Christina Moore (00:00)
Imagine walking up to someone you’ve never met before and immediately asking them for money. That’s how a lot of marketing works today. Brands show up, run an ad and ask for the sale and hope someone is ready to buy. But strategist Dots Oyebolu argues that marketing works best when it behaves more like a relationship. Instead of focusing only on the small group of people already in the market, the real opportunity is building trust with the much larger audience who has a

problem but hasn’t started searching for the solution yet. In this conversation, Dots explains how marketers can rethink their strategy, how content plays a role in building trust, and why the future of marketing may depend on creating value. Let’s get into it.

Dots Oyebolu (00:56)
Yes, my name is Dot. And one of the reasons I like this name is because I connect to the dots, pun intended. So I am a strategist at heart I see patterns, I made roadmaps, and I do things like that. And I was able to apply that into my marketing career,

Christina Moore (01:17)
So how did you get into marketing? What’s the journey of your career?

Dots Oyebolu (01:22)
Yeah, I majored as a computer scientist, believe it or not. ⁓ Yeah, but I wasn’t very good at math. ⁓ Computer science, even in this part of the world, I know it’s changing, is like 40 % mathematics and 60 % coding or whatever application it is. So I did graduate, thankfully, even though I had to struggle through that. ⁓

But that led me into the world of marketing technology.

I know my mom wanted me to be a doctor because she had a rich brother and my dad wanted me to be a lawyer to take over his law firm and I kind of disappointed them so ⁓

really, really happy for what everything has turned out on the marketing side. But yeah, I do have a lot of experience in marketing at this point.

Christina Moore (02:15)
Yeah, I don’t think you disappointed them. I think they’ll be very pleased with how things have turned out for you in marketing with the number of brands that you’ve worked for and also setting up your own business, which is incredible feat and requires nerves of steel, quite frankly.

Dots Oyebolu (02:18)
Okay.

Absolutely.

Yes, yes, you are always the only

marketer in the room.

Christina Moore (02:39)
So over your career, you must have seen various iterations of digital marketing. What are some of the audience behavioural changes that you’ve noticed?

Dots Oyebolu (02:52)
Yeah, that’s a great question.

Customers hate to be sold to I think that’s the biggest thing that we see there was an age Where you know, everybody was crazy about brand marketing You got to run the ads you got to do the commercials and there’s all these nice things around that and Then when digital marketing came up and it’s we could see how easy It was for people to be able to track impact of marketing on performance. Then we dropped all that

And then we just focus on performance marketing, it’s clicks and conversions and, you know, last click attribution and all that stuff. But now marketers hate that because we are all coming from a point of being sold to, and we want to go back to what it used to be, which is what a typical relationship is, which is kind of how I say it, maybe because I’m a family guy, but it works in all kinds of relationship.

Don’t just walk up. can’t just walk up to you today and say, you know, give me your money. You know, it’s never going to happen. There has to be that, nice to meet you. Then there’s a podcast like this. Then maybe we’ll meet in person. Then there’s like back to back stuff. There’s some free exchange of value and then you can give me your money. And that is what is, is ruling right now across both sides of the spectrum where you have

and I’m going to go a little bit technical here, the top funnel brand awareness initiatives, the mid funnel, what we call consideration initiatives, and the conversion slash lead slash bottom funnel initiatives. Those initiatives should run concurrently if we need to be able to get the customer to where we want them to go.

One of the truths that works a lot in B2C that is beginning to work now in B2B is the fact that people are living the blue ocean of marketing, which is…

You want to focus on people who are already in markets, but that’s where every other person is focused on, which is like maybe 5 % of B2B and 10 % on B2C. That place is already, it’s too competitive. It’s full, it’s coagulated. ⁓ And then you run campaigns and you be like, my, the response rates are low, my, the click through rates low, cost per.

clicks are high and so on and so forth. Instead of that, why not go to the other 95 % of people who are what we call the problem aware stage. They do have a problem, they don’t know what the solution is yet. And then you come in as that brand that say, here is the solution to your problem. Don’t sell to them yet. Just tell them here is the solution to your problem and then you start the engagement from there. ⁓ I think…

we need to stop this whole narrative of targeting the those in market. And I know there are lot of voices out there regarding this to focus in those other folks that ⁓ are not aware of your brand yet, but they have a problem that you can help them solve uniquely, can get into brand positioning and things like that. I think those two will be very,

interesting and pivotal to marketing success in general, but to also driving quality client acquisition, ⁓ regardless of the technological landscape and how that’s changing right now.

