B2B marketing is often treated as a different entity to B2C marketing, but Sarah Roberts, CMO at mobile infrastructure provider Boldyn Networks, believes this is an entirely false divide.
She says she “doesn’t believe in” the idea of B2B marketing being different.
“I don’t even talk B2B or B2C. I talk ‘B-to-human’. Because when you’re talking to a consumer, there’s a person, and when you’re talking to a business, it’s still a person,” she tells Marketing Week. “There’s a person who makes that decision. There’s a person who’s thinking about their career and how they look.”
B2B marketing is often treated as a different entity to B2C marketing, but Sarah Roberts, CMO at mobile infrastructure provider Boldyn Networks, believes this is an entirely false divide.
She says she “doesn’t believe in” the idea of B2B marketing being different.
“I don’t even talk B2B or B2C. I talk ‘B-to-human’. Because when you’re talking to a consumer, there’s a person, and when you’re talking to a business, it’s still a person,” she tells Marketing Week. “There’s a person who makes that decision. There’s a person who’s thinking about their career and how they look.”
To help the brand connect with customers in a more relatable way, she says there is a definite need for more storytelling in B2B.
“Show that you understand their business, their market, their space. A lot of it is what B2C has been doing for a very long time, [so it’s] bringing that more into B2B,” she adds.
It’s something other B2B marketers have highlighted as being critical to success. Financial software brand Sage, for example, under the leadership of former CMO Cath Keers reframed B2B as ‘human to human’. Others like Apex Group and Standard Chartered have also been working to humanise their approach to marketing.
For Roberts, whether it’s introducing more personalisation, account-based marketing or more focused regional activities, it’s all “very much thinking about the individual at the other end, not just a business”.
This mindset has been crucial as Roberts led Boldyn Networks through a major rebrand and organisational restructure, following its transformation from BAI Communications in June 2023. The aim being to unify its international presence and enhance its offering.
Everything we do is thinking about the individual at the other end.
Sarah Roberts, Boldyn Networks
Boldyn, which provides the infrastructure needed to allow people to use their mobile data on the London Underground, for example, has made seven acquisitions over the past five years, the most recent of which is Smart Mobile Labs (SML), a German mobile private network specialist acquired in January 2025.
“As a business, we wanted to grow and we saw that the opportunity was in the neutral host space and where the world was evolving,” says Roberts, who joined the company in 2022, having previously worked at BAI Communications in Australia.
In order to integrate these disparate brands, she worked to streamline Boldyn’s global go-to-market approach and provide a more consistent and comprehensive portfolio of connectivity solutions across regions.
Additionally, she created a unified vision for its new brand, incorporating all the different elements of the business, while differentiating Boldyn from the legacy BAI Communications business in Australia.
Making B2B more relatable
Roberts is under no illusion about the challenge required to make telecoms infrastructure feel exciting and innovative.
To that end, she was keen to be an early adopter of AI when the rebrand was in its nascent stages; this involved the creation of hero assets using generative AI.
“Being a future-facing brand and business is really important, so we can market and ensure our brand works,” she adds.
Given the business’s tech focus, she was also keen to ensure it is at the forefront of new tech developments when it comes to marketing.
This, she believes, spoke to the large number of engineers working at Boldyn. She wanted to “bridge that gap between the land of an engineer and the land of creativity and marketing”.
It is this creative approach, she says, that allows the brand to connect with clients despite the almost invisible nature of telecommunications infrastructure. She describes Boldyn as a “secret partner” given the nature of the business.
She believes “understanding the needs of the bigger picture and the needs of the clients” is what allows Boldyn to market effectively.
Measuring success
As a result of the rebrand, over the next 12 months, Roberts says there will be two measures of success for the brand: the impact and attitude of the team, and a rise in brand awareness.
“Our primary aim, alongside ensuring that our customers understood why we were making the change, was making sure that our people were taken on the journey and making sure that our people understand why we are doing it.”
While raising awareness is key, Roberts believes the “credibility” of the marketing team is critical to the business’s success. She says ensuring people understand what the business has delivered in the past is also crucial “because our brand is built on case studies”.
In the first year, the rebrand drove a 134% increase in annual web traffic to 550,000 visitors, and a 60% increase in traffic from Google and other search engines. It also achieved a 23% uplift in social media followers.
Additionally, the brand secured 162 pieces of top-tier media coverage, a 36% increase from the previous year.
We’re pushing ground in terms of what’s possible with infrastructure and technology
Sarah Roberts, Boldyn Networks
Boldyn’s marketing team has grown in line with the business’s expansion. It has inherited marketers and marketing teams with each merger, requiring Roberts to restructure how the department operates.
She explains the “overarching” marketing team within Boldyn now drives strategy, operations, and governance and that it leads “regional teams that are focused on customer, demand generation, and the more regional-focused activities”.
Not only is Roberts proud of the work she has done in terms of the rebrand and restructuring of Boldyn, she says she is pleased with her team’s attitude to their work.
“People [on my team] believe in the brand. And I think that’s my legacy as CMO.”
She adds: “There’s all the marketing you can do. There’s all the targets you can hit. But I think trying to create a team that wants to punch above its weight, that wants to be driving the business forward, it’s very much what I’m focused on.”
