Michelle Picoto

Brand is often a dirty word because it's so misunderstood. The true core of branding is the personification of your business and how you expose that to your market. It's not visual identity, it's not a campaign, it's not a side project or team. It's the sum of all the parts of your business and how it is experienced by both internal and external parties. It requires cohesion and business strategy, and it requires repetition to solidify it.

Yes, you need good content, but that content is only valuable if it's getting in front of the people it was created for. That's what content marketing really is. I've planned out content pillars matched to buyer journeys, run content audits and repurposing plans, and grown content marketing from single channel to multi channel. Best approach is a simple approach.

Disregarding the intense LinkedIn semantic debates, demand generation applies to generating awareness and preference for your product from as early in the buying journey as possible. Call it brand awareness, product awareness, etc. the basics still stand: you have buyers out of market, and buyers in market, and you need to build mental and physical availability for future revenue growth. Those core building blocks outlive the names and labels given to them.

Taking a product to market involves multiple facets: product analysis, product messaging, the sales proposition, marketing strategy, and the sales strategy. I've been fortunate enough to work in roles in all those facets, bringing brand new products to market or expanding existing products into new markets. Matching the right message to the right buyers in the places they hang out.

What is marketing for if not growth? I've worked with startups, agencies, and enterprises to unblock growth, from reframing problem spaces and ideal buyer profiling, to category design and go-to-market plans to find untapped revenue opportunities.

Yeah, this one hits right in the heart. I'm nowhere near perfect in this, but I've found ways to deal with this for myself, and having connections that build you up when you can't do it yourself is invaluable. I'll happily be your cheer squad!

This has to be one of my favourite activities. Most growth walls that my clients face come down to not knowing who their ideal buyers are and why they would care - it's one of the key pillars in my positioning house approach. It's more than surface level questions; it's adapting and digging to understand the user's world and context, and what their true challenges, objections, and risk perceptions are.

Sometimes this is all you really need. And I'm here for it. Safe space, open mind, and a positive approach to working through any issues. We all need a little more empathy in this life.

I've been using Miro over the past few years for everything from workshops to technical diagrams and workflows. It's simple enough to use for the right purposes.

I predominantly use Typeform for custom surveys and forms that I build for my business as well as for clients. I've also integrated it into custom landing pages.

I use Hubspot for my own business as well as for clients. I've implemented email automation for personalised product onboarding journeys, as well as marketing and sales campaigns. I've implemented email, social, and account automation, landing pages, websites, and meetings through Hubspot, custom deal and lead fields and attribution fields, etc.