Christina Moore (06:38)
Brands focus their attention on people who are already actively looking for a product or service, but that audience is small and it’s where every competitor is fighting for attention. Dots suggests that marketers should focus on the much larger group of people who are problem aware. They know they have an issue to solve, but they don’t know where to get started on the solutions. If you can engage those people early, educate them and build trust,

your brand is far more likely to be top of mind when they eventually do make their purchasing decision. To help companies think more systematically about this, Dots has developed a framework he calls the Strategy Maker Engine. He believes that most successful marketing is a result of careful planning, systems, and structure before execution even begins.

Dots Oyebolu (07:30)
The D2C engine, I call it, a strategy maker engine, is something that serves 50 % employee brands that are within the in-commerce industries or general consumer or customer industries.

And the first step there is, as you probably guessed it, market and customer insight.

You are doing your journey mapping. What is that path to becoming a customer?

You are looking at a bit of the technicals in terms of your digital maturity benchmarks. You are looking at issues around pricing and packaging ⁓ and things like that.

Then the second step there is brand and experience design.

⁓ This is very rudimentary, but very, very important.

know, archetypes, ⁓ brand voice, storytelling, community, I’d mention ⁓ UGC or UGM, social proof elements. Those things are very, very important for you to establish. And those are probably things that allows you to know who your ICP is and what you need to give to them.

Next step, which is the third, is building your growth engine. I call it the growth engine build. So this is where you get into some of the operational aspects of it.

You start to have your rollout plan. And I use a priority system. I didn’t invent this one. Called the ICE, I-C-E, impact, cost, and effort. So we are ranking those one to 10.

for each initiative that way you can prioritise your rollout. ⁓ Using data from your digital maturity reports, you are upgrading your overall MarTec stack and then launching other aspects, other kinds of initiatives or platforms, looking at overall.

your go-to-market motions. that I have on my website ⁓ that you can download. It’s kind of like an Excel sheet. This is when you build that with your growth engine.

And the next step there, which is the fourth, is the performance and unit economy. So.

You are looking at your customer acquisition costs and lifetime value analysis.

You are looking at your retention cohort analysis. You are establishing potential A-B tests. And you are establishing your reporting framework. So that’s pretty standard and simple. But many people would just rush into marketing without doing that. In some cases, for a marketing campaign, it takes maybe 30 % of use planning. Well, more than that, actually.

looking

at 70%, 80 % planning, and then 20 % execution. So it’s very, very important to have all those done.

Christina Moore (10:22)
We know the buyer journey isn’t linear. Decisions involve multiple stakeholders. People are sharing articles, podcasts, and posts with their colleagues long before a purchase is made. So is your content designed to be shared for those conversations? If you’re producing content right now and you’re not sure whether it has that kind of reach, take our content power score. It’s a short assessment that shows whether your content is discoverable,

engaging and positioned to influence buyers across the whole journey. You’ll see what’s working, what isn’t and what to fix first. The link is in the description.

Dots Oyebolu (11:03)
Then once you have some great ⁓ sense of what that is, you get into the final phase, which is market expansion.

Are you looking to have activations, collaborations, influencer and affiliate programs, venturing into new markets, things like that?

that will help to see that, I’ve had a good test in this market. I want to try a different markets.

The B2B strategy maker engine is similar, just with a few tweaks. That does serve SaaS, AI industries, mid-sized enterprise brands. And then the first step to that one is marketing and account intelligence.

