Marketing strategy

ITAA sells advisory work worth £10,000 and upwards per engagement, and managed services that can run to a million pounds a year, to a small number of senior buyers. With a three-person team and a £24k annual ad budget, every channel had to earn its place. I set the strategy, decided where the money went and proposed the initiatives that became the core of ITAA’s marketing.

0 → 5

direct enquiries a month, each engagement worth £10k+

~50

gated guide downloads a month

£24k

annual ad budget, with the channel split decided by me

126%+

more website users, year on year

ITAA

Marketing strategy at ITAA

My role: Strategy, budget owner, personas, reporting

ITAA’s buyers are IT, procurement, finance and asset management leaders at large organisations. There aren’t many of them, they research for months before they talk to anyone, and several people are involved in every decision. The website also couldn’t show client logos or named case studies, so the marketing had to build trust in other ways.

What I did

Set the direction from the business objectives. I built the brand strategy around what the business needed: be visible and credible to senior buyers long before they had a licensing problem, then make it easy to start a conversation when they did.
Built buyer personas with the sales team. We mapped four buyer groups (procurement, IT leadership, IT asset management and finance), their pressures and the questions they ask. These shaped who we targeted and how every campaign, page and guide was worded.
Chose the channels and owned the budget. I decided how the £24k a year was split, matching each channel to an objective: Google Ads for high-intent searches like IBM ILMT and Oracle Java, LinkedIn for awareness and remarketing to a small, senior audience, and SEO and AI search for long-term visibility.
Made the calls that fit a niche audience. I advised against a branded search campaign because ITAA didn’t yet have the brand recognition to justify it, and put the money into remarketing and content instead. I kept LinkedIn remarketing as one audience because splitting it by job title would have dropped below LinkedIn’s minimum audience size.
Proposed the initiatives that became the core of the marketing. The Inside Software Licensing newsletter, the AI search programme, the move to publisher pillar guides and the buyer personas were all my proposals.
Fed insight back to sales. Monitoring the website, I spotted trends sales could act on, such as a rise in law firms visiting the site, and passed them on as leads to follow up.
Measured and reported monthly. I reported on traffic, search visibility, campaigns and enquiries to senior leadership each month, and used the results to decide where to focus next.

Outcome

Direct enquiries through the website went from none to around five a month, and the gated guides brought in about 50 downloads a month. With a single engagement worth £10,000 or more, that’s meaningful pipeline for a small advisory firm, achieved without client logos or named case studies on the site. Website users more than doubled year on year.

Some client details and figures have been left out or kept general to respect client and employer confidentiality.