Are you wasting time solving the wrong marketing problems? Learn to stop.

I've worked as a marketing leader for, and then an advisor or consultant with, 25 startups so far. Most discussions of marketing strategy I've had were not about marketing strategy. They were about near term acquisition tactics.

Founders operate in a framework defined by their product, market, and how they think they will get the most market penetration. But it's often not explicit. What's explicit and gets attention is the next launch or the words used in emails. So some of this happens.

• You find it hard to understand or explain how marketing creates outcomes
• You can't tell if a revenue problem is rooted in awareness, acquisition, competition, market size, sales, pricing, onboarding, pr, or what
• You don't know if a plateau in leads is rooted in a tactic or campaign running out of steam, saturation of a channel or segment, the whole GTM being off, or what
• You are reactive to changes in growth and revenue, lagging by weeks and months
• You are presenting numbers to the board in which you little real confidence

Let's turn this on its head and build an operating model that will give you confidence in what marketing is doing, how it improves business, and what's actually worth spending time on.

Put marketing in service of the business

Marketing is a service function. It tells the company's story, convinces people to try your product, creates opportunity for sales, presents your viewpoint to the world.

Marketing goals need to directly derive from business goals.

If your business goals are:

• Be the dominant source of home value information used by home buyers and sellers
• Generate revenue through ads sold to real estate agents and property owners

Your marketing goals might be:

• Be the most used and cited source of home value data in the United States
• Be seen as a democratizing force for data previously only available to real estate agent, empowering home owners to be on equal footing
• Drive mass adoption by home buyers, prioritizing growth of that user base

Put strategy in service of goals

For each of your marketing goals, set a strategy that guides how to achieve it.

If we continue from the example above:

• Become the most used and cited source of home value data in the US by publishing original research and content based on our data and using pr to get placement and citation in economics, finance, housing, and related articles
• Become seen as a democratizing force for home value data by literally providing the data for free to everyone and inviting comparison with broker and agent valuations
• Generated user growth by creating free tools built on that data for comparing estimates, sharing estimates, using estimates as part of negotiations, and promoting the tools using SEO and SEM

Or, putting it in marketing terms:

• Develop the brand using content and PR
• Position the product by giving the data away and explicit comparison to the existing siloed information
• Acquire users through search engine marketing against free tools with viral features

Implement the strategy

For each of those strategies, you'll use an array of tactics.

If we continue with our example:

• Content: Produce larger research reports quarterly, infographics and trends pieces monthly, and commentary or responses to current events weekly
• PR: Pitch research and in-house experts to tech, economics, finance, and real estate press on specific, unique trends and make experts available for commentary on all housing market stories targeting a monthly placement or citation at the minimum
• PR: Build media relationships with only those outlets with with tech-savvy middle-to-upper-middle-class consumer audiences 
• Messaging & Positioning: Use language emphasizing empowerment and accuracy throughout product experience, SEO, SEM, social media, and content
• Customer Marketing: Test no-cost incentives (access to comparative data or early reports) vs paid incentives (gift cards) to get users to submit stories about buying or selling their homes with the help of our tools
• SEO: Ensure being in the top 5 results for every address typed into a search bar and for any housing value or price or market research
• Word of Mouth: Prompt for social sharing with pre-populated content as well as private sharing via emailed link with an in-product form focused on empowerment and accuracy of data

Make plans and do the work

Actual marketing work, the day to day, is running those tactics. And it's typically organized around specific events and cadences.

• In startups, the events that matter are: launches, conferences, and announcements
• But cadences are driven by sales: monthly, quarterly, yearly

If you overlay the two, you get a planning framework where you can plan out specific projects to achieve specific targets using your tactics over time.

If we continue with our example, let's say we are in year three of our startup and all of our work is going to be planned in relation to our first big product launch:

• Product Launch— 3 months: Scheduled to land one month before a big housing market analyst conference, starting 2 months before launch and ending 1 month after launch, coordinate messaging, positioning, comms, PR
• Thought Leadership Campaign— 6 months: Starting at Product Launch, execute brand strategy with content and PR tactics in a coordinated effort starting Q2 to achieve a press-recognized position as leading source of information, analysis, and public commentary on the housing market
• Housing Market Analysts Conference— 2 months: Starting 1 month before conference [product launch] target analyst news and press outlets with expert commentary and market analysis, place speaker at conference, create analyst facing data offer requiring citation on any use of data but otherwise unencumbered use, promote offering during conference, promote offer post-conference using acquired attendee list

Here's a very basic marketing planning calendar in a template that you can copy and modify for your company.

Compare theory to reality

Until you actually execute some plans, you're still operating in theory without any real world feedback or evidence.

If something you try does not work, feel more confident because that is one less thing you are going to waste your time on.

Stop wasting time solving the wrong problems

Developing a sense of how your tactics are supposed to execute a strategy to achieve specific goals that drive business outcomes will help you spend time on the right problems. You're going to have a never ending stream of things you could be spending your time on, problems you could be fixing. But very very few of them are actually meaningful.

A couple of examples.

• If a growth tactic, like a specific SEM campaign stops working—it's not an indication of your strategy being wrong. But if all your tactics are leveling off and new ones are less effective than old ones, then retool your strategy and don't waste time patching tactics.
• If you change what the product does or who it's for or how you sell it—that will totally invalidate some/all of your marketing strategy. So rework it before it fails instead of reacting to that failure weeks or months later.

Want to get better at finding and fixing marketing issues? Read Crash Course In Debugging Your Marketing.

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Good luck!