Podcast Ep 353: MarkGo founders Peter McPartlin and Sharon Mooney say that in the age of AI, strategy, not spend, decides how Irish SMEs will scale. Human judgement, they say, decides who wins.
It’s a little crazy when you think about it but Irish SMEs account for 99.8% of all active enterprises in the country and employ more than two-thirds (68%) of the workforce, according to the Central Statistics Office, but receive the least marketing support of any part of the Irish economy.
This imbalance is one that stands to be corrected in the age of AI, muses Peter McPartlin, co-founder of a new venture that aims to put things right for SMEs and scaling firms.
“I think the sad thing is that the absence of having a marketing strategy will ultimately cost a small business an awful lot more in later years than it does in the first year, and I think sometimes a lot of businesses mistake activity for strategy”
The root of the problem is that many small businesses grow and fumble ahead without any proper marketing plan or strategy. McPartlin and his co-founder Sharon Mooney joined the ThinkBusiness Podcast to outline how the imbalance can be put right.
McPartlin and Mooney’s new venture MarkGo is an AI-powered marketing strategy platform designed to help SMEs create professional marketing plans in just 48 hours. By combining advanced AI tools with experienced human strategists, the company delivers tailored competitor analysis, customer personas, channel strategies, budget recommendations and a 90-day action plan.
Why do founders keep skipping the strategy bit?
Founded by experienced marketing leaders Peter McPartlin, Sharon Mooney and James Dunne, MarkGo aims to make high-quality marketing strategy accessible and affordable for smaller businesses. Its mission is to give SMEs the strategic clarity needed to grow without the cost and complexity of traditional agencies.
Former Carat and Today FM CEO McPartlin traces the idea back to his previous venture, the Indy List, a freelance marketplace. He discovered that clients kept asking for short-term fixes from SEO to social content and rarely had an answer when asked what set their business apart.
“By and large they were all kind of at sea. There’s a big market there for companies who can’t afford necessarily big consultancies or big agencies, don’t have the resources, are probably too small for a lot of those companies anyway.
Mooney spent her career on the agency side, five years at Teneo before co-founding the brand strategy firm Hyphen. She saw a similar gap from the other direction. “So many brilliant small businesses out there fall below the threshold of being able to either employ a dedicated marketing resource or being able to access some of the strategic clout of an agency or a consultancy,” she says.
MarkGo, she adds, delivers “the intelligence and the clout of a big agency” through a 90-day action plan built for founders without agency budgets.
Time and cash explain much of the imbalance, Mooney believes. Founders are focused on payroll and short-term revenue and marketing strategy gets filed away as a “nice to have.”
McPartlin points to the daily grind behind that decision. “There’s a lot of firefighting that goes on in business,” he says, and marketing tends to sit in “that kind of important-but-not-urgent box.
“I think the sad thing is that the absence of having a marketing strategy will ultimately cost a small business an awful lot more in later years than it does in the first year, and I think sometimes a lot of businesses mistake activity for strategy. You know, ‘we’re doing stuff on Instagram, we’re doing stuff on SEO, we have a great website – [yet] we’re burning money.’ You could be burning money, spending loads of money on Facebook credits or Meta credits, and it’s expensive.”
AI is an accelerant, not a substitute for taste
And if things like SEO and social media marketing aren’t confusing enough to the uninitiated or spend weary, the AI juggernaut is also expected to transform the world of digital marketing.
“Every business is so different, but they do fall into quite predictable traps, especially at SME level and founder level”
According to McPartlin, every business owner or founder is using some form of AI already. On the plus side, he believes this has narrowed the gap between small operators and larger ones. But it comes with a caveat: “Acceleration without direction just gets you to the wrong place faster,” he says.
While ChatGPT or CoPilot could divvy up a convincing looking strategy in a matter of seconds, what they cannot supply, he argues, is the judgment to tell a strong position from a weak one.”
Mooney frames it around three blind spots still inherent in AI: knowledge, nuance and nonsense. “It really doesn’t know what it’s like to be a fan, or to get a haircut or to eat pizza. It doesn’t know nuance, so it can’t really understand the unsaid or the culturally implied. AI gets us to good fast, but it’s up to the human in the loop to take it to the next level. And that’s what MarkGo does.”
She adds that short-termism usually tops her list of the marketing mistakes that scale-up founders make.
“You throw money at an activity, you feel you’re doing marketing because you’re out there and you’re talking about it. However, when that stops and the tumbleweed kicks in, you’re like, where’s the ROI (return-on-investment) on that money I’ve just spent on our marketing campaign? So over-investing in a marketing campaign without a strategy – why are we doing this, and why should customers care? If we’re looking to scale a business, it’s about consistently telling a story in a very consistent way. And if we could just hammer that home, given the years of experience that both Peter and I are bringing to the table, messaging on a very simplified, consistent basis is fundamentally going to be a game changer for a business that is trying to scale and get its message out to the marketplace.”
McPartlin points to founders chasing channels simply because their competitors are on them, rather than working out where their own customers actually are.
“SMEs go, ‘Oh, look, my competitors are on TikTok,’ or ‘to get B2B buyers I need to be on LinkedIn’ – something someone else is doing, and you feel you all have to do it too. So it’s kind of following your competitors rather than sticking to, well, where are my customers, where are they at, and deciding what channels I should go for. And the thing that we’d say is, don’t start off doing six channels – do one channel really well, but first identify who your audience is and find out what channel they’re on. Not because podcasting is fashionable at the moment, or TikTok is where your competitors are. I think a lot of SMEs get caught in that particular trap.”
Another trap is underspending or overspending. “Alot of start-ups end up spending on performance marketing, stuff that generates an instant response, but then quickly they run out of road, they’ve exhausted the pool of potential. The balance between performance and brand, in terms of the mix of spend, is really important for an SME or a start-up, no matter what size you’re at.”
Vanity metrics, he says, can compound the problem. “What gets measured gets managed, and what gets measured badly gets managed badly.”
A seasoned veteran of hundreds of SME engagements, McPartlin says the product is rarely the problem, it’s the strategy or the story behind it.
“A founder has spent ages kind of getting the product absolutely perfect, they see an opportunity in the market, they go for it, but they’ve never really thought about the strategy around it, or the story around that product itself. And I think a lot of SMEs get caught up in marketing to themselves – they think about the features, the processes, the credentials that they have, and so on, but don’t think about the output from the customer’s point of view. So I think both of those are really big failings, and they’re the things that matter ultimately to the success of a business or not.”
Advice for bootstrapped founders
Asked what to do with a strong product and almost no marketing budget, Mooney’s advice is direct. “Every business is so different, but they do fall into quite predictable traps, especially at SME level and founder level. First is founders waiting for perfection. So it’s just get it out there, start talking about it – don’t build it in flight, if needs be, but just get it out.
“The second one – potentially owners and operators confuse themselves with the brand, so they may be reticent to talk about the brand because they feel they’re completely intertwined, whereas a great brand can decouple itself from the owner and actually stand on its own two feet. So it’s finding a strategy that helps them deliver that for the long term.
“And the third is conflating tactics with strategy – understanding that this burst of activity that I’m spending a few bob on is not a strategy, it’s just a short-term burst that might live for a week, and then what happens after that?”
McPartlin puts clarity on audience first, then customer proof, over paid spend.
“Testimonials, word of mouth, referrals. All of those things work 10 times more, a 100 times more, than paid ads on digital media.”
He concludes: “Get the thinking right, and then after that you’re investing hopefully in the right direction.”
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