The best marketers don’t excel in one single channel.

It’s not about being a t-shaped marketer, either.

And it’s also not about good taste, as the business media and influencers have been touting for the past six months.

What makes a good marketer is the ability to learn and adapt.

Let me explain.

Between 2015 and 2026, Meta ads became 5-10x more expensive, and AI killed 90% of organic website traffic from Google.

But it doesn’t mean that paid social ads or content marketing no longer work.

Marketers just need to approach these channels differently.

Facebook and Instagram ads now require different ad formats, and higher-quality designs that communicate more, faster.

Content marketing, when done on a website, still requires a high domain authority and fast loading speeds. Your articles still need to rank in top Google 1-5 spots to be picked up by AI tools and listed in query replies. You just need to track the results differently.

But the truly efficient content marketing now happens in newsletters and social media posts.

This necessity to adapt (to new technologies and trends) also applies to early-stage brand, marketing, and growth.

The principles are 100% the same in 2026 as they were back in 2015.

So w/o further ado, here they are.

10 principles of brand, marketing, and growth for early-stage companies

After helping 50+ European tech startups with early-stage growth, here are the key learnings that I continuously bring to all new projects.

Brand:

1. Invest in strong (enough) brand early.
2. Understand your ICP (ideal customer profile).
3. Create what your ICP wants.

Marketing:

4. Focus on 2-3 marketing channels.
5. Copy what works for other brands.
6. Prioritise quality over quantity.
7. Multiply your marketing budget 5-10x.

Growth:

8. Build growth loops. 1 user » 1.5-2.5 users.
9. Run 2 experiments/month, minimum.
10. Don’t worry about monetisation (just yet).

Bonus: Hire top experts & excited beginners.

1. Invest in strong (enough) brand early

In my humble opinion, the biggest mistake that early-stage startups make is not investing in a strong brand.

This is especially true in Eastern Europe and the Baltics.

“It’s the product that people care about,” the practical mind says.

And I do agree. The product does have to be great. However, the same applies to your brand.

Why?

Imagine meeting a new person. You either like them or not.

It’s exactly what happens when you go to a company’s website (or App Store page) for the first time.

You either like the brand or you don’t.

As an early-stage company, you only have one chance to make a good first impression with each potential customer.

People don’t return to brands they didn’t like in the first place. (Either because of a cheap-looking brand or bad product experience.)

If I could do one thing differently in early-stage Taxify (now Bolt)…

Bolt now has a world-class brand.

In hindsight, I wish we’d invested in a high-quality brand that looks trustworthy to people in Western Europe, too.

But I can’t help but think that we’d grown much faster in London and Paris, had we launched there w/ a higher-quality brand.

2. Understand your ICP (ideal customer profile)

In order to build a successful product and brand, you need to understand your target audience.

Who is your ICP – ideal customer profile? Is there a clear understanding about it across the organisation?

The ICP is focused on your most valuable customers and prospects who are also most likely to buy.

When you google customer persona development guides, they often look like personal CVs.

This is not a sufficient way to define a customer persona.

You want to have a deeper understanding of their behavioural patterns, lifestyle, everyday struggles and needs, touchpoint marketing channels, etc.

Below is 1/10 of the ideal customer persona mapping sheet I use on early-stage brands.

3. Create what your ICP really wants

This is true for both your product features and marketing assets.

The not-so-nice truth about working w/ early-stage companies is watching many of them creating a product that nobody wants or needs.

On the marketing side, once you know your ICPs (ideal customer personas), you can develop value propositions that:

1. … are actually useful and relevant to them.
2. … you can truly deliver on.
3. … differentiate you from the competition.

Both your product and marketing should solve your ICP’s pain points.

And by pain points I mean a pain so great they’re willing to break the status quo and give your product a go.

For example, Wise knows their ICP’s main goal is to save money on transfers.

They’ve added a comparison of major banks right on their home page.

4. Focus on 2-3 marketing channels

… instead of doing 10+ channels badly.

I often have to negotiate w/ CEOs who’ve read some LinkedIn post about a new marketing channel X and think we need to try it.

“But why do you think it’s more efficient than our current channels that deliver positive ROAS?”

Silence.

Especially in early stage, when the founding team members’ time is your most valuable asset, it’s practical to focus on fewer marketing channels.

Choose 2-3 marketing channels that reach the maximum number of your ICPs.

In B2C, it could mean organic social media, and paid social (Meta) ads. Or an OOH marketing campaign. Or PR stunts. Or Reddit. Or building a content system that helps your product get referred by AI tools.

In B2B, LinkedIn (organic + paid), content marketing optimised for AI agents, and marketing-supported sales outreach work well. Partnerships and affiliate programmes also, when executed well, return a high ROI.

As a performance marketer who loves to experiment w/ ad designs, I usually start from paid social (Meta + LinkedIn) to launch user acquisition fast. Later, I add a few additional channels, depending on the ICP and product.

5. Copy what works for other brands

There’s no such thing as innovation or uniqueness in contemporary marketing. It’s all tried and tested tactics and channels.

What matters is how you approach each channel.

Research what’s working for other brands.

Don’t copy your competitors, but other brands who target your ICPs.

The easiest way is to check their website, social media channels, and paid ad libraries (Meta and LinkedIn).

See where they invest most.

Is it content, creators, partnerships, paid ads, organic social, live events, webinars, etc.? Is their sales team active on LinkedIn?

For example, a quick scroll through Clay’s LinkedIn ad examples tells me that they run lots of webinars w/ partners and creators, and publish in-depth industry reports.

6. Prioritise quality over quantity

“This marketing channel doesn’t work for us.”

Sounds familiar?

Sometimes, it’s fair to scrap a marketing channel (or experiment) and admit defeat.

More often, marketers say “it’s not working” after testing a channel for 72 hours.

Don’t scrap a marketing channel because of your own scrappy work.

Give it at least 30 days of hard work.

Another problem I often see during marketing audits is the low quality of marketing assets.

I’ve seen dozens of company blogs that have 50+ articles. But none of them is actually good… Nor ranks on the 1st page of Google search results.

By “actually good” I mean the best article that exists on the given subject.

For example, when compiling my free library of 95 marketing audit questions, I didn’t leave it at 15. I went all the way, creating the most extensive resource on the subject.

It’s the #1 search result for the Google query of “marketing audit questions.” And the first resource quoted in the AI summary.

(I tested in an incognito window to remove search bias. Do it whenever checking your own keyword rankings.)

Quality work pays off.

One thing that’s changed between 2015 and 2026 is the level of quality people expect from brands.

Nobody needs more low-quality slop. There’s already too much in the world.

On the other hand, it’s so easy to feel like you have to do something. Because, like other human beings, you encounter 100x more cool stuff daily than you used to five years ago.

Don’t fall into the good marketing anxiety trap.

Instead of despairing “there’s so much good stuff out there, how can I even compete?” take a step back from the noise.

Zone out. Book a 4-hour slot to think. And come up w/ something that’s valuable to your ICP that you can deliver.

That something probably isn’t something you can create in 10 minutes w/ an AI tool. If it is, it already exists.

It’s the slow, focused, demanding work that translates into high-quality marketing assets and campaigns.

I’m not saying “original” on purpose. I don’t believe that in 2026, originality matters as much as quality and craft.

Spend more time on creating quality marketing assets (articles, landing pages, ad creatives, PR stunts, newsletters, etc.) rather than launching semi-good ones.

Read more: Dismantling the AI Marketing Mammoth

7. Multiply your marketing budget 5-10x

Hot take, I know.

Isn’t an early-stage startup supposed to be… FRUGAL?

Well, yeah.

But the thing it needs to be frugal about is not money. It’s time.

Each month that your company fails to grow exponentially, you’re burning your funding on team salaries, office rent, software licenses, etc.

I’ve seen so many startups die slowly while playing it safe.

And so have you.

The whole point of having an investment (vs bootstrapping) is to grow fast.

Early-stage companies are like ice cream. : p

You either go all in or watch it melt through your fingers and stain the floor (your reputation).

