Sales teams do a lot of painstaking work to drive revenue for the business — building relationships with customers, understanding their unique problems, handling their objections. But long before the product can be sold, it has to be desired by someone. A well-crafted marketing strategy lays groundwork for many of those aforementioned activities at scale, utilizing mass communication to condition the audience and lighten the load on the sales team.
They achieve this by conducting research on the market’s needs, and building assets (such as pitch decks, videos, editorial, case studies, landing pages, and so forth) to help tell a meaningful story to its audience. This generates qualified leads, which the marketing team then nurtures to a point where people are comfortable starting a relationship with your company. Throughout that process, to the point of a deal closing (and often long afterwards), the sales and marketing team are in close communication to achieve a single shared goal: driving revenue for the business.
With that in mind, what do the following items have in common?
- An ocean liner without a compass
- A plant with no sunlight
- A house without a foundation
- A car with no speedometer
- A pile of money left on a table
All are analogies used to describe a business that tries to sell without a clear marketing strategy. None are associated with companies that survive the early growth stages.
Key Questions To Create A Marketing Strategy
In the absence of a marketing strategy, you’re basically fishing without bait and hoping that a fish will bite. This introduces a lot of uncertainty – not the best way to inspire customers and investors.
Generating leads and driving sales becomes a lot more challenging in the absence of a marketing strategy, contributing to stagnant revenue growth. This pushes you toward other (more expensive or less efficient) channels to acquire customers, driving up your CAC (customer acquisition cost). Awareness of your brand and products can suffer, making it harder and more expensive to reach customers – especially in a competitive marketplace where it is critical to stand out and differentiate.
A founder or leader of a Seed stage company will often ask themselves certain questions to address this challenge:
- Is our mission intuitive and relevant to its stakeholders?
- What are our business goals? Do we want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive sales?
- Do we stand out among your competition?
- Who is our target audience? What are their demographics, needs, and pain points?
- How do we plan to reach your target audience?
- What are our competitive advantages? What makes our product or service different from (better than) the competition?
- What is it that our customers celebrate about us?
- What is the customer’s path to purchase, and how do we intend to engage them at each step of the process?
- In which environments, and in what context, will our message appear?
- How much reach do we need, to achieve our goals? And how are we generating exposure at a sustainable cost?
- Does our value proposition come across in our communications?
- How do we inspire customers to take action?
- How will we measure the success of marketing campaigns? What metrics will we track?
Creating A Marketing Strategy For Social Impact
A marketing strategy for social impact is one that focuses on generating revenue while also making a positive impact on the world. This can be a challenging task, but it is possible by developing a strategy that is aligned with your business’s social impact goals and target market.
Consider a nonprofit organization whose mission is to decrease the flow of municipal waste into landfills. We can apply the following format to this example.
Define your social impact goals. What specific social impact do you want to have? Who are the people or organizations that are best positioned to help you achieve these goals?
Is the goal to raise the recycling rate for US households from 32% to 50% by 2027? (Currently, just 32% of municipal solid waste (MSW) generated in the US is recycled or composted.) Or is it to create more demand for biodegradable goods that don’t contribute to waste in the first place? Both goals serve the nonprofit’s mission, but each lends itself to a very different marketing strategy.
Identify your target market. Who are you trying to reach with your marketing messages? What are their needs and pain points?
A number of stakeholders need to be considered in a marketing strategy. Individuals and households are the primary generators of waste. Waste management companies collect, transport, and process both the waste and recyclables. Recycling processors and manufacturers transform recycled materials into new products. Governments implement the recycling programs, provide the infrastructure for waste collection and sorting, enforce regulations and implement incentives. Let’s not forget the manufacturers and retailers of products that turn into waste. Who are you trying to influence?
Develop a unique selling proposition (USP). What makes your business different from other businesses in your space? Why should customers choose you over your competitors?
If you’re trying to increase the recycling rate, the USP needs to speak to households, which are the epicenter of the consumer behavior you are trying to influence. Conversely, if you’re trying to boost demand for biodegradable goods, the USP could be tailored to a much broader array of stakeholders. Whichever the case, your USP should be clear, concise, and compelling.
Create high-quality content. Content is king when it comes to marketing. Create high-quality content that is informative, engaging, and relevant to your target market. You can then distribute your content through a variety of channels, including your website, blog, social media, and email marketing.
Editorial content such as blog posts, featured articles and white papers, can be very effective tools to leverage exposure through quality content. For a household audience, for example, this content could cover the benefits of reducing, reusing, and recycling, as well as tips on how to do these things in everyday life. Infographics can be a good visual complement, visually illustrating the environmental impact of landfills on our ecosystems. These play well in social media, paired with inspiring stories of people who are living zero-waste lifestyles. Video content could also appeal to people’s DIY (do it yourself) intentions, showing how to compost, repair items, and upcycle materials.