You are looking at your competitive analysis, ⁓ and you are looking at all that macro or even micro marketing analysis as such. There’s also category and position in design here, which is very, very similar to what we already discussed on the B2C side, but with a few extra things. So you are looking at thought leadership reports, benchmark frameworks.

Those are some of the things that do influence how you set up your ICP, your jobs to be done, and things like that.

Then you have the revenue motion ⁓ engine. Again, this is you trying to build all your

something that is very, important for you to explore to see what are the different ways through which I can make money that includes involves marketing.

I won’t go into the fourth one as in depth is the same as the last one, which is revenue intelligence and reporting. What is important in this one different from the B2C is the multi-touch attribution.

B2B requires a buying committee. And there’s a lot of this, I don’t know if it’s word bureaucracy, but there’s a lot of consensus.

to getting that B2B product or service. So being able to look around that and develop revenue intelligence and economics planning with regards to that is very key.

The last step on the B2B side is the same as B2C, which is market expansion and enablement. ⁓ So very, very key to explore.

Different other initiatives around events, community, executive led evangelism is the biggest right now, which is why some might tell you that personal LinkedIn profiles are doing better than corporate pages today. ⁓ being able to expand around those things and able some market expansion as well is something that really helps.

Christina Mooew (13:47)
Which steps of the Strategy Maker Engine do you think most companies overlook?

Let me know in the comments.

Christina Moore (13:54)
you touched on something there where you were describing the difference between B2C and B2B. And one of the things that came up in my mind was that, yeah, you do have to treat it slightly differently because for B2C, effectively, you’re talking to one stakeholder, right? You’re talking to one person.

who’s going to make the purchase. And they’re very rarely going to consult with other people about that purchase. But for B2B, there are potentially a handful of stakeholders who you’re going to have to convince and communicate with. I’d like to talk a little bit more about how your playbook changes in that area.

Dots Oyebolu (14:20)
Yeah.

Yeah, when it comes to the B2B side, I’m dealing with buyer committees. I think there’s starting to be that shift. And what is the shift? ⁓ We have, in this case, more engagements required from marketers to be able to talk to each of these stakeholders. So remember when I mentioned at the very beginning about ⁓

It’s not just our performance. There’s also like brand as well in the B2B space. That is slowly coming up now. And it should be because ⁓ you can’t just sell to me and you think I’m going to buy it right away. I need to be able to build some sort of relationship with you before you actually become top of mind. ⁓ And it’s so detailed in the sense that I’ve worked on some campaigns where

Even people already in the pipeline sales pipeline are being marketed to not just through email, but through ads. You know, I’m saying people who are almost closed are being sent podcast episodes via ads to watch or listen to. They are being sent different posts to look at. There’s that across ⁓ funnel engagement that is now increasing more.

With SMBs when it comes to B2B, an SMB business customer will likely not read your email newsletter because they are so busy, but they will take your call. They will probably see your Instagram post or meta.

posts, whatever that is, or Facebook posts. ⁓ But that is still needed in that sense. And people do use tools like Clay to find SMB contacts or accounts that they want to start the engagement with and then take it all the way down. ⁓ There is a standard truth across all business types. And that is the fact that you need to have one core or top market.

Kind of like the Pareto’s principle with, you know, 80-20. So you want to have those top 20 % ICPs that will give you 80 % of the results. Once you develop what I call a, well not what I call, but what many call a product market fit, with that 20%, you can then start to expand, you know, with the other 80%. And that way you can grow your marketing efforts as your resource.

Christina Moor (17:09)
you

Dots Oyebolu (17:18)
also grows

Christina Moore (17:20)
So the ⁓ expectation is here that when it comes to B2B, because you’ll have this, scope of material, that

whoever is in the consideration stage is sharing those materials with their colleagues. They’re sending them, they’re forwarding emails, they’re sending them links. They’re kind of like, there you go, dark social. So they’re already trying to onboard people to their way of thinking. And I assume this kind of works really well for SaaS as

Dots Oyebolu (17:42)
It’s called dark social.