Would you rather work w/ a second-time founder (or founding marketer) who…

a) Made bold early bets which didn’t work out, and failed in 12-24 months.

b) Kept the company barely functioning for 10 years, then folded.

I know which one I’d prefer.

A lot of the time, the best moat for tech companies is being the first to take the market.

Chances are that you’re underspending on marketing and expansion.

Here’s how I think about early-stage growth investment:

1. Spend cautiously until you’ve found your product market fit, positive marketing ROAS, and functioning growth loops.
2. Once you’re growing organically (word of mouth, referrals = people love your product), 5-10x your marketing budget and expand to new markets fast.

For example, here’s Klarna’s expansion timeline.

Note when profitability arrives. Source

8. Build growth loops. 1 user » 1.5-2.5 users

All successful tech companies have a growth loop built into their product.

A growth loop means that every new user you bring into your product will invite others.

It also means that if you spend €50 to bring in a new active user via paid ads, the CAC (customer acquisition cost) gets diluted once they bring other people into your product.

The most obvious growth loop is referrals. But there are many more.

Here’s an excellent article by Maja Voje on growth loops, including many examples.

9. Run 2 experiments/month, minimum

The best way to find things that work in the early stage is to experiment.

This applies to both marketing and product bets.

Rule #1 of experimentation: do it regularly and consistently.

In the past months, working on Roleo’s marketing and growth, I’ve run at least one Meta ads experiment every week.

There are weeks when the new ad creatives perform worse than the previous ones.

And then there are weeks when I discover a new creative that brings 2x as many new users at a 50% lower CAC.

In just three months, I tested over fifty different Meta ad designs.

Rule #2 of experimentation: prioritise the “highs.”

Often, low-effort ideas get prioritised over high-effort and high-impact.

Stay alert to this trap.

Also, give priority to high-confidence ideas.

You have a solid understanding of your ICPs and their pain points. Trust your gut feeling. When in doubt, validate any new idea by talking to your users (and non-users).

My take on user interviews:

You want to talk to people who use and love your product.

But more importantly, you should talk to your ICPs who are not using your product to understand what you need to build and improve.

10. Don’t worry about monetisation (just yet)

Another controversial view, I’m aware.

“If people aren’t willing to pay for our product, there’s no product-market fit,” you might argue.

Yes, I agree to some extent.

But I’ve seen too many early-stage startups limit their early-stage growth with a bad monetisation model.

By “bad” I mean a pricing model that stops new customers from trying the product and stalls both supply and demand.

In the early stage, use your funding to grow, not to make back 0.1% of your potential future earnings.

In order to monetise a market, you first need to take it.

For example, when entering a new market, Bolt burned millions on rider discounts and driver bonuses before reversing the profitability chart.

If you think about fast-growth AI companies in 2026, they subsidise computing power, tokens, and software features.

Or they give consumers free agentic products that, in the background, cost them millions of €$£ in computing bills.

These companies will become profitable in 2 or 5 or 10 years.

But first, they focus on fast growth and taking the market. To build the moat that makes it nearly impossible for any new players to enter.

Next steps

Scroll back to the numbered list of 10 early-stage company marketing rules.

Take 10 minutes to reflect on them.

1. Which ones do you already check?
2. Are there any that might help you grow faster?
3. Do you have the right team to implement them?

If you feel like talking to a marketing and growth expert, I’m open to 1-2 new consulting projects. Read more here.

The post 10 Rules of Early-stage Brand, Marketing, Growth appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

If you’re running paid ads, your creatives are the number one thing that decides your success. (By success, I mean ROAS and revenue, not impressions and clicks.)

Number two is something you’ve barely touched since the last rebrand: your website header.

You get the click. Fine.

But what’s the website conversion into leads and paying customers?

Quick maths: if you spend €10,000/month on paid ads and your signup CAC is €28, improving your website conversion rate by 20% buys you 71 extra signups a month.

That’s €24,000 a year in signups you didn’t have to pay for. Or a 20% bump in new users for the same ad budget.

Read more: 95 Marketing Audit Questions: Free Checklist

But here’s where most marketers get it wrong.

