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10 minute read
There are so many different approaches when it comes to marketing. But of course, you already know that marketing is complex — that’s why you’re here.
Even people who spend years honing their marketing skills in robust academic programs or getting hands-on experience in startups don’t know every trick of the marketing trade. That’s because marketing is always changing, practices vary industry-to-industry, and ultimately, each product is going to require its own unique approach and strategy.
Marketing becomes even more complicated when you factor in the ever-changing Google algorithm, AI, and consumer trends. Heck, in the 20+ years since I started working, I’ve already seen some of the craziest shifts in marketing: the rise of the internet to its current ubiquity, magazines becoming obsolete seemingly overnight, the dawn of social media, and now the AI revolution… the list goes on! Navigating these shifts is a major responsibility of marketers, and not something a founder can — or should — spend all of their time on. That said, we can all take a page from marketers’ playbook.
By necessity, marketers are creative problem solvers. And in order to solve problems, you need to first understand what the goals are and what is blocking you from reaching those goals. Then, you get to the fun part. Setting a marketing strategy.
For this, there are no perfect formulas — no checklist to guarantee results, and no manual for creating the perfect marketing plan. But there are some things that, simply, just need to be done to set the groundwork for success. That’s where the following marketing strategy tips come in. What's great about these tips is that they’re highly adaptable to loads of different situations, whether you’re a founder who knows you need to invest in marketing but doesn’t know where to start, a freelance marketer meeting a client for the first time, a job seeker doing an interview for a marketing role, or even the person hired as the very first marketer for a startup.
Speaking of the last of these scenarios — I’ve been there. Time and again, I’ve helped companies build their marketing strategy from the ground up. And when getting ready to launch a marketing strategy from scratch, these are the five things I always make sure I do first.
1. Conduct a Tools Audit.
It’s easy to get caught up in the building of a website and a product when you’re trying to go to market quickly. However, don’t forget about the tools you’ll need to be successful down the line. If you’re a founder who’s unfamiliar with marketing, these tools might not seem important to you right now, but trust me — you’ll be glad you set the foundation for success early. Ensure that your lineup of marketing tools includes:
Google Analytics: Google Analytics is free to use and relatively easy to set up. This is the most powerful tool for understanding customer behavior on your website or application. Within Google Analytics, you can see a wide range of data points, like how many users are visiting your site and what pages they’re converting on, as well as crucial demographic information, the type of devices users are visiting you through, and so much more. Even with a basic understanding of Google Analytics, you can draw important conclusions about your business that can inform marketing processes and strategies moving forward. While you’re at it, make sure you’ve set up Google Search Console, too; you’ll need it to identify issues impacting your site’s visibility in search engines and to monitor your rankings.
CRM
Standing for Customer Relationship Management, a CRM is the technology you’ll use to manage interactions and relationships with both prospective and current customers. There are hundreds of CRMs out there, with options that range from free to thousands of dollars per month. Choosing a CRM and setting it up properly is crucial for creating a successful marketing strategy because it’s where your converted customers will live. To enhance your various customer funnels and track behavior, you’ll want to monitor this data in one cohesive platform. While it may not be the most cost-effective solution, I’m partial to Hubspot for its robust suite of integrations and easy-to-use product features. Plus, there are thousands of videos online to help you get up-to-speed quickly. (Pro tip: Hubspot also offers a free tier, which is a great place to start!)
On-platform blog or resource center
Regardless of what type of business you have, you’ll want to reserve somewhere on your website to serve as your SEO center. Of course, all pages should be optimized for technical SEO (we’ll get to this later), but a dedicated, SEO-guided “resource hub” will establish your brand as a thought leader or category creator and help share your unique value proposition. To accomplish this, you don’t necessarily need a full blog, but you should at least have one landing page that has the ability to speak to your product, service, or offering in deeper detail than you would on a sales page. Blogs or resource centers tend to be the easiest way to do this without muddying the pages you’re optimizing for conversions.
Other tools that can help with a ground-floor marketing strategy:
- Canva: If you’re not using Canva yet, it’s only a matter of time until you do. Graphic design has never been easier with its AI integrations and templates for social media graphics, decks, and more.
- SEO Platform: While Google Search Console can help with some key SEO basics, you’ll need a tool like Semrush, KWFinder, Ahrefs, Moz, or Ubersuggest (to name a few) — which combine keyword research and competitor analysis tools with easy-to-implement tracking and reporting — to really make search performance part of your marketing strategy.
