You’ve just secured your Series A funding. Congratulations! But what’s next?
As a founder, you have multiple challenges to address, including scaling operations, talent acquisition, and market penetration. Indeed, you now have the resources to expand your market presence. And marketing plays a crucial role in driving market expansion. But marketing post Series A differs from Seed in various aspects. As almost 20% of startups fail because of poor marketing, as highlighted by Business Insights, marketing is a crucial area to pay attention to after a Series A.
Let’s explore strategies to scale your marketing efforts for sustained growth effectively.s
Change your mindset: Speed & Scale
In the Seed stage, your objective is often market validation and early traction. Your approach is typically iterative, agile, and at speed. The marketing strategy and efforts evolve as you learn, gather feedback, and look at early results. Your mojo is speed, as you need to validate ideas.
However, you must shift gears to scaling your marketing efforts in the Series A stage. It’s time to execute proven strategies at scale, optimize processes, and drive rapid growth. The focus is achieving results at a larger scale. Agility and experimentation remain crucial, but your mojo is to execute marketing campaigns effectively and efficiently to capitalize on market opportunities.
Your approach is more strategic and must balance longer-term and short-term efforts.
Review your marketing strategy
Your marketing strategy must evolve as marketing objectives commonly differ in Seed and Series A. If not already, It is usually the time to hire a marketing executive to drive a strategic approach, hire the right team and execute marketing tactics effectively.
As you now have some historical data, you can thoroughly analyze what you achieved and how. Look at your customer segments, understand your sweet spots, profile your target audience, and build positioning and messaging aligned with it.
When Seed startups most commonly invest in content marketing, social media, SEO, or affiliate to generate awareness and acquire customers at a lower cost, Serie A is usually the time for integrated campaigns, ABM, and automation to scale customer acquisition efforts and expand market presence. It can also be the time to review your go-to-market motion and add new elements to it: adding Sales-Led-Growth (SLG) to a Product-Led-Growth (PLG) approach is an example. My article “How to add SLG elements to a PLG approach” explains the process in more detail.
But this can enormously differ from business to business. Establish your marketing strategy after thoroughly analyzing the situation, strong market understanding, and customer knowledge. Don’t overlook it. Your long-term vision will ensure the consistency needed to build a scalable machine and organization.
Customer acquisition, yes, but customer retention better
Strategic thinking on customer retention is also crucial. If customer acquisition is necessary, attracting the right customers for your solution who will stick to your product is vital for sustainable growth. And this is even more true during economic downturns when churn rates explode. Success will remain in the hands of those who strategically adopted a longer-term approach to the right customers that use and need your product, not those attracted more easily or at a lower cost but with a lower fit (this is what I call “bubble growth” this can be tempting but very risky).
The power of customer segmentation.
Segment your customers to understand the usage of the different profiles and identify the segment that drives the most revenue at the lowest cost. Segmenting your customers by their buying behaviors (sales cycle length, lifetime value, retention rate, and more) will give you an idea of what to prioritize, target, and approach to adopt.
Don’t be blind by your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC); look at your CAC ratio per segment to understand where to invest. And remember to split your metrics as you add customer segments to measure the effectiveness of your strategy.
Partner with customer success to better understand your customers, their happiness (NPS), and all information needed to understand better what success means for your customers. Work together to increase customer engagement. Make them ambassadors and involve them in your marketing activities: roundtables, webinars, customer cases, and more. It is usually a double-win situation where you engage your customers while attracting new ones.
Remember to address your customer needs in your marketing approach. Marketing commonly overlooks expansion ARR. And yet, Marketing Metrics tells us it’s “about 50% easier to upsell and cross-sell to existing clients than to find new ones. Include it as a shared key result with your sales team, or customer success will help you achieve sustainable growth during economic downturns. Your investors will love it.
Scale your marketing team
As mentioned above, Series A funding means scaling operations for founders. And this is even more crucial for your marketing department. Building a capable marketing team to support scaling efforts takes work. Think strategically and identify the key marketing roles you’ll need to scale efficiently. You’re probably concluding that you need a CMO or fractional CMO to help you in the process. But let’s explore how to scale your marketing team efficiently from hiring to leading.
Hiring is like establishing a marketing plan.
Identify the area of expertise you’ll need to achieve your objectives and execute your marketing tactics. Segment it into roles. Then understand the ideal profile for each position, critical skills, and mindset.
Craft a hiring budget based on market price and assign priorities. Balance junior and senior roles to achieve the proper return on investment.
In scale-up, you need hands-on and strategic people, but having seniors doing only hands-on tasks will waste money and motivation (think longer-term, you need to retain your talent to scale). Make sure to balance positions to achieve cost efficiency. Draft a compelling job description to attract the best talent and consider the hiring process beforehand to ensure things run smoothly.