They redesign the entire website to improve the conversion rate.

Nothing below the fold matters. Unless your header gives people a reason to scroll.

Visitors judge your website in 50 milliseconds.

That’s 2.5x faster than a blink of an eye.

It is your website hero that decides whether people will sign up and buy.

In the previous issue of Marketing Fix, I analysed the hero copy of 15 category-defining AI products.

I promised the design half next, so here it is.

Light vs. dark, product UI vs. illustration, and the mystery of the disappearing stock photo. And because looking at pretty websites fixes nothing, each finding comes as an actionable test you can run on your own header this week.

So that your website header can digivolve from Patamon to Angemon.

Six AI-era website header design trends

The 15 AI brands I analysed employ some of the best design and marketing minds money can hire. Which makes their headers less “inspiration” and more free R&D.

Here’s a quick overview of six key trends in AI brands’ website headers.

1. Bin the 50/50 layout. Choose a single focus point.
2. Ditch the white default. Pick your own mood.
3. Forget Inter & Helvetica. Go for a human serif.
4. Stop asking for the click. Let visitors try the product.
5. Cut the stock photos. Go bare or baroque.
6. Change the hero weekly. Keep the logo bar sacred.

Each is worth a copy-and-run test.

Let’s take a look at what each of these means in practice, and how you can turn them into A/B tests for your own website.

1. Single focus point » Headline 1

Examples: Wispr Flow, Dovetail, Clay

Back in 2016, website headers balanced headline and image equally.

In 2026, all good marketers know that 80% of visitors are on their smartphones. Just check your paid ads traffic and placements.

This means that you’ll have to choose one thing to show first: image or message.

Nearly all (13 out of 15) leading AI brand websites have their Headline 1 blown up to poster size.

But some have also completely omitted the illustration. Unthinkable in 2016!

Wispr Flow states their USP with only a whisper of decoration around it.

Dovetail makes the headline physical with a 3D finger.

Clay runs a two-line statement over quiet toys-on-white.

How to implement this on your own website:

Promote your headline, demote everything else. Try removing all illustrations from your header.

Make your headline follow one of these proven angles:

• Promise an irresistible outcome: “Get better at being healthy, every year” (Superpower)
• Build in a tension: “Build with facts, not vibes” (Dovetail)
• Keep it readable in one breath (5-6 words): “Meet the night shift” (Notion)

Read more: Copywriting for Facebook and Social Media – How to Make Sentences Make Sense

2. White background » Hued or dark

Examples: Notion, Granola, Superhuman

A white background can look clean, trustworthy, and Apple-adjacent. For many people, it also looks half-baked and pre-seed.

Another trend past its shelf life is the gradient. Only two of the 15 still pull it off: Lovable and Superhuman.

Half of the 15 analysed brands turned the lights off completely: dark heroes from Superpower, Dovetail, Notion, Cursor, Superhuman, and Sierra.

The light half didn’t always keep white either. They swapped it for cream and paper tones.

Notion paints its “Meet the night shift” hero in actual night-shift navy.

Granola sets its AI notepad on a soft cream that reads as paper.

Superhuman’s purple is the bolder of the two surviving gradients.

How to implement this on your own website:

Pick a background that matches your ICP’s mood. Tranquil vs. techy vs. experimental.

• Dark = technical, premium, serious (works for dev tools and pro software)
• Cream and paper = calm, human, editorial (works for anything claiming to simplify work or life)
• Gradient = statement. Only if you commit like Lovable’s pink-blue.

Whatever you pick, ensure high text-background contrast first. Dark heroes win design awards and lose conversion tests.

3. Sans » Serif fonts

Examples: Wispr Flow, Ada

I think the sans » serif font change is the best recent UI hack I’ve seen. It immediately creates a classy and elegant feel.

What’s even better: It’s a new trend that most SaaS brands have yet to catch up with. Change now and be among the avant-garde.

Sans serif fonts (Inter, Helvetica, etc.) are safe and neutral. They’re also invisible and identical to everyone.

The taste-signalling AI brands break rank in two directions.

