how i build a marketing machine

I built a process at Morning Brew & storyarb to create a powerful engine for organic growth.

- At the Brew, we scaled to 1,000,000 newsletter subscribers within 4 years, the majority of which we acquired organically.

- At storyarb, we got to $150k in monthly revenue within 12 months & launched a 1,600-person virtual content conference in 30 days on a shoestring budget.

I'm going to share the entire process with you in excruciating detail.

I think you’ll find my approach is simple & intuitive, but not easy to execute.

Fair warning: this post will be lengthy.

But I hope it gives you a specific & actionable approach to setting & executing on your own company’s marketing strategy.

THE PROCESS: 7 STEPS TO THE MARKETING MACHINE

It all starts with the process.

To develop a thoughtful marketing plan, you need to be clear on a few things: your customer, your channels, your goals, and your metrics.

Once you go through the steps, I’ll take you through a real-life application of these steps (at one of my company’s) to make this process as tangible as possible.

Step 1: Who is our ideal customer (and what proof is there of that)?

Create your Market of 1.

Get as specific as humanly possible. Write a one-pager describing your avatar. What do they do. What do they need. What are their behaviors.

Have a real person? Even better. Pull their Linkedin URL. Write down everything you know about them.

Step 2: List out all of the hubs (marketing channels) that give us access to lots of spokes (our ideal customer)?

Examples: newsletter, digital conference, ambassador program, SEO, in-person event, channel partnerships, subreddits, producthunt, IRL activation, etc.

Step 3: Calculate your marketing math.

- What are your 1, 3, and 6 month revenue goals?

- What is the average value of your ideal customer?

- How many more customers are needed in 1, 3, and 6 months to hit revenue goals?

- How do you define a qualified lead?

- What is the conversion rate of a qualified lead to a closed won customer?

- How many qualified leads are needed in 1, 3, and 6 months to hit your closed won customer number needed to hit revenue goals?

Step 4: What are the marketing channels you are going to prioritize & what is your prediction of how many qualified leads they will drive?

Prioritizing channels isn’t easy, especially when you have no historical data & resources (time/money) are limited.

A helpful way to compare & prioritize channels is by creating a simple matrix that allows you to compare channels across a number of categories:

- Cost

- Effort

- Predicted Effectiveness

Step 5: Who will own each channel?

A channel owner is responsible for:

- Setting the specific channel’s strategy

- Tracking performance

- Reporting performance to marketing owner

- Recommending changes based on performance

Step 6: How long will you be testing the channels before looking at performance and making adjustments/prioritizing top performers?

Early on, I suggest quarterly. As your business matures, monthly.

[X WEEKS/MONTHS LATER]

Step 7: What were the results from the marketing strategy?

- Are we on/off track to hit our goals?

- What were the highest performing/lowest performing channels?

Step 8: Based on the results what does the go-forward marketing plan look like?

Return to Step 4..

THE APPLICATION: BUILDING THE MARKETING MACHINE AT STORYARB

Step 1:

A Head of (Content) Marketing at a mid-sized company ($10m+ revenue).

They understand the value of content & has lots of content needs within their business, but is unsatisfied with what is being produced as a result of insufficient or improper resources.

Our Market of 1: Nehal Tenany, Content Marketing Lead at Clari.

Step 2: See all current marketing tactics here...

Step 3:

Given our current demo/call volume & conversion rates, we’ll hit our key milestones on the following dates:

$200,000 monthly revenue:

- At 18 demos/week: 9.76 weeks (8/24/2024)

- At 8 calls/week: 4.24 weeks (7/16/2024)

$416,667 monthly revenue:

- At 18 demos/week: 49 weeks (5/27/2025)

- At 8 calls/week: 21 weeks (11/13/2024)

$833,333 monthly revenue:

- At 18 demos/week: 123 weeks (10/25/2026)

- At 8 calls/week: 53 weeks (6/24/2025)

Here is a revenue scenario & the corresponding leads needed:

End of Q3 (9/30): $250,000

- Demos: 626 (per week: 48)

- Calls: 120 (per week: 9)

End of Q4 (12/31): $416,667

- Demos: 886 (per week: 34)

- Calls: 170 (per week: 7)

To hit our current, ambitious revenue goals, we need to increase our leads/week. This can happen in a few ways:

- Demos must increase from 18/week to 48/week OR

- Calls must increase from 8/week to 9/week OR

- Demo or call conversion rate must increase (current: 5% & 26%)

There are a number of levers to pull to increase our demos/demo CVR:

1. More traffic to site - by executing on a thoughtful marketing strategy & generating more awareness for storyarb, site traffic should increase

2. Better traffic to site - by optimizing our marketing strategy based on performance, we can improve the quality of the user coming to our website, which increases the odds that they are in our ICP & will request a demo

3. Better site conversion - run a/b tests on-site that allow us to streamline the story & user experience such that the path to requesting a demo/making a purchase is smoother

4. Picking one lead type - instead of allowing users to request a demo OR book a call, prioritize a single lead type

5. Improving lead nurturing --> sale

Demo request

- Creating a better/more valuable demo video

- Improving the initial demo email

- Improving our email marketing drip post initial email

Call request

- Improve sales pitch/objection handling

- Improve post-call follow-up sequence

My recommendations:

1. Pick one lead type: CALLS

Calls are currently converting 5x better than async demos, which means that we only need to increase our current weekly call volume by 12.5% vs. 3.9x our current demo volume to be on track to hit our revenue goals.

