Every start-up’s #1 focus is growth – most often first through product, then sales, and finally marketing. If it’s a “first time” experience with marketing, the biggest question is where to start and how to keep momentum.
When you’re in the midst of a rapidly growing business and bring on your first marketing team, the first inclination is to push your marketers for results – fast. While every marketer would absolutely love to fulfill this, they will go through an order of operations to ensure long term, sustainable success. Now, if your goal is for some quick wins, there are plenty of things any marketer can do to cut corners and win some business, but if you want to grow and scale, you’re going to have to think about the bigger picture.
To kick off your first marketing campaign (or any campaign, really), you’ll need to cover off on the following check-list:
- Start with goals
- Define your audience
- Develop your message
- Build your buyer journey
- Create content
- Set up campaigns
- Track and measure
If you do any of these things out of order, you’ll often find a program that struggles to get its feet off the ground. Again, not to say that if you just produced a piece of content you might not get a couple of good leads out of it that turns into business. The goal of this post is to help you see what unlocks a bigger strategy that grows your marketing-generated business beyond some peaks here and there.
Always start with a goal (or goals)
This goes without being said (or what are you doing!?), but make it a quantitative and be specific about who you are targeting, timeframe, and the measures for success. Great examples are:
- Generate X [audience category] leads that of which X% will end in closed business in X months
- Improve lead to qualified conversion by X% in X months
- Improve time from lead to qualified by X days in X months
Build your target audience segments
This is where you define who you are going after, why, and what you think will make them convert into a customer.
- Group your audiences – this is the time to leverage your ICP & personas to create who you’d like to go after.
- Create a detailed profile – For each audience segment, identify the best methods to reach them and their reasons for buying.
- Don’t go after everyone – if you don’t focus, you won’t get meaningful results.
Filling in the details: If you’re not sure where to find your audiences, look no further than the most popular sites (which may also include competitors) and see what content seems to resonate. Check Google, Twitter, YouTube, Medium, and any forums for popular content / content with a lot of views.
Send the right message
Now that you know what your goals are and who your audience is, you need to determine what you’d like to say: your message.
You will want to create a high level message that speaks to your audience(s), but also has the ability to give you insight into what’s resonating. So make sure you make a list of data points you are looking for (example: do topics of efficiency hit more or cost effectiveness?)
When crafting your message, it will need to be:
- Clear – get to the point
- Tailored – to the audiences you are targeting (create different ones by audience)
- From your audience’s point of view – this is where messaging related to JTBD can come in handy. Your customers need to solve a problem, how can your solution help them get there?
During and after creating a few messages, you’ll want to do a little testing to make sure you’re hitting the mark.
- Intent research – leverage someone who knows SEO to help research (the fastest way to get some solid information around intent) – more on this later.
- Testing – try various versions on simple landing pages for some of the key search terms you’ve identified so you can optimize for the best version
- Talk to trusted customers – feedback from anyone outside of your business will likely give you ideas you haven’t thought of before
Takeaways:
1. Leverage search intent research to support the foundations of your messaging.
2. Create clear messages that are tailored toward each audience’s needs.
3. Determine if there’s anything you’d like to learn from your messaging tests and how to measure.
3. Test your messaging by talking to customers, surveying prospects, or A/B testing copy throughout your campaign.
Map your buyer journey and design your campaign
Your buyer journey should not only include all the pathways to purchase and help you design your campaign. Once you get a better idea of your journey and campaign you will need the next step: building out your content strategy.
For your buyer journey, list out what activities you want to do for awareness, nurture, and supporting sales enablement.
- Awareness – Looking back at the audience segments you built – where do they learn about new things? Is it through press? Social media? Analysts? Ads? Events?
- Nurture – How do they seek out and consider solutions? What research do they do? Is it through trusted content (via partners, peer review sites, analyst reports)? Case studies? Webinars?
- Sales enablement – Once they are into direct contact with your sales team, what types of things will help the team close business. Technical documentation? Demos? White glove events?
Build your campaign
Once you know what your buyer’s journey should look like, you can map everything out into a campaign. The Sirius Decisions Campaign Framework is a great way to visualize how you design everything end-to-end.
Along with all of this, you’re going to have to build your content strategy.
Content strategy & SEO
Start with the search intent research you did when building your message and start to map out and prioritize the content you’ll want to create as it maps back to the buyer journey.