Hire people with a scale-up mindset:
- agile enough to support scale-up speed,
- organized enough to build foundations able to scale,
- and autonomous enough to be efficient quickly.
Think about their ability to grow as professionals. You’re hiring your future marketing leaders. It would be best to find people with enough maturity to grow with you but hands-on enough to match the scale-up spirit. A standard error made by startups at that point is to hire professionals from big companies without considering the differences it brings. Tasks are segmented, and rhythms are different, don’t be blind by big logos and understand the real experience behind it.
Creating a high-performing marketing department.
Recruiting takes time and costs money. Make sure your investment is made for the long run. Establish a clear onboarding that will help your team to get started quickly.
But more importantly, create a work environment that will sustain a collaborative and high-performing marketing department. Give a clear direction to the team so they know where to focus together. And foster a transparent, caring, and challenging environment to keep them motivated. Team spirit is powerful; balance the right amount of time for personal sharing and professional efficiency to ensure engagement. Especially with remote teams, create moments that will bind the team together and make a real collaborative and secure environment.
As a leader, listen to your team, their struggles, and their wish to grow, and address their needs as you would with a customer. Identify areas of professional growth for each team member and support them in achieving it. Encourage ideas to foster creativity, innovation, and accountability.
Be humble, as your team will give you as much as you give them. You’ll grow together and learn together. As a leader, I feel fortunate to have worked with fantastic teams, proud of all we accomplished, and humbled by their talent. Remember to say thank you.
Build the right foundations to be able to support your growth
In Seed, you launched a set of activities that helped you in acquiring early customers. In Series A, you need to build the right marketing engine to support your growth and scale with you.
Review your Marketing Tech Stack
It would be best if you now thought more strategically and in the longer term. Review your marketing tech stack. Can it support your growth? If the sales department expands, will you be able to adjust? Usually, you’ll need to clean or build what you implemented at speed and without long-term thinking. Review the overall organization and implement a sustainable system that will be able to grow with you.
Now that you have insights into customers’ behaviors review your lead scoring, lead stages, nurturing, and workflows, and make sure your processes are designed for the future and optimized.
Automate your tasks
Include as much automation as you can. Even if a step seems negligible now, when you grow, it can burn many of your resources. Think big, but only build a Porsche if you need it. Find the right balance between moving quickly and creating a well-designed, strong foundation able to scale.
Make sure your foundations reflect your business specificities. I’ve seen consulting firms trying to sell me processes that weren’t considering my specificities, selling me “quick implementation” and “best practices.” Run. There will be no good coming from this. You’ll end up with a solution that you’ll need to refactorize in a few months, losing historical data on the side, costing you twice the price, and wasting precious time in the end.
Create/Optimize your processes
In Seed, you are trying to get traction at speed. Your team is small, so the decision process is simple. Processes are only sometimes defined. Communication is relatively easy as fewer people are involved. You have multiple open Slack channels involving the overall company, and departments’ silos are nonexistent.
In Serie A, the teams are growing, and optimizing to speed up sustainable growth is required. Think about your department in the future. You’re planning to recruit, establish an efficient marketing machine, and challenging goals to achieve. So you need to be organized and start structuring your processes. It is the time to prioritize actions, think about organizational efficiency, and ensure clear communication and alignment between departments.
Establish and document clear methods to allow efficient execution of your marketing campaigns. Identify the tools, create templates, and draft workflows to ensure efficiency. Pinpoint roadblocks in your workflows to address them quickly. Iterate until your process is efficient enough to allow quick execution.
Foster clear and efficient communication.
Organize alignment with the other departments such as sales (especially in sales motion), product (especially in PLG), customer success, and others depending on your organization and the specific needs of your business. Make sure your team is equipped for success with clear goals, needed tools, and smooth flow with other teams.
Avoid silos of information but don’t throw everything at everyone. Structure your communication channels to avoid disruption and lack of focus. Make sure the information is flowing but not flooding.
Communicate clearly what your team is working on and the processes in place, so other departments can propose new ideas, give feedback and efficiently ask questions.
Data-driven decision making
I’m one of the kind who thinks that marketing is a science, not an art. I can’t do marketing without having the data to help me analyze the situation and make decisions. Gut feelings are great, but facts are better. Understanding which channels perform, how you can optimize your actions, where you should increase or decrease your budget, and how your target audience reacts to your messages are key. And this is only possible by tracking the right data to allow you for smart decision-making. I’ve seen many startups wrongly analyze metrics, lacking historical data because of continuous changes, overlooking the setup, resulting in inaccurate data, or missing key metrics.
