Blog 44: Making your traditional marketing strategy work

Well! we built a good product. And it solves a real world problem. But if the world does not know about it, the product means nothing.

We need a marketing strategy to drive growth. Hence, marketing concepts, the funnel, its four stages, AARRR metrics etc. are critical (read blog 42, 43 to learn more).

Choose a mix of traditional marketing, growth marketing, and growth hacking based on your product, its life cycle stage, and priorities.

Traditional marketing is what we are mostly familiar with. It is mostly about brand building and brand awareness. It is a long term strategy, takes time to fruition and requires substantial marketing budget.

For our products, we decided to use a traditional marketing strategy, supplemented by growth marketing and growth hacking phases.

A). Before creating a traditional marketing strategy, we did some ground work:

Target audience: We understood our target user base, demographics, pain points, goals, interests etc. Our blogs 9, 10, 13, 14 highlight the frameworks used.

4 fits workout: We used the 4 fits framework to get a bigger picture of our product and its ground realities. Read our blog 41 to know more. To summarise the 4 fits,

· Product-market fit: Does the product actually solve users' problems?

· Product-channel fit: What is the right ‘channel/s’ (e.g. social media, emails, ads, search engine etc.) to reach users and maximise growth?

· Channel-model fit: Can the ‘monetisation model’ cover the acquisition costs?

· Model-market fit: Can the product scale?

After this important ground work we focused on GBRM (Goals, Budget, Retention, Measure).

Goals: Setting the goal is the first step. We need to clearly identify what we want to achieve, how and when. Set marketing goals that are SMART. The framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timebound.

SMART goals create targets that can be tracked, measured and improved. For example, “increase sales by 20% over the next 3 months”. Goals can be higher sales or increase brand awareness or increase sales leads etc.

Budget: As per industry research, B2B companies spend 2-5% of their revenue on marketing, and for B2C companies its 5-10%. The numbers will be different for pre-revenue start-ups. Once you have the budget in place, allocate it to each marketing channel you plan to use. The Channel-model fit mentioned above, will help you here (also read blog 41).

Retention: This is an important aspect of marketing strategy. As per studies, acquiring a new customer can cost five to seven times more than retaining an old one. Along with building trust through community outreach, targeted email marketing (promotions, bonus content, etc.), and loyalty programs are some of the widely used initiatives.

Measure and Optimize: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” (John Wanamaker, a marketing pioneer). Measure your marketing activities against KPIs and benchmarks. Optimize to improve results and performance. If a particular channel or activity isn’t working, tweak or replace it.

B. Growth marketing and growth hacking:

Growth marketing and growth hacking significantly differ from traditional marketing. They both go beyond marketing a product. Traditional marketing is mostly focused on the product.

Traditional marketing measures key sales metrics, such as revenue, volume, market share, etc. While, growth marketing and growth hacking have metrics, such as customer acquisition cost (CAC), retention rate (RR), referral rate (RRR), customer lifetime value (LTV), etc.

The terms growth marketing and growth hacking are interchangeably used. But, they do differ. Our next blog 45 talks about this.

Jump to blog 100 to refer to the overall product management mind map.

Source:

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-budget-percentage

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2022/12/12/customer-retention-versus-customer-acquisition/?sh=1bbfc9241c7d

All the best! 😊