- Research –
- Use Google’s Keyword Planner and Google Trends for insight
- Check out direct and adjacent competitor sites to see what they are talking about and what gaps there might be (and note what’s popular and what is not)
- Check out partners to see if they can help you with your strategy
- Identify popular sites (blogs, media) that you can leverage to spread your word (guest posts, backlinking, etc)
- Interview – Interview internal stakeholders about the topics your business should be talking about – especially senior leadership, sales, and client success.
- Organization – Start grouping your content topics together to come up with themes.
- Build – Start mapping out priority, content types, and putting it on a calendar.
Remember, the most important things to remember about content is: it needs to be made to found, it needs to be relevant and easy to understand, and it needs to be consistent.
Start creating content.
This part is creation. The only key here is to have a process. The only advice I can give here is to not try to do EVERYTHING all at once. Break things down, leverage a project management system, have check-ins. Most importantly: have an agreed upon process for approvals. This may involve sitting down with senior stakeholders and/or creating an agreed upon brand voice and content guideline (you should have this anyway).
Setup your campaigns.
Before and during a live campaign, you’ll have to set up how you plan to reach audiences with your message. For digital campaigns – there are tons of options from landing pages, paid promotion, to organic promotion.
Remember the goals you set up? When you create your campaigns, make sure that you can track the results for your goals (see Tracking and measuring).
Landing pages
The key to a good landing page is to optimize for conversion.
- Keep messages simple – Have a strong headline (see Marketing Examples’ “How to write a landing page title“)
- Don’t put too much on the page – No one has time to read word barf, keep it clean
- Optimize UX – opt for clean design and easy to navigate landing pages
- Always include a killer CTA – be succinct and give them a reason to give you their information
- Outline 3-4 benefits max – don’t overload with information, they should reach out if they want to hear more
- Give your message credibility – include social proof such as quotes, case studies, or ratings from social reviewing sites
Paid promotion (SEM, paid media, influencer)
If you’re unfamiliar with how to do SEM or paid, it is well worth it to talk to someone with expertise. Otherwise, you may just end up lighting some money on fire.
For those new to this – my recommendation for this is to start small. Don’t try to do EVERYTHING – e.g.: Search, Display, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram… unless you have the experience.
Budget-wise, test and iterate. Make sure the conversions you are getting are the ones you want and that you are paying for quality not quantity.
The same goes for influencer marketing – for a tech business, identify influencers via Twitter and popular blogs. Have a strategy for reaching out and a specific asks. Having a negotiation strategy may work here too – so don’t do a giant blast – be specific and edit your asks as you go to get the best results.
Organic promotion (social, employee amplification)
Social is “free,” but you need to have a strategy here. Don’t post once and forget it. Vary your messaging, have a reason for your messaging, be clear, and test. If you don’t see results here (say, because your followers are low) then you may not want to put so much effort into it.
Leverage your employees to amplify your message – but make sure they understand what’s ok to say and not ok to say, and what they should be doing. They should be more than willing to help.
Just make sure they don’t all copy and paste the same message… you don’t want to get marked as spam.
Email marketing
Once you start collecting email addresses, that you have a consistent cadence and interesting content to share. You want to avoid being annoying and irrelevant or you will likely end up losing subscribers immediately and getting marked as spam (and hurting your IP).
Also, make sure they are opted-in to emails. You want to avoid the headache and trouble with GDPR and CAN-SPAM laws.
Tracking and measuring
I have this section last, but it should be one of the things you do first – your marketing activities aren’t going to be successful if you aren’t able to properly track their success.
At the most basic level, make sure you have Google Analytics or any other web tracking set-up.
Once you ensure everything is working – you’re going to want to have a regular cadence for reviewing results and acting to optimize – otherwise, why are you collecting data anyway?
Takeaways:
1. Connect your Analytics, Ads, form capture to your CRM
2. Create a basic dashboard in Sheets (or Excel) so you can confirm your tools will collect the data you need.
3. Have a cadence for reviewing results
Here it all is at its most basic level! This was never meant to be super comprehensive, so I’ll need to break down these sections more and go into detail later on.
There are plenty of ways to build a successful marketing campaign and my goal here was to simplify a complex process. Come back later for more content!
Header Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash