Aidan Leather

I’m Aidan Leather, a marketer and designer based in London.

I work with go-to-market folks at tech companies to make wonderful things.

That might be the whole go-to-market, or just a brand, a website, a campaign—or something weird & fun. You get the idea.

What are you working on?

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Go-to-market for Noxus

Go-to-market for Noxus

Helping Noxus break into UK financial services

Noxus is a seed-stage AI automation platform. The job was to get them taken seriously by senior buyers at large UK financial services firms—a market where nobody had heard of them and trust is the whole game.

We did it with one connected motion: find a dataset the industry was ignoring, turn it into something senior people actually wanted to read, and put it in front of them on LinkedIn.

The result

In roughly twelve weeks, on modest LinkedIn spend, the campaign brought in 90 inbound leads—and the quality is the point, not the volume:

  • 72 at Director or Head level and above
  • 28 in the C-suite
  • Interest from named accounts including Barclays, HSBC, Santander, Monzo, TSB, Hargreaves Lansdown, Legal & General, Prudential, AXA, Admiral, JP Morgan Chase and 7IM

A group of those leads later came to an in-person dinner. The pipeline is still running on the same motion—as it's been live longer, the leads have kept coming.

The thesis

Every industry has a dataset nobody's using. It's usually public, often mandatory to publish, and almost always sitting in a format no one wants to read. If you do the analysis no one else has bothered to do and turn it into something genuinely useful, you can earn the attention of senior buyers without ever cold-pitching them.

For financial services, that dataset was the FCA's complaints data. Every regulated firm has to publish it. It's a clear, comparable picture of where the industry is failing its customers—and almost nobody in marketing was touching it.

The bet: if we benchmarked the sector against its own regulator-mandated data, the people responsible for those numbers would want to see where they stood.

Building the ICP

The buyers we wanted were the people who own complaints, operations, customer outcomes and the AI or automation budgets meant to fix them—at UK-regulated financial services firms.

So the targeting was built around two things at once:

  • Seniority—Director, Head, and C-suite. The people who set strategy and hold budget, not the people who'd forward it upwards.
  • Account fit—a named list of UK financial services firms, from the big banks and insurers through to challengers and wealth managers, plus a broader cold ICP layer to catch everyone who fit the profile but wasn't on the named list.

That gave us two motions running together: cold targeting against the wider ICP, and retargeting to warm up people who'd already engaged.

Choosing the assets

The dataset decided the asset. People don't download a "guide"—but they will read a benchmark that tells them how they compare to their competitors, especially when the data is something their regulator already holds them to.

So we built two things:

  • A benchmarking report—the FCA complaints data, analysed and turned into a clear read on how the sector and its players were performing. The kind of document a senior FS leader would actually open, because it spoke to a number they're personally accountable for.
  • An interactive companion tool—so people could go beyond the static report and look at the comparison that mattered to them.

The report was the hook. The tool was the reason to come back and the reason to share it internally.

Making the assets

The report had to survive scrutiny. The audience was senior financial services analytics and operations leaders—exactly the people who would pull the original FCA source data and check our working. So the build was as much about rigour as design: get the analysis right first, then make it look like something worth a senior person's time.

The visual language was deliberately confident and editorial—closer to a piece of published research than a sales brochure. Clean data visualisation, a strong cover, no fluff. It had to feel like it came from people who knew the sector, because that's what earns the click and the forward.

Choosing the distribution

LinkedIn, paid and organic, was the channel—because it's the one place you can target by seniority and named account at the same time, which is exactly what the ICP demanded.

The structure ran in two layers:

  • Cold ICP ads to the named list and the wider profile—putting the benchmark in front of people who'd never heard of Noxus.
  • Retargeting to convert the people who engaged but didn't hand over details first time.

Leads came in mostly through LinkedIn lead forms, with a smaller stream landing directly on the website. Everything was logged and attributed so we could see which creative and which audience was actually producing the senior leads, and shift budget accordingly.

What it proves

This wasn't a LinkedIn ad campaign. The ads were the last mile of a system: a data insight, an asset built to earn senior attention, and a distribution motion tuned to put it in front of the right people at the right accounts. That's the whole argument—find what's blocking growth and build the thing that fixes it.

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