, reactivating, and maximizing on the customer lifetime value.
Now we go into the next bit. So the point of a potato is not that it's exciting, the point is that it is dependable. If your marketing feels chaotic, it's usually because you're living in the visible layer. Posting, boosting, launching, chasing. The potato marketing method pulls you back to what is underneath. Soil, is two, truth. Seed, choices. Roots, infrastructure. Shoot, consistent trust building. Harvest and store, follow through.
And when those foundations exist, tactics suddenly start working. Because tactics are multipliers, not replacements.
I've got question for you. Now I want you to think about your business, your team or your role and answer this honestly. What is your current marketing built on? Fireworks or potatoes? If it's fireworks, it's no judgment. That's most of the market. But here's the better question. What is the next foundation you need to strengthen? Is it soil because you're not clear enough? Is it seed because you're doing too much? Is it roots because your systems and follow up?
as a shaky is it shoots because you're inconsistent, or is it storage because you keep starting from zero. Pick one, not five, just one. And that's how your foundations get built. Businesses with the strongest marketing are rarely the loudest. They're the ones that show up consistently with clarity, backed up by systems, focused on the real problems, and patient enough to let trust accumulate. That's the potato approach. The irony is this.
Phil Bacon (14:38.604)
In a world obsessed with speed, the most powerful competitive advantage is often the ability to do the basics properly for long enough that it becomes unfair. So if you take nothing else from this talk, take this. Stop asking what tactics should we try next. Start asking what foundation do we need to fix first? Because when the foundations are right, growth stops being a gamble, becomes a crop. Thank you for listening.
Michael Bernzweig (15:04.724)
Phil, thanks for that fantastic presentation. I'm sure a lot of organizations in the audience have quite a few takeaways. And coming up next, we have several opportunities for Q &A. So if anybody that listened to the presentation has a question they'd like to pose, pop that into the Q &A, and we'll get to those during the next Q &A session.