Direction one: serifs. VoiceFlow goes full editorial, a headline set like a magazine cover. It is paired with a simple sans font in Headline 2.

Direction two: keep your sans font, but drop the weight.

The thin sans is the safe update that you can test without messing too much with your CVI.

Ada’s headline uses a thin sans font which creates a more premium feel.

How to implement this on your own website:

Switch your Headline 1 and Headline 2 fonts. If you use a WebFlow or WordPress template, you can easily change your system fonts.

Five free and classy serif fonts to test:

• Instrument Serif: the current AI-brand favourite
• Fraunces: a quirky old-style serif font
• Newsreader: designed for digital editorial, Conde Nast and New Yorker style
• DM Serif Display: glossy fashion magazine vibes
• EB Garamond: more classic literary publisher font

Unique paid serif fonts: Tiempos Headline (Klim), Canela (Commercial Type), Reckless (Displaay), Editorial New (Pangram Pangram), Ogg (Sharp Type)

Digimon break

4. Show don’t tell » Give don’t show

Examples: Replit, Lovable

“Show, don’t tell” used to be the golden rule of header design: feature a product screenshot and let it speak for you.

The leading AI brands turned the tables. They no longer show but let you test the product before signup.

The header no longer displays the product. It contains it. You can type right into the prompt box, see a quick result, and be transferred into the signup flow.

Replit asks “What will you build?” and hands you a prompt box to answer in.

Lovable goes further and skips the button entirely. The prompt box is the CTA.

Remember what I found in the website header copywriting analysis (previous Marketing Fix newsletter): about 90% of your visitors come to website with the conversion decision already made elsewhere.

So your hero’s job isn’t to persuade, but to remove the last step between the visitor and the product.

How to implement this on your own website:

Productise a key feature of your product that visitors can use without signing up. Put it in the hero.

A prompt box, a calculator, a question with 2-3 answer options.

There’s just one condition: the first interaction must deliver value in seconds. A slow or disappointing demo is worse than a CTA button.

5. Imagery » None or all in

Examples: Sierra, Cofounder, Mistral

I’d love to make the Patamon-Angemon comparison here. But it wouldn’t be quite valid.

Angemon certainly exemplifies the all-bells-and-whistles version of a header illustration. But there’s no room for a Patamon: the modest middle ground is gone. It’s either Angemon or empty background.

Hero imagery in 2026 comes in exactly two flavours: none at all, or art-directed by skilled designers.

Zero of the 15 analysed brands use stock photos. Not a single corporate princess smiling into the camera.

Sierra runs a muted film-still of a real person on the phone. It looks like an Antonioni frame, not a landing page.

Cofounder commissioned a pixel-art landscape, a laptop resting in a storybook forest. Their entire branding is very difficult and expensive to copy.

Mistral went the opposite way: no imagery at all, just massive type and a brutalist pixel pattern.

How to implement this on your own website:

Run the swap test on your hero image: if it could appear on a competitor’s site without anyone noticing, change it.

Two directions to explore:

• All in: real photography with actual art direction, or illustration with an artist’s fingerprint. Commission it instead of licencing.
• None: bold typography on a bare background. Free, and yet stronger than a generic illustration.

6. Social proof » The sacred logo bar

Examples: Replit, Notion, Clay, Intercom

A lot above the fold has rotated over the past decade. Layouts, colours, fonts, CTAs…

One element didn’t move: the logo bar.

However, it is worth noting that the logo bar is a quintessential B2B move. A B2B buyer needs to justify the purchase to their boss. A consumer only needs to justify it to themselves.

In B2C, brands showcase the number of active users or trust site ratings.

Out of the analysed brands, Clay and Intercom do it the best.

Clay stacks the densest bar of the set under a “trusted by 350,000+ GTM teams” line. And note the little “Case Study” banners next to each!

Intercom takes the logo bar to its extreme. Or shall we say “the logo block?”

While not in the header, there’s an entire section of nothing but customer logos right under it on Intercom’s website. Twenty-four of them, Amazon to Anthropic to A24, arranged like a wall of honour.

How to implement this on your own website:

Selling to B2B teams? Keep the logo bar inside or directly under the hero.

