MANY HAPPY RETURNS

How the right marketing plan can increase your next pre-money valuation.

"1/3 of all entrepreneurs fail or lose investor interest because they don’t know how to spend their money…customer acquisition frequently ranks as the second biggest reason why they fail."

Archana Priyadarshini, Venture partner at Unicorn India Ventures.

You know that marketing is important to achieve results for the company and return shareholder value. But budgets will always be constrained, no matter what stage you're at. So how do you structure the right plan for your growth cycle?

This article covers the essentials for a marketing plan that builds optimal value into your company, exploring how your strategy will change, depending on the needs of the business through each round of investment from series A through to B and C.

Demonstrating marketing’s value to shareholders

It’s time to think like an investor. How is your marketing plan going to show a return on their investment? The proof point for each round, from series A, through B, C and towards float/exit, will be whether the value marketing delivered, justifies a further re-investment. Broadly, the value drivers for each round are:

SERIES A: GROW. FAST

This round is about proving the business model, showing there’s a revenue generating market for your proposition. Your budget for series A marketing, excluding wages for 1-2 personnel, is likely to be around ￡100-￡150k per year, over two years. Fundamentally, this needs to cover brand development and an agile growth marketing programme to test and refine your proposition.

1: Establish your brand’s fundamentals. Let’s be clear, this is about more than designing a logo, brochure and website. It’s about creating a brand that connects with your customers’ needs and desires, persuading them to buy what you’re offering, over and above your competitors. You only get one shot at this, so you’ll want to do it thoroughly, and get it right. For a solid brand architecture, you’ll need to cover:

• Market analysis: needs, trends, growth rates, competitors
• Positioning: purpose, values, features, benefits, unique selling points, pricing
• Proposition: buyer personas, value statements, reasons to believe
• Creative development: logo, look & feel, personality, tone of voice, imagery, brand standards
• Collateral production: applying the brand story to brochure, stationery etc.
• Website development: establishing the core brand presence, built on a content management system that can scale and grow

2: Develop your growth programme. As a rule of thumb, customers need to see your brand three times before they’ll remember your name, six times to remember what you stand for and nine times to take action. With a modest budget, your plan will need to be agile, efficient and tightly focused on the market segment you’ve identified in your brand architecture, otherwise you’ll go too broad and dilute its effectiveness.

Your growth program should feature activity which is cost-effective, flexible and easy to set-up, run and optimise. You want to be able to test, fail and refine quickly in order to measurably show the results you need, within the time frame you’ve got.

Your plan may include:

• SEO: optimising your website’s content to appear high in search results
• Conversion optimisation: improving the conversion rate of visitors to your website
• PPC: Running Pay-Per-Click advertising on search engines
• Inbound marketing: writing content your customers will value enough to opt-in for more
• Social media: running social media campaigns to build and convert your following
• Account based marketing: targeting business buyers in a co-ordinated sales/marketing programme
• Sales promotions + affiliate marketing
• Speaking at events, or running webinars
• PR: off and online, engaging with journalists and influencers

These activities will need specialist skills, supported by thorough analytics to deliver the results your plan demands. You might also trial:

• Digital advertising and solus emails with key publications
• A small presence at select events

Your plan will avoid cost prohibitive print, ambient and broadcast media and an overreliance on expensive events and paid media.

SERIES B: STABILISE. EXPAND. REPEAT

From a series B marketing pot of ￡1m, your budget for series B marketing programmes, excluding wages for a team of 4-6, will be ￡500k - ￡600k, depending on sector and headcount. Your strategy will focus on both stabilising the income stream from the previous round’s target market, and expanding into new segments and channels. You may also be developing new products and revenue opportunities. This will be also be a time to consider revisiting your brand, making sure it reflects your direction of travel towards series C.

Refresh your message, innovate customer journeys, automate processes

As you extend your reach, you’ll need to deepen your understanding of your customers and the journeys they take through your marketing and sales cycle. You’ll combine this insight with what you learned in series A to prepare the brand for an awareness push. You’ll also lay the foundations for processes, technology and resources needed to grow into enterprise level operations during series C expansion.

Your plan may include:

• Customer research: deeper profiling of customer needs for each new segment
• Customer journey mapping: defining and recording your customer journeys
• Brand refresh: strengthening the brand’s proposition and messaging
• Brand awareness: investing in baseline brand awareness
• Demand generation: innovating, refining + optimising your targeting, messaging, propositions + channels
• Technology investment: marketing automation and CRM technology
• Process automation: systemising your customer journeys across marketing, through to sales and CRM
• Digital operations: developing technologies and processes to manage and develop:

- Prospect and customer databases

- Website and social media publishing

– Journey analytics, optimisation, segmentation and personalisation

– Project management

• Team expansion: for example, product manager, content developer, digital marketer, PR + social manager

SERIES C: SCALE. INDUSTRIALISE. MANAGE

From a series C marketing pot of ￡2-4m, your budget for series B marketing programs, excluding wages, will be ￡1m+, depending on sector and headcount which can be between 15-30. Having proved that there’s a broad audience for your proposition in series B, your strategy will now focus on capturing the whole of the available market. The goal will be to show blue-chip levels of predictable, sustainable returns. Success will be driven by consistent, systemised management.

Cement your brand, systemise demand, manage complexity

At this stage, your priorities will be embedding your brand in the minds of your customers, expanding your share of wallet, setting your marketing processes into the core of the business and consistently increasing ROI. Your challenge will be achieving this whilst working through the increasing complexity that scales as you grow.

Your plan may include:

• Brand advertising + sponsorship: across broadcast, ambient, print and digital media
• Demand generation: direct response and account-based marketing across multiple off and on-line channels, generating a consistent pipeline of new prospects
• Co-marketing: working with channel and other brand partners
• PR + social engagement: targeted messages for word-of-mouth spread
• Events: conferences + exhibitions, own-brand customer events
• CRM: programs to generate repeat sales from existing customers
• Digital marketing systems: CRM, marketing automation, web and social publishing, analytics + insight, digital asset management (DAM), product information database (PID), collateral production and distribution dashboards, customer and channel partner portals, partner training and accreditation platforms, apps and re-useable digital micro-services
• Standardisation: Your focus will be delivering a world-class customer experience. Your management teams will be working on programmes to establish best-practice sharing, collaborative working practices across departments, automated standard routines, performance benchmarking, customer feedback monitoring and continuous improvement programs

PUT YOUR CUSTOMERS FIRST

We started this article by seeing things through an investor’s eyes. Your aim was to deliver a return on shareholder value, achieving a higher valuation in the next funding round.

Then we explored how to develop adaptable marketing strategies, investing in the needs of the business through each stage of development. Each strategy invested in innovation to diversify revenue streams, and systems and processes to increase efficiency and ROI.

One thing we can be sure of throughout though, is to build value into the company, marketing will need to keep the business focused on delivering value to the customer. As simple as that sounds, it’s amazing how difficult it gets as the business grows, and day-to-day organisational issues take over.