- Buffer: Social post scheduler Buffer can’t be beat for marketing efforts that are just getting started. The interface is simple, all the basic features you’ll need are included, and their free plan allows for 10 scheduled posts per channel. As an alternative, I also like Sprout Social. It’s pricier but has more advanced features, like an integrated inbox for all incoming messages across your social platforms, making it better for larger brands with more community management needs.
2. Set Numerical Goals
I’ll be frank: Leaders who say only “I want more leads” or “I want more brand awareness” are already at a deficit, because a successful marketing strategy requires specificity. Consider: If you’re currently getting two leads a month, then really, adding one more lead is technically “more” — but no one wants to pay a marketer to step in for only one additional lead.
Setting numerical goals is hard, especially when working with complex attribution methods, but it’s so important to really think about what marketing success looks like for you. Ask: What specific amount of new leads or conversions would make it worth it for you to pay a professional to own these metrics? Or is your cost vs. benefit analysis telling you it’s better to continue spending your own valuable time on this work? Please keep in mind that when I mention “cost,” here and throughout this article, that can either mean monetary cost OR time cost — I believe both are equally important and valuable, especially for busy founders.
A great way to think about cost vs. benefit and numerical marketing goals involves asking yourself, “What number of X would I have to get to to justify this extra marketing cost?”
Examples:
- My software costs $100 for one download. If I could get 20 downloads in one month, paying $1,000 for marketing is worth it to me.
- Right now, no one is visiting my website, so I have no idea which product they are interested in. If I could track 1,000 visitors per month, I could make a more informed decision on which product to focus on and cut back time spent on the other products.
Beyond this kind of cost vs. benefit analysis, your marketing efforts writ large will need to be tied to specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely (or S.M.A.R.T.) objectives, with a set numerical goal for each. Even for areas that feel more quantitative than qualitative — increasing brand recognition, for instance — you’ll still need to pinpoint some hard numbers that represent success. It may be a bit of a cliché, but it’s true: what gets measured gets managed!
3. Conduct a technical SEO audit.
Don’t let SEO intimidate you! Yes, it’s elaborate and always changing, but what’s great about SEO is that there are also some very simple ways to make sure your content is optimized without having to become an SEO expert.
Start with a free technical audit using a tool like Semrush, Ubersuggest, Moz, or Ahrefs. Or, if you’re really keen to test your skills, use a few different tools to check your work. A technical audit typically consists of you putting your main domain into a search bar and allowing the software to analyze your website. Depending on how many pages you have on your website, this should only take a few minutes.
The following report will then show you your domain authority, the keywords you rank for (or have the potential to rank for), any backlinks you’re getting from other websites, and the technical SEO errors that are inhibiting your site from being crawled by search engines.
This is such a great place to start because oftentimes, technical SEO errors will be harming your site performance without you even realizing it. Everything from poor page-loading speeds to duplicate content and broken links could be undermining all the hard work you’ve done to create a website worth visiting. When you consider Hubspot’s findings that SEO drives 1,000%+ more traffic than organic social media and that 60% of marketers say inbound (largely achieved via search) is their highest-quality leads source, this clearly isn’t an area you can afford to overlook.
4. Create Your Marketing Implementation Plan
Now that you’ve got the right tools, numerical goals, and a website optimized for search in your arsenal, it’s time to translate all of this into actionable marketing steps and tactics. Using the goals you set in step No. 2 as your foundation and launching-off point, to formulate a marketing implementation plan, you’ll want to:
- Identify your target audience and personas: You’ve probably already got at least a loose idea of who you see your business or product catering toward. But this is the time to get specific, clearly define your target audience, and develop buyer personas that factor in for their needs, preferences, pain points, and consumer behavior. With all of your marketing tactics, you need to be sure you aren’t straying far from who your target audience is and how to reach them.
- Pick your channels: Now that you, in certain terms, understand who you’re trying to reach, you can select the most appropriate marketing channels for these groups. A solid, multi-pronged marketing strategy will include a mix of channels like social media, email marketing, content marketing, video, SEO, webinars, and paid advertising. Depending on the nature of your business, offline channels like in-person events may make sense, too.