Include Your Metrics setting system in your plan.
Make sure you establish a plan to setup the system to track your metrics. It will be the key to understanding if your actions perform. It can take time but don’t overlook it. If built for the future, the system will support you for years. If you can analyze your actions, you can iterate, be more agile, evolve quickly with environmental changes, and ensure you’re putting your efforts in the right direction.
Foster data-driven mindset.
Align with key departments involved in your success, such as Sales or Product. You should understand your metrics, and they should understand yours. I strongly advise some training sessions to make people well informed about data metrics within the company.
Open your marketing reporting session to other departments. Communicate your metrics to the company so they better understand your efforts. Metrics are like a language; you’ll need to make sure everyone speaks the same one and understand it. I’ve seen failure because of metrics’ lack of understanding or engagement. I recommend taking into account this part and organizing solid training sessions.
Metrics don’t end with marketing. Make sure the departments involved in conversion have a robust setup aligned with yours to be able to discuss the real challenges you’ll face. If you have a little picture, you are right back on gut feeling and sterile discussions. Address the real challenges without ego but with facts. It is only possible if you have the right metrics to make data-informed decisions.
Read and train yourself on metrics. Follow Ray Rikes, Founding member of the SaaS Metrics Standards Board, and Dave Kellogg, author of the insightful kellblog, who are metrics goldmines, to get a deep understanding of metrics, analyze and use them properly.
Review Your Marketing Tactics
As you expand your growth and review your marketing strategy and foundations, you must ensure your marketing tactics align with your new plan. Do you plan to reach new customer segments? Address Enterprise Accounts? You might want to explore new tactics such as ABM, integrated marketing, strategic partnerships, and more.
Test new marketing approaches.
It can be the time to add new marketing channels to improve synergies, address new segments, or create longer-term growth power. Test the approach first. Make sure you’ve identified how each channel will contribute to your growth and how you’ll measure it. Some of them, such as media or analyst relations, are difficult to measure. Efforts are usually costly and impact visible in the longer term. But think big and balance short-term efforts with long-term investment. Increasing brand power and security will be tight to your success if you target Enterprise Accounts. Don’t miss the opportunities because there are far away. It is the same as having a vision; if you don’t think big, you’ll not achieve big.
The power of targeted marketing.
Explore targeted marketing. Once you better understand your ideal customer profile and their behaviors, draft tailored campaigns.
Elaborate on your generic campaigns to improve efficiency and leverage automation tools to do more in the future. Automate your lead nurturing, email marketing, customer segmentation, and more. That way, you can draft personalized marketing campaigns for each persona. Especially useful when you add new segments to your game.
Self-sufficiency is a myth; you are just missing out on growth opportunities.
Don’t forget the potential of strategic partnerships and alliances to amplify marketing reach and drive growth. Identify and collaborate with complementary businesses, industry influencers, and strategic partners to expand brand visibility and tap into new markets. Elaborate joint marketing with complementary brands to expand your reach. Start the conversation by defining a joint angle and explore together marketing campaigns that would be relevant for both businesses. Keep in touch regularly to measure success and ensure your BDR teams are informed and understand the challenges. Iterate periodically to build and extend partnership as it evolves.
Offer ways to engage with your brand to industry influencers: webinars, roundtables, and content. Understand how they like to get involved and offer them multiple formats to choose from.
Marketing tactics will depend on your marketing strategy, objectives fixed, and go-to-market. Make sure everything is well-aligned to ensure success.
Create a solid marketing budget
With Serie A and added marketing complexity, you’ll need to ensure your marketing budget can reflect your efforts on specific channels and customer segments to understand the ROI of your actions.
Moreover, as your team grows, more people will work on it, so having a well-structured budget able to give you the overview you need, segmented per your business requirement, and understandable and manageable by each team member is critical.
Align your budget structure with your marketing plan and involve finance to ensure both departments are aligned and structured to get the necessary insights.
Establish a regular cadence to discuss with the finance team, ensuring your metrics are aligned and consistent.
Tight your budget to your marketing reporting to understand the ROI of your activities and optimize as you progress.
Conclusion
Scaling marketing effectively after Series A funding is not easy. It requires a strategic, well-structured, and data-driven approach. It differs significantly from the Seed stage from mindset to execution, and you’ll need support in shifting your company and yourself. As you hire your executive team, make sure they will be able to support you in this movement. Evaluate their ability to organize your departments, attract and retain talents and offer a data-driven approach.
As a marketing leader who created three departments from scratch and supported startups in scaling, I can assist you in this transition, reviewing your strategy, building solid foundations, and hiring the right team to reach your business objectives, expand market share and position you as a leader in your industry. Contact me directly for more information.
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