10th November 2025
Marketing is under growing pressure to deliver measurable impact, build credible brands and navigate increasingly complex buyer journeys. At our recent FPE Marketing Forum, bringing together the heads of marketing from across the portfolio, Ben Wright and Nick Andrews (Rostrum), Nick Milne (Go Ignite) and Fiona McKenzie (Revere) shared practical perspectives on building authority that converts, proving the value of marketing in sales-dominated organisations, and rethinking the buyer journey for today’s decision-makers.
1. Building authority that converts - Ben Wright/Nick Andrews, Rostrum
A familiar challenge for B2B software, data and services companies is how to build visibility and authority in crowded, specialist markets - and how to link that to commercial outcomes.
Rather than chasing volume of coverage, the discussion centred on a much sharper definition of “authority”:
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It’s not about how often you’re mentioned
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It’s about whether you’re recognised as a credible voice, referenced by others, and able to shape how a category is described.
A few practical themes stood out:
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Decide what you want to be known for: Many brands try to say everything at once. Be disciplined: choose one or two themes where you can genuinely lead, and build your communications, content and PR around those.
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Start with the audience, not the product: Look at real buyers - the humans, by name. What do they read, share and care about? Which journalists, analysts and influencers shape their thinking? That external view should drive the agenda more than internal feature releases.
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Use data to earn attention: You don’t need a big research budget to create compelling stories. Proprietary usage data, smart analysis of public datasets, freedom of information requests or even search trend analysis can all underpin insights that feel newsworthy and useful – particularly in trade and regional media.
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Thought leadership that actually says something: Opinion pieces remain one of the most efficient ways for small teams to build authority. They work best when they carry a clear point of view or prediction, rather than repackaging product messaging.
Underlying all of this was a simple idea: authority is built where your expertise, your customers’ real concerns and what’s happening in the market overlap. Showing up consistently in those conversations - on the right topics, in the right channels, with spokespeople who can hold their own - is ultimately what drives commercial value.
2. The ROI challenge - Nick Milne, Go Ignite
A topic that comes up regularly is how to prove the value of marketing in organisations that were built, and are still led, by sales. A key distinction ran through the discussion:
- Efficiency - doing things cheaply and quickly
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Effectiveness - doing the right things that genuinely drive growth
It is entirely possible to be highly efficient at activities that don’t move the dial on revenue, margin or long-term value. To help shift the internal conversation, several practical lenses were suggested:
- Be clear what marketing is accountable for: Marketing should absolutely support revenue, but that doesn’t mean it should carry the same closed-won targets as sales. A more realistic boundary is often around qualified demand - for example, clearly defined marketing-qualified or sales-accepted leads, plus agreed expectations around brand and pipeline contribution.
- Measure customer response, not just channel activity: Rather than jumping straight into attribution models, start by agreeing the signals that matter:
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How are we changing what customers think about us?
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How are they engaging - events, trials, demos, content, communities?
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How is that flowing through to opportunities, deals and revenue?
- Marketing activity, sales outreach, product changes and pricing then sit underneath that as inputs used to explain those shifts, rather than being treated in isolation.
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- Build benchmarks over time: For many B2B businesses, a simple spreadsheet of campaigns, objectives, budgets and a handful of core metrics is enough to start spotting what really works. The value comes from consistency and comparison over time, not from complex tooling on day one.
- Create a culture of learning, not judgement: Effectiveness improves when teams are allowed to test, learn and adapt. Honest post-campaign reviews - “What did we expect? What actually happened? What do we change?” are more valuable than treating every result purely as a scorecard.
One theme was clear: marketing, sales and finance need a shared language for value. The challenge, and opportunity, for marketing leaders is to help create that language, and to use simple, transparent frameworks to show how marketing contributes to growth alongside other parts of the go-to-market engine.
3. Is the buyer journey broken - or just more human? - Fiona McKenzie, Revere
What is the reality of modern B2B buying - and what that means for how we plan, execute and explain marketing activity.
Three ideas in particular resonated:
- Most of your market is not in-market: At any given time, only a small proportion of your potential buyers (5%) are actively considering a new solution. Yet many programmes are designed as if everyone is ready to talk to sales. That creates pressure for short-term “leads” while overlooking the 90–95% of future buyers who are quietly forming their views and building their mental shortlist.
- The journey isn’t linear - and it isn’t individual: Buyers rarely move neatly from awareness to consideration to decision. They dip in and out over long periods, talk to peers, join communities, read reviews, attend events and loop stakeholders in and out of the process. Buying groups are larger, decisions take longer, and the perceived risk of making the wrong call is higher.
- Brand and experience matter more than ever: When most buyers end up choosing from a shortlist they have already formed, being on that list is critical. That comes from repeated, relevant exposure over time - not just a single well-timed campaign or sales call.
A more realistic way of thinking about this, moving away from a rigid funnel and towards a series of recurring stages of consideration - from first noticing a brand, to questioning the status quo, to building an internal business case, to expanding and renewing once someone is a customer. The emphasis was on using this view as a practical planning tool rather than as a theoretical model:
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Make sure you’re doing something to stay present with the buyers who aren’t ready to purchase yet
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Challenge over-reliance on gated content where it blocks buyers from self-educating
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Treat existing customers as a core growth engine, not only a retention challenge
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Use the buyer journey to educate internal stakeholders, particularly on why some activities can’t, and shouldn’t, be judged purely on in-quarter pipeline.
Final Thoughts
Across all three sessions, a consistent theme emerged: marketing’s role in growth goes far beyond “filling the top of the funnel”.
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Building authority in specialist markets
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Creating a shared, credible view of how growth really happens
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And designing experiences that reflect how people actually buy today.
Marketing creates the most value when it builds focused authority, measures impact in terms the business recognises, and reflects the messy, human reality of how buyers choose.