I would also lump in high-ticket B2C in there, not just B2B. Like, you want to buy a house, you want to buy a car, you want to buy anything that is four figures and above. People are now treating those kinds of purchases like a B2B purchase.

So ⁓ Yeah, it holds

Christina Moore (18:18)
But even with a clear strategy, the buyer journey today is rarely straightforward. In B2B, decisions are made by committees rather than individuals. Multiple stakeholders are involved and information moves between them in ways marketers often can’t track. Dots explains that marketing often needs to continue even when someone has already entered the sales pipeline. Buyers are still researching, they’re still comparing options,

and still sharing content with their colleagues. Many of those conversations happen through what is being dubbed as dark social. Links shared in private messages, forwarded emails, or conversations between colleagues, which means the content a brand produces can influence decisions long before the marketing team even sees a measurable signal.

Dots Oyebolu (19:11)
yes, content.

I don’t think people still have that bandwidth to sit down and read a five-minute article, even though they are ready to quote-unquote sit down and listen to a one-hour podcast.

That’s because they are listening to the podcast as they are doing something else. I’m a huge beneficiary of that, which is why starting a podcast was a no-brainer. It’s easier to consume that kind of content because it’s very low friction.

There’s no order in what you need to start with first. My own suggestion would just be we are slowly moving into an age of interactive content. So even if it’s a text format, somehow it needs to be interactive. And that’s why people will build quizzes and things like that that engages people on the kind of content that works for them.

The second thing with regards to interactive content is this podcast we are doing right now. And podcasts have been the podcast business now since 2022. And podcast is the single biggest seed content in the history of humanity. it’s, don’t know how best to put it. Because if you have this podcast episode, it can be turned into an article. It can be turned into social media clips.

It can be turned into image quotes. It can be turned into… I know an agency in the UK ⁓ that can turn your podcast episodes into books.

YouTube is now the second biggest social media platform in the world. I’ve been saying that since 2019. And if Facebook is not careful, it’s most likely going to be number one. So the future is going to that end.

Content marketing has become more important than ever, but you just have to be smart about it,

Christina Moore (21:14)
Dots thinks content is essential, and I would agree. But as AI makes it easier to produce content at scale, the real value will increasingly come from something harder to replicate, perspective and experience. The marketers who stand out won’t necessarily be the ones producing the most content. They’ll be the ones providing the most meaningful insight.

Christina Moore (21:38)
and just before we wrap things up, I would like to talk about how you think emerging technology is reshaping marketing.

even a projection of what you think is going to happen in the future.

Dots Oyebolu (21:51)
is the biggest thing right now.

I mean, the unfortunate thing with marketers for AI is,

You might be given more responsibilities. For example, if you’re in the agency space, you might be forced to manage six clients instead of five clients. You might be forced to do both account management and execution. ⁓ If you’re a marketer, in-house marketer, you might be forced to run just a two-person marketing team versus a 10-person marketing team. I know a lot of CMOs that are just one-person marketing teams. And then you’re speaking to them on Zoom, and you’re like,

you’ve got someone that is gonna do that website change, right? This is a CMO, as I know, it’s just me. So that might happen. Unfortunately, you have to suck it up and just do it, but leverage AI as much as possible so you don’t burn out.

Christina Moore (22:42)
Awesome. Dot, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been an absolute pleasure to speak to you. And I look forward to seeing how your career goes from strength to strength as well.

Dots Oyebolu (22:57)
Thank you. Yeah, thanks for those kind words as well.

Christina Moore (22:58)
Thank you.

Christina Moore (23:00)
What I took away from this conversation with Dots is that buyers don’t want to be sold to immediately and that building trust earlier in the journey matters more than ever. We explored why marketers should spend more time educating the much larger audience who are still figuring out their problem. But the central idea running through the whole conversation is this. The brands making headway

are often the ones that provide value and build trust long before someone decides to buy. Because in the end, marketing works best when it behaves less like a transaction and more like a relationship. Thank you, I’m Christina Moore. This is A Mind For Marketing. And remember to take our content power score in the description below.