How to Scale your B2B Marketing | Advanced Marketing Strategies for Startups

okay in this video we're going to talk about scaling your marketing efforts and specifically I want to talk to Founders and early stage startups there are some essential elements of your sales and marketing process that you should be thinking about pretty early in beginning that scaling process I I know as a founder or as an early stage startup person you probably more comfortable aligning with sort of product product development that's again probably what's brought you to this this this journey of Entrepreneurship and the things around sales and marketing probably a little bit more foreign so

that's what we want to talk about here is how to start to to build some of these sales and marketing infrastructure pieces and more importantly how to begin to scale them so the first thing that I always like to start with is writing creating a writing habit and Publishing content and I say writing but when we get to the publishing content that could be a variety of different formats in media right it could be writing articles it could be writing emails uh it could be recording video which I'm a big advocate of it but it

all begins with sort of capturing ideas and beginning to create this writing habit again as a startup founder you're trying to communicate or introduce ideas or a different way of doing things a different workflow something that's new into the market and you're going to have to advocate for that right and so writing capturing ideas capturing examples of where things are maybe not as efficient or whatever you saw that inspired you you to to build this new product or service beginning to capture that and putting that and Publishing that out into the marketplace is your essential

starting point I in particular like this book for learning how to do that again I'm going to try to give you some resources cuz sales and marketing is probably not your comfortable place this is great because um there's a couple of things in one uh Nicholas Cole is terribly accomplished right if you go out in a variety of places on the web you're going to run into Nicholas Cole he's had a lot of success he's a writer he shows people um how to write but he also has some sort of contrarian but correct in my

estimation things that he talks about in writing that is a lot different from a lot of the other gurus so first and foremost I think it's chapter one in this book he says don't start with a website or a Blog right um because that just requires so much to get traction um to get discoverability seo's got to work it's just so hard this day and age and so he's a big advocate of actually writing where the audience already is and and leveraging platforms that have your ICP so I don't want to give away too much

of the book but there's just a ton of great uh information in here and just step by-step actionable ways to one build the writing habit and then two create and publish content on on a regular basis to begin advocating that product or Services change that you're you're looking for in order to to begin to get traction the next thing that's really important and it goes to kind of leveraging those platforms that already have your ICP and audiences and that is to optimize your social media uh too often uh I see Founders and entrepreneurs that are

their LinkedIn is out of date or looks like they still have a job or just isn't clear what they're doing or what they're trying to accomplish so make that social media platform reflect the thing that you're doing right the thing that you're trying to Advocate even if you have a job and you're doing this as a side Hustle but you have a strong opinion uh around something that will ultimately become a product or a service start to be the Evangelist for that idea and make sure that that's readily apparent on your profiles right your LinkedIn

profiles if you're writing on medium in your medium profile it it should be the things that you're writing about again everything should start to be bit constrained and very focused around whatever that future product or service idea or concept is you want to build some density and you want to become the kind of like the known uh evangelist or advocate for that perspective right so optimize uh any of the social media and the platforms that you're using the next step I think is always email marketing right start to build that list again this can be

I have a video check a link up here to how to create landing pages and optimize those for conversion capturing for an email list is a great sort of initial MVP right so build some sort of offer that is around that email list and on that email list or that email list itself the newsletter should be in some way an MVP of your eventual product and service and you can use that conversion that capture of that email is sort of a test begin to build your skills at conversion rate optimization um at creating user experiences

that are compelling and actually will end up resulting in a transaction of value a conversion again email marketing and building that list is a great way to start to practice a lot of those different things and then of course that list itself becomes your IAL beta audience right it becomes a a dense collection of icps where you can begin to test in those initial MVPs of your product or service a component of all of this is to make sure that you have analytics in place for the most part you can just use Google analytics whether

that's on your website Google analytics will also integrate with a lot of these platforms so if you're using something like substack for your email list or convert kit or those sorts of things you can link these things um in inside of there so you can start to track whether or not you're getting the engagement you expect how big is that audience is it growing there's a lot of things that are inside of that analytics it will be very powerful to to give you some early indicators that everything's starting to to gain traction and momentum the

other thing and this is something I don't often hear talked about but I think is essentially important very early as soon as you have an MVP start to focus around and build your culture around customer success an advocacy right uh this is a big thing for for Amazon I'm currently reading uh Amazon Unbound and it's kind of interesting to think uh to to learn from some of these bigger companies but in their context right the customer was everything and I think too often as as SAS Founders in particular but even early startups it's kind of

us against the world and sometimes we get this a little bit messed up and it's kind of becomes us against the customer right cuz there are going to be some early customers that frustrate us and don't don't get it right but we have to be careful that we're always focused on the customers's perspective giving them success and advocacy and don't get kind of you know Surly early on just because we have a few uh negative interactions we certainly don't want to create a culture within our growing organization where there's an adversarial relationship with our customer

so very very early customer success being obsessed with them being obsessed with their experience that's going to go a long way in retention and retention is everything thing for a young startup so that's going to help you to sort of grow and scale because every dollar every ounce of effort you put into acquiring is going to pay 10x on the back end right it's going to pay over and over again month over month and so that becomes really critical that you don't have a leaky bucket there because that's going to make it really hard for

you to get the scale and the traction you need to to have ultimate success after that let's talk about some of the advanced things so maybe this is after you've got a round uh of funding in here you can start to mess with some of these more advanced type techniques and the reason sort of external funding and capital can be important on this is because a lot of times these things take an inordinate amount of of money in order to kind of give them the the scale that they need to be effective however if you've

done the previous things you have all of the intelligence you need to be able to pour money to accelerate things with SEO with PPC with you know Facebook or social media or LinkedIn ads right when you start to go into that advertising again don't forget everything that you've learned and what you've done with kind of this early free you know you doing everything don't forget that intelligence that's why that analytics is also really important to have in place because then when you start to spend money on an SEO agency or an SEO skill set or

or PPC PPC manager and those sorts of things you'll already know the type of campaigns that will be effective and how to run those and you will have already practiced and gotten efficient at landing page and conversion rate optimization which is super critical in order to make that advertising investment return a positive Roi then we could start to again Branch out look at some strategic Partnerships I'm a big fan of finding adjacent products where we can work with those Founders this can be even an early strategy you don't want to waste too much time in

here because it can be time intensive but finding partners and adjacent products where you can do podcasts together where you can collaborate on video together where you can Advocate each other you can potentially dip into each other's customer bases but looking for strategic Partnerships the other thing that's really important about those is by looking for those Partnerships and synergies that make sense um those a lot of times can be potential exits if that's something that you're interested in as well the other kind of item in this Advanced bucket is PR media outreach again one of

the reasons I put it into this bucket is one it can be really time consuming and difficult especially in the early going and trying to get anyone to pay attention to you through PR and media outreach and then as you you know potentially get some Capital to invest in this there are agencies that are very efficient at doing this and you probably need a little bit of scale and traction to to invoke any sort of Interest anyway so that becomes really important that you kind of do these things in the right order so hopefully this

has been helpful if you've been here till this point I hope that you're enjoying this kind of content uh encourage you to like And subscribe to this channel there's a whole bunch of of this type of content to help you get initial traction with your startup and there's of course more to come look forward to seeing you on the next one