Edition 5: Power Up In Brief

Last week was a big one for The Scale Up Collective. We wrapped up Scale Up 4.0 and we said goodbye to my homemade Canva logo! The new-look Scale Up Collective is out in the world and we’re already working on the next steps for our tech marketing hub.?

Cohort 4.0 was all about scaling for Series A and over the course of eight weeks we worked towards creating a full marketing plan.

If you’ve been reading Power Up In Brief for a while, you’ll know that we love the process of feedback, reflection and sharing the lessons we have learned.?

Here are our takeaways from Scale Up 4.0:

?? Ideas into action can be the biggest challenge

Creating a marketing strategy and distilling this into a plan is no small task. We had a lot of discussion around who is actually going to be doing the work and the process to implement it step-by-step so it doesn't feel overwhelming.?

Once the marketing process is underway and momentum kicks in, then the building blocks for a marketing engine are in place. You can then build on this with creative opportunities as and when they arrive.

Our expert session from Yaser Ayub was a great example of putting SEO into action, with practical steps to improve performance and how to use tools such as Surfer SEO to improve each piece of content.

?? Focus and niche for fast growth

In Scale Up 4.0 we talked about the tendency to feel safe with a marketing strategy that targets 'everybody', which tends to lead to reaching no one. The more you can micro-niche at the beginning of your business journey and focus your marketing efforts, the faster the network effect can kick-in.

This was a theme for many of our expert sessions. Brand expert Emma Sexton really brought home the importance of knowing your audience and defining a clear tone of voice to relate to them with her ‘brand personality test'. Liz Painter's session on email marketing really resonated and gave clear structures on the One Rule in email - one audience, one goal, one call to action.?

?? Share your story as you scale

Whether it’s your founder story or a launch, you do have something interesting to say, whatever the stage of your business. Nurturing press and influencer relationships at the start of your journey will make it easier to execute across these channels as you? scale.

Our PR expert Pippa Goulden showed our Scale Up founders how to embrace PR at each and every stage of growth. Your origin story, case studies, funding wins and takes on industry changes are all newsworthy whatever the size of your business.?

What’s next for Scale Up?

The Scale Up tech marketing hub will be adding a self-guided program with mentorship and options to workshop with our team so that we can offer DIY marketing to startups when it suits them - and don’t worry, we’ll still run live courses! If you're interested, send me a DM.?

This month’s focus for the team is getting our self-guided programs set up on an online learning platform. And, you can be sure that we’ll share our lessons from this process next month.?