- Define your budget, and allocate resources: In the beginning, you might not have a clue what it’ll cost to reach each of your key goals. The first budget you set will probably be a bit of a arbitrary one, and that’s okay — you can finetune it and make your spend more strategic as you learn more about your audience and market. To help speed some of that learning up, it’s a good idea to run preliminary “test” campaigns on paid advertising channels; they can help you arrive at figures like your business’ average CPL (cost per lead), and you can strategically adapt your budget from there.
- Develop a marketing calendar. This should be a detailed calendar of when each of your marketing activities will be executed, in keeping with the resources and budget you’re able to allocate. Make sure that your different channels aren’t operating in silos from each other; if you have a date-specific social media campaign planned and believe that the same content could be leveraged for your newsletter audience, make sure your calendar reflects that!
- Create content and assets. This is where marketing gets especially fun. As part of your marketing strategy, you should be efficiently mining content across channels while also understanding that each channel is going to require content to be tailored in a specific way. That can be a lot to take on solo, and even with platforms like ChatGPT making quick copywriting a breeze, AI tools still can’t understand how best to leverage channel-specific copy in the same way a marketer can. For that reason, this might be an area where you’ll especially benefit from bringing in outside help.
- Set up tracking and analytics. This is where a lot of the tools we talked about in Step No. 1 come in! There’s no way around it: the later you implement tracking and analytics, the more to your disadvantage it’ll be. Make sure these systems are ready to go from the outset.
- Monitor, optimize, and adjust. The final strategic step to any marketing implementation plan is proactively defining your system for monitoring, optimizing, and adjusting your marketing initiatives. Too often, time-strapped founders only have the bandwidth to set things live before moving onto their next to-do item. Who is measuring your marketing efforts’ performance, at what cadence are these measurements happening, where are the results being tracked, and most importantly, what are you doing with this information? These are all questions you need to answer now.
5. Be Realistic About Your Capacity, and Outsource Wisely
Now that you know what all goes into launching a successful marketing strategy, at this point, you’re probably thinking, “How am I supposed to do all of this in addition to everything else on my plate?”
I’ve been on more than one scrappy leadership team in my day and know firsthand that sometimes, the only way forward is to roll up your sleeves, get resourceful, and figure out how to do more with less. The problem with applying that logic to marketing, though, is that at a certain point, there’s objectively a ceiling to what a lone person wearing 10 different marketing hats can accomplish. To be successful, marketing needs to be multi-channel, and that involves a lot of different skill sets and areas of expertise, not to mention time. Consider:
- 86% of senior marketers believe lack of leadership depth and capabilities has resulted in missed revenue, growth, and customer acquisition opportunities.
- 79% of businesses believe that outsourcing enables them to focus on their core business functions.
- A 63% higher likelihood of positive ROI is seen by companies that use marketing agencies.
The incentive to outsource is clear. But exactly how much of your marketing work can be outsourced?
One of the biggest (and most understandable) mistakes founders make is taking a DIY approach to marketing, then calculating their perception of marketing’s worth off of that output. (I.e. “I’ve already tried marketing on channel XYZ and saw little gain from it, so I can’t justify spending money on outsourcing it.”) Meanwhile, marketing is a growth engine that returns the investment you put into it.
As a founder or small business owner, though, the limit on DIY marketing returns isn’t the only ceiling you’re facing. You’ve also got a fixed budget and need to carefully distribute resources across your budding organization. As you take inventory of your own capacity and bandwidth, use the numbers you arrived at in Step No. 2 to determine where you’ll get the most bang for your buck by outsourcing some or all of your marketing needs.
I know that for me, as a marketing leader for startups and one of the founders of Ophina, a results-obsessed marketing agency, resource efficiency is my bread and butter. At Ophina, we built a menu of services with scrappy founders and small-but-mighty marketing teams in mind, including:
- Full Marketing Engine: Our most robust tier, this is essentially a complete in-house marketing team at a fraction of the cost. Included is demand and lead generation, content marketing, email marketing, paid advertising, and marketing strategy and implementation.
- SEO Boost: Outsource your technical SEO needs with a package that includes an SEO health check, on-page SEO, keyword recommendations, implementation, and more.
- Campaign Strategy: Get a custom, research-powered plan covering current state analysis, benchmarking, buyer personas and ideal customer profile (ICP) development, and a tailored campaign plan and strategy.
- A la carte: Take your pick of our standalone services, including paid advertising, video, graphic design, blog posts, landing pages, newsletters and email nurture journeys, and more!
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