Making us unmistakable. How hard can it be?

Sorry for the radio silence over the last couple weeks. September and October were intense even by scale-up standards.

But big yay ??, we brought our Series A over the line! We now have an incredible new partner - one of the most respected and successful VCs in Africa, and dare I say growth markets overall - Knife Capital .

But don't worry, this edition is not about that.

We're now fully into execution mode to deliver our roadmap with the goal to better serve our clients and talent.

In this post I'm going to share what the marketing team and I are working on, at an accelerated pace thanks to the investment.

Marketing focus next 3 months: Building the pipes for future growth

Being venture-funded means you have big and scary - sorry, 'ambitious' - growth plans. Thus, most of my waking hours are spent thinking about how to deliver our projections, or better still, over-deliver.

In other words, the marketing team and I are now busy pumping out Google Ads and LinkedIn lead-gen carousels left, right, and center. Gotta hit those numbers!! ??

Well, actually, not quite...

Those of you who know me knows I'm a relatively structured person, and like a good plan... And I'm a firm believer in doing it properly.

In this case, doing it properly means making sure we do things in the right order

1. Build the pipes first. For example, there's no sense in driving lots of traffic to a site that is below par. That's like pouring water through a sieve. Or to start pumping out content, if you haven't finished your prioritisation of key messaging to your buyer and influencer personas. Or set up intricate campaigns, across the funnel and channels, with no way to manage it and measure it properly.
2. Get the big decisions right. What should we do in-house and what's with external agencies or independents? What's the split between supply and demand marketing? Dark social vs more measurable stuff? What proportion should be spent on awareness building top of funnel vs more lead gen focused initiatives? How much should we focus on new accounts vs existing? New sectors vs old for new accounts targeting? What's our updated tone of voice and visual language? And so the list goes on. ?? This one is not so much of a worry for us, but important to get right.
3. Develop a detailed roadmap. Once you know the big stuff, the fun really begins in terms of planning it all out. What content, what channels, what formats, etc, etc.
4. Execute. Provide value to clients and other stakeholders. Get those attention-grabbing, value-add videos scripted and filmed. Write the SEO-optimised anchor pieces. Attend those really key industry events, and make sure you make an impression when you're there ( Mathias Thulin - can we please get the number to the designer of the snazzy GetAccept jackets below?)

• 5. Test, measure, iterate, test, measure, iterate. And then probably some more testing, measuring, and iterating. At Outsized, perhaps because of having bootstrapped for so long, for better and worse we're obsessed with frugality. This means we'll be monitoring carefully what's working and what's not. There's a big caveat though, see my main worry at the end of this article!

Long story short, doing it properly might take slightly longer at first, but in the end it saves you time and helps you grow much faster, more profitably.

Kind of like the tortoise and the hare fable, only with a very fast tortoise (I'm hoping).

So where are we at in terms of the big picture and infrastructure building?

Well, we had done some thinking before raising the money, so it's not like we're starting from scratch (pinky swear, dear investors).

So as soon as the money hit the account, we were ready to kick off two big infrastructure/ marketing pipes-building initiatives - the first of them below.

Kicking off our web project!

Our current website looks, pardon my French, like s**t, and it wasn't very good even when we launched it many years ago.

We know it, you know it, and anyone else who happens to land there, mostly by mistake since our SEO also stinks, know it.

Our current site is detracting value, not adding as it's supposed to do. Clients and talent love us when we talk to them (check us out on Trustpilot!), but when they go to our website I can't blame them if they have second thoughts!

The navigation on our site is too complex, the look and feel is dated, the design language is inconsistence, it's slow, and it's not SEO optimised in any way.

Long story short, we knew that we had to not so much tweak our website, as completely rebuild it. That's why we have just partnered with Triggerfish - part of iO , one of the top agencies in Scandinavia. It was a long, thorough, and truly global search for the right partner.

What did we tell the agency we wanted to achieve with our site?

One of the things we stress to our clients is that they need set up the independent talent for success. Talent need to get onboarded properly, given access to the right stakeholders, get some context about their project, etc, etc.

So we try to do the same when we bring in external partners, in this case a web agency. We wanted to set them up for success, too.

We've sent them lot's of background of who we are and what we do, what our plans are, and how our website fits into this.

Key website objectives:

• Punch above our weight when it comes to our marketing, including our website. The world is noisy, and we need to stand out and be memorable at what is still a limited budget compared to growth plans.
• We want to be unmistakably Outsized. This applies to look and feel, but it's more than this. We have some very deep-rooted values in how we believe business should be done around passion, integrity, and accountability. Our agency has a great designer in Oscar Sj?qvist who will help us with a creative refresh, bringing it all together. No pressure Oscar!
• The design of the site must be rigorously matched to the goals. We have two main users of the external site, clients and talent, and we want them to do different things. Book a meeting, register, post a project, etc.

Sometimes less is more, simplicity and leaving things out can be the right choice. We'll get there with the support of Henrik Bygdeman and Jesper Hansson .

So, that's about it for now. We're kicking off our #martech project in parallel, I'm sure I'll come back to that another time.

People with interesting insights

• The importance of key messaging simplicity in the hero section of a website. Check out Anthony Pierri ?? for inspiration on how to crack it.
• One of my (many) blind spots is Paid Search. Jonathan Bland has a lot of helpful posts on that, so I'm slowly getting there. He's also got some great insights more generally when it comes to B2B marketing. (And by the way, I fully agree with him in terms of ungating (most) content, and an overall stronger focus on demand generation vs lead generation. The future will tell how it goes when we try to implement this.)

?? My key worry right now?

We have got to where we are with Outsized on a shoestring, and have never really done any client-side marketing.

The little budget we've had has been used almost exclusively on the talent-side of the platform.

This means we have very little in terms of benchmarks. For example, what are reasonable assumptions for funnel conversion rates for us? What if our CAC / LTV assumptions are way off?

Thanks for reading and please share any thoughts or comments below! Until next time.

/Niclas