By definition, call bookings will be high intent prospects given they’re going to be putting in the effort to speak with our team.

While taking away demos will remove a list of warm leads, we’ll still be capturing emails which we’ll be nurturing on a monthly (or more frequent basis) and always giving the option to book a call via our site/footer of our newsletter.

2. Improve site conversion:

Have someone be responsible for owning site conversion.

- Site change recommendations

- Remove the process step-by-step

- Get testimonials

- Have more robust examples of our work

- Make the content offerings static (movement creates mental fatigue for the user)

- A/B test the header/subheader of the intro card

- Make the bottom card newsletter sign-up vs. product demo

- More/better traffic to site: marketing strategy to come below

Step 4:

The table above lists the marketing tactics I believe we should be prioritizing (for the next 3 months) as well as the predicted sales calls each channel will drive over the course of a month.

Remember, if we focus on calls as our lead type, 40/month is our goal (based on the current 26% CVR) to hit our revenue goals.

I’ll walk through each channel briefly:

1. CommaCon

I believe CommaCon can be for storyarb what Dreamforce is for Salesforce, Adobe MAX is for Adobe, and Pulse is for Gainsight.

It will become the go-to live events franchise for content/content marketing, which will act as our biggest top-of-funnel, flowing through to several of our other marketing channels, namely newsletter, digital community, and social.

2. Newsletter

Like Marketing Examined (by Alex Garcia), Future Social (Jack Appelby), or 3-2-1 (Harry Dry), I believe we should be approaching storyarb’s newsletter as its own product.

What that means is the content should be so good/value add that 1) people will be referred to it without any prior knowledge of storyarb and 2) it could stand alone as a successful newsletter even if storyarb didn’t exist.

I also believe that if we want this to truly be an indispensable part of a marketer’s content diet, we’ll ultimately need to ramp the newsletter up to 1x/week minimum.

3. Team-based social strategy

I think we should dogfood our advice to our executive social clients and create a team-based social strategy.

I think of it like the Avengers, where each superhero has its own identity, storyline, and superpowers that attracts a certain fan, but each superhero is part of a bigger unit (aka storyarb).

Each of us will post 3-4x/week & cross-promote the posts of everyone else in our squad.

Starting Squad (and potential pillars):

Abby (CEO):

- Building a productized service

- B2B marketing lessons/case studies

Magda (Content Strategist):

Executive social strategy

Company social strategy

Jeanine (Community):

Community-building best practices

Alex (Chairman):

Marketing lessons/case studies

Content/copywriting best practices

4. Live workshops (aka presence in digital communities)

This strategy involves a storyarb team leader leading a workshop with a community in which many of its members sit within our ICP.

This marketing strategy can serve dual purposes, each of which would be worth the time investment on their own.

- Generating leads from these workshops

- Understanding how other marketing communities are run to inform the way in which we run ours

5. Channel Partnerships

There are a number of complementary companies that share a similar ICP to ours.

Finding, prioritizing & striking the right deals with the right companies to drive predictable lead flow can be a low lift marketing channel once a process is set up.

6. Referral Program

If you have product-market fit, a referral program should always be a predictable source of quality leads. It’s a no-brainer to set up a simple referral program that provides a strong incentive for our best customers to be our best ambassadors externally.

7. Targeted Linkedin Outreach

This can be hit or miss, but given the specificity of our ICP, the low cost of a VA who can support this effort, and the messages coming from my account, I think it could prove fruitful & scaleable.

I think there are really clever ways that we can create lead lists that a VA can reach out to from my Linkedin account. I also think the copy of the outreach can be a soft sell for just how good storyarb is at copy.

Company Size: 25+

Titles: Heads of Content, Content Marketing, Editor, Head of Comms, Head of Growth Marketing

Miscellaneous: Scan all open product marketing, content, marketing manager roles & do targeted outreach to hiring manager.

8. Digital Community for Content Marketers

Community can be an amazing way to continue to nurture our CRM that we build through a variety of channels (newsletter, commacon, calls), convert community members into customers at the right time, and also learn what our ICP needs from us as it relates to our current (or potentially future) products.

Community is also another potential monetization channel down the road. We also have a talented team member who would go all out to run the arb’s digital community.

9. Upsells

Similar to referrals, if we are crushing it for our clients, there should be opportunities throughout the life of a customer to upsell them into our a la carte offerings or higher subscription tiers.

This is especially important for our executive social clients, who we know are a ticking time bomb and are not our ICP.

Step 5:

Once we agree upon our go forward marketing strategy, I think we should give it one quarter before making any macro changes (adding/subtracting tactics from the overall strategy).

I think we can make micro strategies throughout (i.e. a/b testing, evolving content pillars, changing lead lists based on response rate, etc).

To execute this strategy well, we need a singular owner for each tactic (several tactics can have the same owner). A tactic owner will be responsible for:

- Completed strategy

- Successful execution

- Micro changes

- Data collection

- Reporting & analysis at the end of 3 months

- Recommendation for following quarter based on reporting