• Use a mix of universally recognisable logos + trendy industry darlings
• Six no-name logos are worse than none. If your logos aren’t recognisable, skip them.
• Once your customer list gets long enough, do what Intercom does: give it its own section.

Bonus

The coolest website I saw when researching this article: Contra Labs

Need help with marketing? I am open for 2-3 new projects starting in September 2026. Read about collaboration options here.

Further reading recommendations:

• 215+ Best Facebook Ad Examples (NEW 2026 Update)
• Dismantling the AI Marketing Mammoth

The post 6x A/B Tests to Digivolve Your Web Header into 2026 appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Each episode features a 30y+ old startup marketer. We watch the host hand them a laptop. The marketer’s face contorts, either in awe or disgust. What they’ve just been shown is their own handiwork from ten years ago.

How would you feel when seeing the websites, blog articles, and infographics that you created in 2016? Back when cornflowers were bluer and organic traffic 100x higher…

I’m a sucker for nostalgia, so I couldn’t resist testing my own reaction to how Taxify’s website looked in July 2017. That’s when I joined the company now known as Bolt.

Hello, Wayback Machine my old friend.

My reaction was an elated “Awwwwww!” The good ol’ times.

That diagonally split background photo was my arch nemesis for years. It proved surprisingly resilient to any replacement. It just worked so well. The image shows both the app and how it materialises in the physical world. It even perfectly halves the “Tap a Button, Get a Ride” headline.

The next section, right after the hero, explains the key benefit and how the product works. The illustrations are product UI.

AI may have turned many areas of marketing on its head, but the basic rules of the website hero remain intact:

1. Communicate your product’s key benefit
2. Explain how your product works
3. Visually show your product
4. Keep it clear and simple
5. Have one call-to-action

I was surprised to see the current Bolt home page. I don’t have the data, but my marketer nose tells me that for the people looking to order a taxi, their Formula 1 message is confusing af.

It can be argued that Bolt is now a household-name brand, and everyone knows what it’s for. But even so, I don’t get the Formula 1 message. What’s happened to the app and rides?

If someone from Bolt’s marketing team reads this, please get in touch and explain.

In any case, let us race on towards the leading AI tools’ website hero analysis + tactics for fixing your own.

Your website hero: 2.016 vs. 2.026

The basics of a good website hero section in 2026 are more or less the same as in 2016. What’s changed is how people interact with it.

Thanks to AI and the innovations of BigTech companies, the level of noise in our everyday has increased 100x. Every app is built to interrupt us, and most of us switch apps without even noticing.

What it means for your website:

1. The conversion decision has already happened elsewhere.

About 90% of your (human) website visitors come there to convert. They’ve already made up their mind elsewhere: AI recommendations, Reddit, paid ads, friend’s recommendation, etc.

2. Any distraction or confusion might hurt the conversion decision.

If your Home page hero doesn’t match people’s expectations, they get confused and leave. (Here are 6 A/B tests to fix that.)

The trouble with tech products in 2026 is that they do much more than just one key task.

Think of Claude or Clay. They’re great for a million use cases. So how to write a hero headline that conveys it all? How to say as much as possible in as few words as possible?

Both have their own tagline approach. I’ll show you how more AI brands approach the hero headline in a moment.

3. Aesthetics matter more than ever

You don’t have to keep up with every design trend, e.g. 3D icons. But since Apple popularised the Liquid Glass style, nearly all brands jumped on board.

The bad news:

If your website header doesn’t leave a high-quality, trustworthy impression – or looks like Y2K without the intention of looking like early 2000s – visitors move on to your competitors whose website looks better.

The good news:

There are so many amazing AI website platforms and design tools (Wix, Framer, Figma) that enable marketers to set up beautiful, sleek landing pages.

And sometimes, simplicity is the key.

In case you suspect that your own website hero is also leaving the visitors confused – or simply doesn’t convert them – keep reading on.

Website hero tactics of 15 category-defining AI products

One of my convictions that hasn’t changed in time is this: If you want to learn about any area of marketing, see how the best-in-game do it.

