Sport Signage handles all the on-location branding you see at every Grand Prix on the F1 calendar. A very large contract. So trackside boards, the LED panels, the sponsor logos on the grass, the cooldown room.

The brief on day one was to showcase what we were doing in the paddock and tell the company’s story.

I never asked for a target

The job title came with no target, with no revenue number, client-acquisition or retention problem to solve. There was a lot of testing early on, a lot of finding my feet and doing things that made sense to me rather than what made sense to who I reported to.

My first real move was to rely on what I did before: “Let me start posting on Instagram and see what happens.” Everything that followed came from that decision, and looking back, it wasn’t an effective use of my time for a company that relied more on B2B marketing and sales.

The only part I would defend is the early weeks, meeting people, walking the tracks and seeing who else the company works with.

I never established who the work was meant to reach, at what stage of their buying or what number it was supposed to move. And because I never properly asked, digital became a function that produced things.

We had a project with DHL to take the boards and signage and make recycled materials like wallets, pens, notebooks and tote bags out of them. And a newsletter that went through five design iterations.

Rather, I should have spent time on why we were writing the content, and why company updates were going out to a small subscriber base. Rather, we should have focused on the clients we wanted to attract over the long term and the job we were doing for them.

Truth is, I was caught up in the circus, looking around, star-struck, thinking about how cool it is and what my 5-year-old self would think. That isn’t something to take for granted, but when it distracts you from the job, it becomes a liability, which is the same reason teams and agencies say they try not to hire fans.

In the video game Assassin’s Creed, you climb to the viewpoint and synchronise before the map appears, and everything below stays foggy until you do. If you walk into a fight without getting that idea. You’re going to be lost.

Being at the track was the right place to start; the paddock is where the client list walks past you and where the crew does the work. I spent those days partly focused on making videos. I’d spend them now asking the questions you can only ask in person.

Then I'd spend most of the first month with people on the team, learning everything that already exists about the brand. Location, heritage, founders, whatever internal research is lying around.

At Sport Signage, that’s 30 years of trading, and an F1 season every year since 2014, and an archive I never opened.

Running alongside it, I would look at the hard facts:

Then I would do qualitative work with clients, F1 teams, F1 itself. Questions they were doing before they found us, who else they considered and what nearly stopped them from signing.

With every client worth a lot and a smaller client, that’s about having those conversations rather than a research budget.

Then I would measure whether people in this category see us as the company that installs things correctly or the company that thinks about where the logo should go. Essentially doing a brand survey about perceptions and associations. Then we can track this a year later to see what’s changed.

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning

Sales would be 100% involved in this process, especially for a B2B company like this, because 80% to 90% of execution runs through them. So that would be meetings with the director of operations to understand who actually signs and what they’re buying.

We would have to be selective about targeting more rights-holders and promoters, or do more activation work. Since activation work tends to have a lot more competition, priority would be working with the rights-holders.

The other thing to account for in a category this small is that nobody is in the market on the day we reach them. If a series adds a race or a club rebuilds a stand, the shortlist has already formed. Everything before that moment is the job.

Sport Signage’s distinctive look had a hard green feel, with the logo running across their shirts and vehicles moving around the track.

We would also identify movements in the funnel, specific to Sport Signage. From unaware to aware, from consideration to preference, from trial to loyalty. Something like moving the proportion of commercial directors at the series and clubs we could physically service who know what we do.

The second version is the one who earns the trust to do the job properly.

Three of four objectives out of that and the DHL project, the sustainability project and the newsletter get measured against those objectives. Two of the three won’t survive those; that’s the point of writing these objectives down.

The other thing that I’d change is the job title. As the only marketing person in the company, I should have come in as a marketing manager, because the word “digital” told me which of the four P’s to care about.

I was hired to do the fourth P, which is where most marketers tend to silo to. Promotion

Product, for me, meant deciding which service line goes at the front of everything we say and making sure it exists as something a client can ask for by name. They sell installs, LED panels and ground painting. Very rough names; conversations would inform better names.

But I would have taken it, named it, written out what a client gets and what it costs, and led with it on the website, in the deck and newsletter, with installs sitting behind it all as evidence we can execute.

Their place is the paddock and behind-the-scenes of sports. The founder’s relationships and the director of operations client list are the distribution, so the marketing job is arming those conversations with something worth sending afterwards. The website is there to confirm what someone already heard at a race.

Had I assumed the site was generating leads, I’d have spent a year improving a page that few people ever arrive at cold.

That leaves promotion, and I’d do 3 things in this order.

First, get the founder onto LinkedIn every week, because he holds the relationships and the stories about what goes wrong at a track, and my job is to get those out of his head and onto the page in his own language.

Then I would work with a PR firm to get us into the right industry publications and panels to show expertise.

The third would be the newsletter, rebuilt around the job customers hire us to do: what sends someone looking for a signage partner in the first place, what they were doing before that, and who else they would consider.

Every issue occupies one of those entry points.

I was briefly interviewed at the Bahrain GP and asked nothing useful, because I wanted the job and it was F1.

What I’d ask now is why they need someone at all right now, and what they’d want to see at 3 months and at 6 months that proves I’m contributing to the business. I’d ask what’s stopping them from doing this fractionally or on a freelance basis, and why they want someone full-time rather than part-time.

Part of my questions would be those early-stage diagnosis questions: what the founder is trying to do over the next 12 months, and how I’d come in to help grow the business.

One version of me needed a job and got excited about the opportunity to work in F1. While the version I’d want now comes in on the role itself. Asks what he’s actually meant to do there, and puts systems and thinking in place to help the business hit its goals.