Our marketing playbook for H2, 2026
TO: All Marketing Team Members
FROM: Azleen Abdul Rahim, CMO
SUBJECT: Our marketing playbook for H2, 2026
Hey everyone,
Azleen here. Sorry for this delayed email. I was waiting for the CEO to approve this marketing playbook first before sharing it with you. Adam did ask me questions about its achievability, especially on the 30 per cent growth in revenue by the end of December. I told him that it’s going to work. I highlighted that the marketing team has done this before, delivering 20 per cent growth in revenue and brand reputation from January to June early this year, despite only a handful of us who inherited zero momentum to piggyback on when we started back in January.
Did you know that marketing is pretty much like midfielders in football? Now you do. FYI, midfielders are called playmakers. They have two jobs to deliver. One is to provide goal-scoring opportunities to the strikers to score goals. Sometimes, they score goals too. What midfielders do basically is to read the game before and during the game, create the play and build opportunities to score. Strikers here refer to the sales team, just in case you wonder.
Two, is to be the first line of defence. This is the second role midfielders play. When the team is under attack from the opponent, the midfielders will ensure that they can hold the fort by not allowing the other side to score goals. In marketing, as 'midfielders', we will have to work closely together with the partners and customers to solve any issues or challenges coming our way, so that things don't escalate further. If, for whatever reason, things do escalate, then it will no longer be our primary job to hold it. It will be the responsibility of the product team or the management team to solve the issues.
To me, you guys are the best 'midfielders' I've ever known. Now, let me share with you that playbook since the approval part is done. Here goes. Please take note of this. It’s important.
Refresh our knowledge base. Start working on this immediately. Update all outdated information and remove all obsolete materials. Early this year, we started this knowledge base as our go-to place for information and sources. Today, after close to 6 months, we are living in a different reality. Some information in there is no longer valid. Please urgently work with the rest of the stakeholders, especially the product team, the financial team and the operations team, to tweak and clean up our central repository and be done with it by the end of July.
We’re going aggressive on outbound marketing. I’m talking about doubling down on our partnership ecosystem here in Malaysia and Singapore. In other words, we need to expand our list of resellers. This is our quickest and most effective way to generate leads and grow our paid customers list.
While we are growing our partners, we will continue hunting more commission-based affiliates with our daily ads on Meta and Google, too. When it comes to capturing high-intent leads via ads, as usual, we will use the online form. As for the ad budget, this time, it will be RM30 per day for each platform. These ads or performance marketing will continue to run ‘forever’. Two reasons. One, ads will speed up our brand awareness and reachability. As you know, organic posts are dead, but not ads. And two, we might have a chance of securing at least 1-2 commission-based affiliates per month. In short, our outbound marketing's objective is to generate compounded leads via third-party entities, namely partners and affiliates.
Maintain our Inbound and discoverability activities. We are going to maintain our twice-a-week organic posting on social media. We are also going to maintain our twice-a-week publishing content on our magazine on the website, on Google Business Profile, on LinkedIn Articles and on LinkedIn Newsletter. We are not going to spend additional time on discoverability like other people. In short, we aren't wasting time trying to ‘game’ search engines or AI assistants. Inbound marketing's objective, to us, is merely to get a certain level of validation from the customers that we are real, legit, credible and trustworthy.
I noticed our competitors, companies and people out there are pushing their content productions and distributions so freakin' hard just wanting to be found on social media, search engines and AI Assistants. This is insane. We’re not going to do this. We are going to keep our game simple and practical. Playing it too aggressively just to win over algorithms is a losing game. There's no guarantee that their content is going to make them discovered.
And the worst thing is this. I noticed some agencies come up with a service to 'help' businesses win the AI citations with their proprietary tools or approaches. This somehow doesn’t make sense at all. You see, even those agencies are unknown. They don’t even get mentioned on any AI Assistants, and yet here they are, offering their services to people for that. This is weird. And guess what. Even though those businesses can get mentioned by the AI Assistants, it won’t last that long. Those answers will change in merely a day, a week or a month at the most. This is because their content will be replaced by other content that could be far superior in quality.
Refine our offer. Clarity matters. The aesthetics of our product documentation in our Knowledge Base can be improved. Some of them I personally feel a little cluttered, overloaded with information and have the old-school vibes. It’s time to keep things simple yet sophisticated. It’s time to keep the copywriting simple and sharp, which minimises jargon. One more thing, we need to help come up with a matrix of comparison among our products so that customers and partners can ‘scan’ and understand the products difference under 60 seconds.
Auto-generate paid customers through partners. Our version of lead generation is different from others. Our definition of leads comprises two groups. One, partners or resellers. These companies are the door openers for us to reach out to end-customers. Two, the end-customers themselves. With this group, we need to deliver our level best to ensure they stay with us (as in our partners and our company) for as long as possible. Do you know why I keep emphasising partnerships? It's because our compounding revenue depends on it. Based on our experience back in the first half of 2026, each partner, on average, brought in at least 2 or more new paid customers to us. We managed to outgrow 2025's revenue by 20 per cent in 5 months. We won't be able to pull it off if we rely on other outbound marketing methods. Let alone inbound marketing, it is even slower. Imagine we double or even triple the number of our partners or resellers. And each of them will bring us at least 2 new customers. This simple act alone will bring us massive results by the end of December.
Keep our partners and affiliates happy. This is the only way to keep our customers staying longer with us. By taking good care of our partners, their customers, who are our customers too, will be happy as well. The way to go about it is to have regular, consistent communication with each and every one of them. Staying in touch with them is a must. You can use WhatsApp for it, email or even a simple audio call. The same goes for the affiliates. Ensuring that our finance team pays their commissions on time, every time, will help us with this retention effort.
Keep, maintain regular communications and grow the database. Those whom we didn't convert, we will add to our database, just like how we build a database of paid customers and partners. These contacts matter because we intend to communicate with them directly moving forward, either via email or instant messaging. The ads we run, and the online form we are using are meant for us to capture new contacts. Once those are captured, we then move them to our database to ease our direct communication. As you all know, to date, we've grown multiple database types, ranging from members of the public via WhatsApp Channel, partners/resellers, affiliates, newsletters, and the latest one is the affiliates list.
Guys, this is the playbook in general we’re going to execute starting this month. I will send you a calendar invitation to our meeting on Monday at 3 pm. Bring along your notebook. This discussion will take 2 hours. I will brief you in detail on the how-tos. Since this is the 2nd time we will have a long meeting, I’ll buy each of you a coffee and a chicken pie from the cafe downstairs. At the same time, I want to give something to each of you for the job well done back in H1, 2026.
See you on Monday.
Azleen
P.S. Thanks for reading. If you want a functional marketing team that produces results, we can help you build it. Let's talk.