And in 2026, the brands with best marketing and design talent are the AI tools.

I chose 15 leading AI products, and conducted a qualitative + quantitative analysis of their website home pages.

My curation process considered:

1. Status as category-leading AI product
2. Reputation for strong marketing
3. Extreme focus on design
4. Angle and category variety
5. Mix of audiences, B2C vs. B2B

The final list I came up with: Superpower, Dovetail, Ada, Clay, Granola, Attio, Cursor, Notion, Lovable, Superhuman, Replit, Wispr Flow, Sierra, Cofounder, and Mistral AI.

As the hero section does 90% of the heavy lifting, I focused on exactly that.

There’s a lot to unpack even in the hero alone:

1. The 1-sentence headline
2. Sub-headline and minimised text
3. Design: light or dark
4. Illustrations: photos or videos or product UI
5. Additional elements: chat interface or CTA, client logos, etc.

The questions I asked myself:

1. How do the headlines convey what the product does, and the USP to the user?
2. What’s the sentence structure of the headline? And the average length?
3. What are the most common elements used in headers?
4. What are the prevalent design trends?
5. What’s in the home page section following the header?

In this article, I focus on the copy side of things. My follow-up article covers design and user experience.

Below are the key takeaways. Read through and apply them right away.

1. Keep your headline short

The leading AI brands keep their website headlines short and sweet.

Ten out of fifteen analysed websites keep the headline at 6 words or fewer. The median Headline 1 length is five words.

The shortest headline award goes to Lovable (“Build something Lovable”), and the longest to Clay (“Go to market with unique data — and the ability to act on it”).

The sweet spot is at the 4-6 word count. “Build with facts, not vibes.” “Meet the night shift.” “Don’t type, just speak.”

But there’s a caveat. The short n’ catchy messages do not work alone.

Simply reading a headline like “Build with facts, not vibes” or “Meet the night shift” wouldn’t tell you what the product does.

The short headlines always have a subheadline underneath them.

This part carries the literal description. As many as 13 of the 15 sites split the copy exactly this way.

Still, I’d argue that the best website headers skip the subheadline completely. More on how they do it shortly (pun intended).

2. Most headlines talk about brand and/or category

It doesn’t matter whether your headline is five or twelve words, if you fail to convey what your product does + how it benefits the customer.

Of the 15 sites I analysed, the Headline 1 fell under one of six angles.

1. Brand as a subject (4 of 15): X helps you with Y

• “Cursor is your coding agent for building ambitious software.” (Cursor)
• “Cofounder lets you run an entire company with agents” (Cofounder)
• “Better customer experiences. Built on Sierra.” (Sierra)
• “Build something Lovable” (Lovable)

2. Category claim (3 of 15): What is this product?

• “The agentic customer experience platform” (Ada)
• “The revenue platform engineered for scale” (Attio)
• “The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings” (Granola)

3. New category defining (3 of 15): Meet this new product

• “Superpowers, everywhere you work” (Superhuman)
• “Frontier AI. In your hands.” (Mistral AI)
• “Meet the night shift.” (Notion)

4. Contrast (2 of 15): Do X not Y

• “Build with facts, not vibes” (Dovetail)
• “Don’t type, just speak” (Wispr Flow)

5. Outcome promise (2 of 15): Do or get X

• “Get better at being healthy, every year” (Superpower)
• “Go to market with unique data — and the ability to act on it” (Clay)

6. Question (1 of 15): Question + chat interface

• “What will you build?” (Replit)

3. Put the blablabla in subheader

Nobody reads it anyway.

And yet, most analysed websites still do it.

My bet is that it’s not for people, but AI algos scanning the websites to understand what the product does.

As to humans, the better place to address them is in the section right after the hero.

Several analysed AI brands use the after-header section to communicate how their product works.

4. Test non-traditional CTAs

The good old “Get Started” still works: 8 out of 15 brands run some version of the classic formula.

• “Get started” (Cursor)
• “Start for free” (Attio)
• “Try Dovetail free”
• “Download for free” (Granola, Wispr Flow)
• “Get Notion free.” (Notion, duh!)

