Your Killer Start-up Marketing Strategy
Marketing is no small task, whether you are a well-known business or an early-stage start-up. However, many start-ups see their marketing efforts impacted by limited resources – time, money and talent. These conditions mean start-up marketing presents a unique challenge. This is why a coherent marketing strategy is needed. It will put your start-up and its products on a path to success.
As a start-up your focus is attracting prospects to your brand and product offerings with a view to turn them into leads and ultimately customers. Sometimes this may cause a strong desire to move quickly, jumping from one marketing tactic to another without any common cause or goal. While there is nothing wrong with working at pace efficiently, you do want to avoid working in a continuously reactive state. Having a marketing strategy will provide much needed focus, so your resources can be used to efficiently drive positive results towards a common marketing goal or objective.
A wide variety of tactics are needed to build an effective marketing strategy. While we cannot explore everything in this blog, we have detailed the fundamental components for building your killer start-up marketing strategy. Here are MCC’s absolute must haves!
1. Clear objectives and KPIs
To get your marketing engine running you will be working on multiple marketing tactics at the same time, so setting objectives, goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is paramount. Decide what goals you want to achieve with your marketing strategy and how you will achieve them. Importantly, you must also decide what success looks like in order to determine ROMI (Return-on-Marketing Investment). Setting KPIs will assist with measuring the impact of tactical or operational delivery, providing a baseline to determine marketing effectiveness on a continuous basis, weekly, monthly, quarterly and year-on-year.
2. Marketing effectiveness
Straight off the bat, you want to be able to demonstrate marketing is contributing to revenue growth and customer acquisition. You will need to get a handle on marketing metrics; to do so, you should ask questions about marketing’s impact, to ensure the marketing goals are aligned to business benefits. For example, consider the following: “How is marketing contributing to the pipeline and revenue?”; “What is the return on the money we are investing into marketing?”; “What would happen if we increase (or decrease) marketing spend by [x] percent?”
When thinking about business impact, you should consider “Did marketing drive short-term revenue growth?”; “What was the long-term impact of marketing on key metrics, such as shareholder value and Customer Lifetime Value?” By asking yourself these questions you will be better positioned to understand where you stand with metrics such as Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), shareholder value and incremental revenue.
For channel performance you need to look at individual channels and determine if specific channels helped to drive net new acquisition. “Did my channels impact brand awareness?” In doing so, you will gain greater insight into incremental sales conversion, brand awareness and cost per action.
For campaign performance, you should look at campaign effectiveness. “What was the cost per action? What types of customers did I acquire?” Such questions will give you a better insight into the potential sales lift and ROMI.
3. Lead generation
It is crucial to have a clear strategy and growth system to support your lead (and demand) generation efforts. Since most early-stage start-ups do not have significant budgets to acquire leads, you will require a strategy that is efficient and economical. However, the most successful start-ups have robust lead generation processes in place, because they recognise that the demand generation engine is a critical component of all marketing plans, and the main growth driver for start-ups.
4. Customer Journey and Personas
This is much more than simply knowing your customer. Early stage-start-ups must have a clear understanding of their target customer persona and be able to show how their product and/or services can solve specific pain points and problems. Identifying a customer persona will guide you through the customer journey and the decision-making pathway, from awareness of your brand through to engagement, action and eventually deal closure or purchase. Strong knowledge of this pathway and the personas or stakeholders involved along the journey means the appropriate content can be provided at a time when it resonates with the audience.
5. Content strategy
Getting content right is one of the most important elements for marketing, when working to seek differentiation in today’s highly competitive and creative markets. Delivering the right content means effectively providing content, which is appropriate, in the right format, delivered via the appropriate channels at the right time for the intended audience. This is why understanding the customer journey is an intrinsic part of content strategy. You need to be able to serve the right content and add value irrespective of where the customer is on their journey or pathway. With so many channels and constantly replenishing feeds to watch out for, content strategy can make or break a brand.