Graduating From Early Stage: Building a Serious Marketing Function

In the early stages of a company, founders often handle marketing themselves. As the company grows you might hire a junior marketing person but at some point, it becoming a bottleneck for many startups.

Founders who understand what to look for when hiring their first CMO, VP of marketing, agency or whatever, obviously sees more success.

This series of articles aim to provide founders with an in-depth understanding of how advanced marketing research, positioning and branding is developed for scaling businesses - to use as a measuring stick when evaluating a new marketing hire or agency pitch.

I'm drawing from my experience consulting various startups as well as fortune 500 companies - with ROI top of mind. The articles are quick and straight forward - I will also provide examples you can copy or tweak for your own use cases. Let's get into it.

Let's start with the basics - what even is a marketing strategy?

Let's say the girl scouts asked you to create a marketing strategy for their new improved version of the thin mint. You create the following strategy:

GET: hot boxing teenagers
TO: choose the ultimate munchies snack
BY: handing out flyers under every door, promoting it in the nearby dormitory

In a nutshell, this is all there is to it - coming up with a clever roadmap on how to achieve your objective. For you, it might be stealing market share, increase market penetration, boost customer acquisition or anything else rooted in your company-wide sales goal.

A strategy is a specified way to solve a problem. A marketing strategy is how to solve a marketing problem to achieve a specific business objective - whether that's increasing sales, market penetration, shareholder value or anything else.

How do I know this stuff?

I'm a brand strategist with an agency background who turned JavaScript developer. During my 8+ years of experience I've worked with 30+ startup as well as household brands such as Google, Nike, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the government (I even helped Applebee's make profit after 3 years of slumping sales - the trick turned out to be $1 margaritas). Marketing strategy turns out to be quite formulaic - for startups and Fortune 500s alike.

When learning marketing strategy, I always found it hard to get advice in plain English on how to turn abstract strategy into something concrete - like a marketing document - ready to be used by a client or a company.

In this series, I will attempt to cut out as much fluff as possible and provide clear instructions on how to create a brand (with deliverables) step by step, with examples. By the end, you'll be able to understand if your new CMO knows what they are talking about or even develop a bulletproof brand, go-to-market strategy and channel mix for your company by yourself.

Let's get started by exploring how to set objectives that ladder up to your business goal:

Next module: Setting sequential marketing objectives & KPIs (after product market fit) ->

List of modules this course will cover

Brand Positioning

1.01 - Objectives, KPIs and the effectiveness framework - Map how your marketing efforts will add commercial value to your balance sheet by driving behavioural change.

1.02 - Branding fundamentals - A quick overview that explains the basics of branding and brand positioning.

1.03 - Target Audience - How firms like Bain & McKinsey help Fortune 500 companies create a segmentation and find their ideal target customer.

1.04 - Research & the 4 C's of marketing - How to conduct research to form the basis of your brand positioning.

1.05 - Consumer - Dig deeper into your segments and develop an audience persona.

1.06 - Competition - How to conduct a robust competitor audit to reveal whitespaces in the market.

1.07 - Culture - An introduction into trends research - how to put your finger on the pulse of culture and discover micro, medio and macro trends in society.

1.08 - Company - There are always insights to gain from looking into the history of a company. What can we learn about the founding days?

1.09 - Positioning Statement - How to craft a unique brand or product positioning statement to keep your marketing activities consistent and clear.

1.10 - Manifesto, Visual Identity & TOV - Express what and who your brand represents by creating a manifesto, visual identity and tone-of-voice.

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Brand Definition

2.01 - Defining a Brand - Learn how to structure your positioning work, expand it, simplify it and make it "production-ready" to be used as the foundation for all your marketing and communication efforts.

2.02 - Brand Architecture - We’ll define a system to organize your brand(s), product(s) and service(s) to help your audience access and relate to your portfolio.

2.03 - Brand Purpose - Define your brand's reason for being and what you stand for - allowing your brand to connect with consumers (and employees) on an emotional level.

2.04 - Values & Behaviours - Define a set of guiding principles to shape every aspect of your business and dictate your brand message and personality.

2.05 - Additional Brand Attributes - What other attributes and tools can we use to define our brand?

2.06 - RTBs & Proof Points - What are “Reasons-to-believe” and how do you choose which ones to prioritise?

2.07 - Brand Book & Visual Guidelines - How to create a document that sets distinct guidelines for maintaining brand identity across all aspects of your business.

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Brand Campaign

3.01 - Introduction to advertising campaigns - How to create a strategy designed for a specific business objective (eg. to strengthen a brand, launch a product or steal market share).

3.02 - The Consumer Journey - Understand your customer’s purchase journey and the experiences they go through when interacting with your brand, from awareness to purchase and loyalty.

3.03 - Comms architecture - How to plan your marketing tactics and deliver comms to consumers at the right moment in their buying cycle.

3.04 - The Creative Brief - Create succinct documents outlining the strategy for a creative project which can be provided to partners such as copywriters, designers, film producers and web developers.

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Brand Media Strategy

4.01 - Introduction to Media Strategy - Why it's important to choose the right marketing channels for your business and how to find the perfect ones for you in a sea of options.

4.02 - Media Plan - Create a campaign media plan to deliver your ad message via the right channels and increase conversions in an effective manner, at low cost.

4.03 - Channel strategy - Strategies for specific channels and approaches to figure them out (eg. TV, Google Ads, Billboards, SEO, Social Media, Apps, Email, PR).

4.04 - KPIs & measurement - Learn how to define KPIs and create a measurement strategy to understand campaign performance and inform adjustments to current tactics.

4.05 - Branding 101 Conclusion - Summary of what we've done and where to go next.

Next module: Setting sequential marketing objectives & KPIs (after product market fit) ->

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