Gain exposure through all available channels. Your content won’t deliver itself to the eyes and ears of your audience. To reach a wider audience, build trust, and generate outcomes in support of your mission, it is best to follow a three-part media strategy:
- Paid media: any type of media that you pay to place in front of an audience (for example, digital advertising channels like search engine marketing, social media advertising, and display advertising, as well as traditional channels such as TV, radio, and print). This tactic is useful to reach a large audience quickly and efficiently, but is also generally known to be the most expensive.
- Owned media: any type of media that you create and control (for example, your website, blog, social media accounts, email list, proprietary content). Owned media gives you the most control over building relationships with your audience and sharing your brand story, but can be limited in its reach.
- Earned media: any type of media exposure that you receive without paying for it (for example, product reviews, external blog posts, social media mentions, news articles, influencer marketing). Generally, this is considered the most credible form of media, as it is generated by third-party sources. We live in a world increasingly prone to greenwashing: one study found that 42% of green claims made by companies in Europe were found to be exaggerated, false, or deceptive. Therefore, the credibility-by-association that comes from earned media can help to insulate your company against potential loss of trust from your customer.
Our Approach To Creating A Marketing Strategy
Building a marketing strategy to support revenue growth and social impact is much more than a project or a process – it is a journey built on four key pillars.
| Pillar | What is it? | Why is it important? |
| Brand | The guiding compass that aligns marketing efforts with the company’s core values, positioning, and overall goals. | Ensures that marketing campaigns and initiatives are cohesive, relevant, and impactful. |
| Audience | The roadmap for understanding the target audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviors. | Defines the target audience and the approach to reach, engage, and convert them into loyal customers. |
| Creative | The blueprint for creating compelling messaging, designing engaging content, and selecting appropriate channels to deliver the brand’s message effectively. | Provides a framework for developing and executing impactful marketing campaigns that resonate with the target audience. |
| Media | The plan for how resources will be allocated and how specific media channels will be used to maximize the impact of marketing programs. | Determines how to utilize paid, owned, and earned media channels to effectively reach and engage the target audience. |
The Brand Pillar of the marketing strategy includes an analytical review of target audience (comprised of both first-party and third-party data), along with a competitive review to identify gaps in the marketplace and inform positioning. We provide guidelines on brand identity and voice, and how these should manifest in communications. With clear positioning, your brand occupies a unique space in the minds of consumers, separating itself from all the noise in the marketplace.
The Audience Pillar of the marketing strategy begins with a clear definition of the target audience, built on market research and customer data to understand their motivations, pain points, and decision-making processes. We develop an ideal customer profile (ICP) to make sure your brand is focusing on the right market segments. From there, we further break down the audience based on characteristics such as age, interests, or purchase history, building detailed customer personas that allow for more targeted and personalized marketing campaigns.
The Creative Pillar of the marketing strategy starts with a review of objectives and existing customer segment research, to clarify the target audience. We isolate the core value proposition and USP, to be reflected in marketing communications. These inform the development of a memorable creative concept and its creative elements, from messaging and visuals to calls-to-action, which will resonate with the audience and drive engagement. Tactics such as experiential marketing and user-generated content (UGC) sometimes apply here as well. A strong creative effort drives key metrics like brand recall and consideration, by holding the audience’s attention and making emotional connections.
The Media Pillar of the marketing strategy pulls all of this together into a clear and actionable plan. Armed with an analysis of existing customer path-to-purchase insights, we audit the media channel landscape to prioritize target channels according to impact and value. The resulting media plan harmonizes budget & timing priorities with campaign objectives, at which point we decide on success metrics to benchmark campaign performance and ensure proper budget utilization.
Solutions For Creating A Marketing Strategy
A business without a brand is like a house of cards, risking collapse at any moment. If a customer doesn’t know why they’re buying, what they buy and how they buy become irrelevant.
Give your customer a compelling reason to care about your mission, consider your solution and sign on the dotted line.
Our Process
- Conduct lengthy review of internal planning assets (existing plans, ICP, personas, sales funnel, campaign briefs, etc) & augment with feedback via interviews
- Use SWOT analysis to drive internal consensus on marketing priorities and connect them to overall business objectives
- Identify & affirm a differentiated value proposition to manifest across all channels and campaigns
- Define marketing priorities with actionable, quantifiable targets at all stages of the sales funnel
- Create a 12-month calendar for all marketing initiatives & provide recommended budgets to execute against each
Deliverables
- Initial summary of current state of marketing strategy at project start
- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and customer persona reference material
- Recommendations for 12-month marketing calendar and budgets to support key initiatives
- Comprehensive strategy document to guide all brand, creative and media execution
Impact
- Increased brand awareness and market reach
- Increased purchase consideration and volume of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)
- Lower customer acquisition costs (CAC) and higher customer lifetime value (CLV)
- More agile communications in response to changing market conditions
- Stronger competitive positioning
Click for more information on the Marketing Strategy, or get in touch.
Other Revenue Growth Challenges For Seed Stage Companies
This discussion about how to create a marketing strategy is one post in an 8-part series about revenue growth challenges for seed stage companies. See below for how to address other common revenue challenges:
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