February 10, 2025

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Seven Ways To Build A Scalable Marketing Strategy For Startups

Seven Ways To Build A Scalable Marketing Strategy For Startups

Roshni Wijayasinha, founder, Prosh Marketing, a fractional CMO & marketing agency that helps startups/SMBs build their marketing practice.

Revenue growth can be challenging for companies that are just starting out—not only are they faced with smaller budgets, but they likely also have leaner teams. In my experience with startups, scaling can indeed be a major challenge.

A resourceful marketer views this scarcity as an opportunity to be not only strategic but creative, finding ways to make a little go a long way. Having helped a number of startups grow despite limited resources, here are a few of my key tips on creating scalable marketing strategies.

1. Start with a clear and specific target audience.

Always begin your marketing planning processes by strategically selecting your initial target market and creating detailed buyer personas based on market research and early customer feedback. These should be customers who can also be great leaders and influencers in your larger future customer base.

You’ll also want to narrow down this first target audience as much as possible. The broader your target audience is, the more generic your message is. This creates a risk of spreading your small budget too thin and therefore not making a big enough impact. By focusing on a very niche market (at least to start), you can also focus your communications and therefore gain a greater share of voice to gain attention.

2. Always be testing and learning.

Start with a small experiment to see what works before making big investments in messaging, channels and campaigns. This allows you to strategically invest in areas that perform well versus taking your best guess on a larger project and then realizing later that it’s not working, resulting in greater sunk costs.

Scale up the most effective campaigns as your budgets increase, replicating winning strategies across your channels. Continuously testing in rapid cycles will also enable your marketing teams to adapt quickly to market changes, resulting in less waste as well.

3. Invest in content that can be repurposed.

Content creation can be a time-intensive process, but startups also have aggressive timelines. To make the most of the content you’re able to create, prioritize content that can be repurposed across a variety of channels.

For example, you could leverage a blog post and turn it into a video series, a social media carousel, an infographic or even a webinar. You could also leverage a podcast episode into short video clips for social media, create transcripts for your blog to help with your SEO (search engine optimization) or summarize its content in an email newsletter.

Overall, consider making your content as timeless as possible and revisiting this lasting content (called evergreen content) regularly to ensure that it’s still relevant. This includes any stats and figures, or dates.

4. Automate marketing processes where possible.

Many marketing activities can be automated these days. You can leverage marketing automation tools like HubSpot for email marketing or Zapier to build connections and automation between systems using workflows to reduce repetitive tasks.

The rise of AI has also created numerous tools that allow for smart automation, such as Browse.ai, which allows you to train a bot to source competitive intelligence for you, automatically creating a spreadsheet with details like new trends, pricing strategies, reviews, product launches and more, using human-like behavior to bypass Captcha and other bot-blocking programs.

5. Monitor KPIs on a regular basis and optimize.

Track efficiency measures like ROAS (return on ad spend) and CAC (cost of customer acquisition) closely. These metrics allow you to not only monitor performance but also evaluate how efficient your marketing efforts are and how well you’ll be able to scale your budget.

Reviewing ROAS by channel will also allow you to optimize your marketing spend by doubling down and shifting resources to the most efficient channels for revenue generation, maximizing returns within your fixed budget.

Since CAC is a measure of how much it costs to acquire a new customer, improving this number by finding more effective messaging or a better channel mix for example will allow you to get more customers for your same budget.

6. Leverage partnerships and collaborations.

One of my favorite ways to scale is by partnering with complementary products and services to pool your resources and customer bases to maximize value. Since you have similar audiences but are noncompetitive, working together can allow both parties to have a bigger bang for their buck.

Whether it’s sharing a trade show booth space, creating a bundled offering or cross-promoting each other to your existing audiences, strong partnerships start with alignment on common goals. If both parties are in sync on what they want out of working together, resulting programs can be a powerful budget multiplier.

7. Leverage scalable resources.

Oftentimes, hiring full-time internal resources can be cost-prohibitive for startups. Consider leveraging external specialists in a freelance capacity to help drive successful marketing results while building internal capabilities for future growth.

New models have emerged to help startups access these resources. For example, fractional CMOs not only oversee marketing strategy on a part-time basis, leaving more budget for marketing implementation, but they also coach and train internal employees and leverage their previous experiences and portfolio of clients to implement with economies of scale.

For a startup to be successful, marketing efficiency is vital. Not only can this help them grow with constrained resources, but it can also help them reach critical economies of scale that attract investors, attract strong senior talent and ultimately beat out competitors.

Being deliberate with budgeting decisions is just the start—it’s about continually making strategic choices that enable you to grow quickly and cleverly, making the best with what you have.


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