You've got your round A funding; it's time to start dating. Oh, I mean marketing.
You've got your first bit of runway sorted, and you can feel the pressure from your investors. You turn to your marketing team and demand a lead.
The thing is, there is no magic shortcut. Marketing like dating takes chemistry, time and consistency before you fall in love.
Congratulations, you've moved past the first gate from proof of concept or prototype, and now, at this point, it's time to demonstrate that your great idea can start to become a business that can make money. No matter the strategy, ultimately, this comes down to improving your product, growing your team and increasing the size of your customer base.
Marketing can help with all three of these goals and set you up for success. But how to take these early steps into building your marketing activities and strategy will have a significant impact on your future. The temptation is to throw everything at digital or performance marketing, or even growth marketing. But if you are driving bad goals for marketing focused on "fast leads" only, no matter which one of the three you pick, they won't give you the success you're promising.
Of course, leads are important, but without the right strategy or understanding of the marketing mix and market lag, you could fall into the trap of optimising for quick win quantity over quality which never drives a business forward and neglects to help support the product and team growth.
Forrester discovered that during the pandemic, the number of B2B touchpoints for each deal has extended from 17 to 27. I've also seen the number 21 from Forrester - but in any case, it's high. If all you're focusing marketing on is filling the funnel with people with the right title and quickly, you'll soon end up with a problem.
It will always be more advantageous to demonstrate growing brand recognition and high conversion rates than just be gathering lots of names of people without any intent that you can't convert or painfully, head towards an awful relationship between marketing and sales. But if you are only rewarding for short term success like RoI in 30 days, i.e. a digital campaign returning lots of engagement from the moment it's turned on, this lousy outcome could be precisely what you're driving.
Don't see a short term bump in lead numbers as success. Otherwise, you won't enable your business to grow or your marketing team to do the things it needs to do to drive real growth. Unfortunately, the same way your sales has a lag, your marketing does too.
I always say marketing is like dating.
First, you've got to find someone you have a little chemistry with, someone worth flirting with. They, not you, need to have the realisation that "oh, you might have something worth spending my time and energy on...."
Then you've got to woo them. Let them get to know you, see how amazing you are, and realise how much better it will be with you in their life. And then and only then, once they are indicating that they understand how special and unique you are, can you ask them to commit. Sales should be overlapping in this journey. It isn't a hard handover; there is no bait and switch here. It's a consistent journey with the brand.
We can't stalk people into loving us, and we can't be successful by asking someone to marry us on the first date. Or you can, but ultimately how often does that end up being prosperous on multiple levels? It takes time to build the foundations upon which most B2B sales will occur. They have to respect you, remember you and find you relevant to their world, not yours. A lead with the correct title is not the win you are hoping for.
So what can you do?
It's time to revisit your value proposition and reconfirm that you are working from an outside-in point of view - from what the customer thinks, not what you think. A powerful unique value proposition is how you're going to capture your love interest's attention. Think of this as the initial chemistry. They need to, within seconds, discover that there is something a little different and intriguing about you that makes them want to know more or even better that they immediately see in you the possibility of pain or problem being taken away.
Think about your brand identifiers - the things that are going to help your customers quickly identify you. Do the right level of brand development, but please don't waste your time or limited resources on the work of a comprehensive all singing and all dancing brand strategy when most likely you don't have any heritage or enough customers to build it correctly. At this point, you're trying to survive and being flexible at this stage counts for tons. You're still on the road of flux, and things may change, you need strong brand basics and a few consistent things that define you and help you stand out from the sea of suitors. It's more important to be distinct.
Build a strong creative marketing strategy based on a healthy mixture of brand awareness and performance marketing that focuses not only on short-term goals but also on long-term wins. Brands can't afford to only focus on digital lead gen anymore. I mean, we really can't afford to. Organisations have seen costs per impression rise by 50% between 2014 and 2018 and then doubly hit with a meteoric rise in 2021. Some brands saw an increase of 300% in May 2021 alone. Gartner is already telling their clients to prepare for a future of consent-based advertising. It is time to get creative, think out of the box. Brand activities do generate leads, as "recall" is incredibly important. For example, think about how you can use brand activities and digital PR together to create some cost-effective returns.
And finally, as always, manage your runway and expectations. You do not want to be splashing out on insane massive marketing campaigns without doing your research, understanding the trigger and purchase path and then testing and knowing what works. Don’t do huge brand development projects without doing your homework, only to run into cash flow issues in the later stages. Remember, it's a journey, and you don't want to use all your resources up on the first date.
Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. The pressure is on, but don't let that make you lose track of the bigger picture.
The good thing is that doing this work will also help you improve your product with the masses of insight you'll gather, and as your brand gains respect, it will be easier to higher your chosen talent. What goes around comes around. While there are no shortcuts there is a reward for doing a great job!