“Try” and “Start” are the default for a reason: it requires zero thinking from the visitor. No objections = more conversions.

The more creative (but not necessarily better-converting) heroes treat the button as one more line of copy.

If your headline angle is strong, the button is free real estate to say it again.

• “Run a company” (Cofounder)
• “Become a member” (Superpower)
• “Send me a demo” (Attio)
• “Listen to a real call” (Ada)
• No button, just a prompt box (Lovable, Replit).

The boldest move in 2026 is skipping the button altogether. Replit puts a textbox right under “What will you build?”

Personally, I’m a fan of interactive headers that invite the visitor to engage with the product before taking any action. It pulls them right in.

5. “AI-powered” is SO passé

In 2023, having AI in your product was a novelty. In 2026, it’s self-evident.

And yet, every marketer still faces the Headline 1 dilemma: to say the magic word, or to assume that everyone knows, anyway?

As to the leading AI brands, one of the last words they’d use in their Headline 1 is “AI.”

Only 5 of 15 analysed headlines mention AI or agents at all. But 12 out of 15 still say it somewhere above the fold.

Sierra, Replit, and Superpower never say it anywhere above the fold; Superhuman tucks it into the sub.

1. “AI-powered” is dead.

Zero out of 15 headlines use the 2023 cliché. Mistral kept the word but made it grander (“Frontier AI. In your hands.”). Everyone else dropped “powered” altogether.

If “AI-powered” is still in your headline, get rid of it fast.

2. “Agent” is the new “AI.”

Cursor sells a “coding agent,” Cofounder runs your company “with agents,” and Ada claims an “agentic” platform. Notion and Clay tuck “agents” into the subheadline.

AI describes a technology, agent describes a hire. And by saying “your coding agent” instead of “an agent,” Cursor turns a software tool into staff.

3. Omission is a status symbol.

Sierra, Superhuman, Replit, and Superpower skip AI in the headline entirely. Sierra doesn’t even say it anywhere above the fold. When you’re the category leader, AI is assumed.

Putting “AI” in your headline now reads like a buzzword.

TL;DR: Five key takeaways

Research takeaway #1: 10 of 15 leading AI brands keep their headline at 6 words or fewer.

Research takeaway #2: Most headlines follow a brand or category led angle.

Research takeaway #3: I suspect subheadlines are mostly read by AI crawlers now. Humans get convinced in the section after the hero.

Research takeaway #4: 8 of 15 brands still run the classic “Get started / Try free” formula. The boldest replace it with a prompt box.

Research takeaway #5: Only 5 of 15 headlines say “AI” or “agent” at all, zero say “AI-powered,” and the category leaders skip the word entirely.

Test your own website hero against these five. If it survives, let me know.

Next up: the design part of the analysis.

Light vs. dark heroes, product UI vs. illustration, and why nobody uses stock photos anymore. Read it here: 6x A/B Tests to Digivolve Your Web Header into 2026.

Need help fixing your marketing game? Read more and contact me here.

Further reading recommendations:

• 6x A/B Tests to Digivolve Your Web Header into 2026
• 95 Marketing Audit Questions: Free Checklist
• Dismantling the AI Marketing Mammoth

The post How to Write Homepage Headlines: Lessons From 15 Leading AI Brands appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

In this marketing audit guide:

• Explanation of what is a marketing audit
• List of marketing audit chapters
• Guide on how to conduct your own
• Thoughts on using AI to save time
• Free checklist of 95 marketing audit questions

What is a marketing audit?

After working on 45+ marketing audits, each of which takes 20-40 hours, I’ve spent ca 1,350 hours of my waking life (that’s about 84 days!) switching between tabs and docs.

How did I end up writing the audits? And why?

It’s rare for agencies or consultants to offer marketing audits as a standalone service. They’re usually done in-house, by the CMO. Or by an external auditing agency as part of a bigger project.

And yet, the need for an audit of a company’s marketing activities arose every time I started working for a new brand.

A 360-degree marketing audit is the fastest way to:

1. Get an exhaustive overview of what’s worked / not worked.
2. Understand each marketing channel’s state and ROI.
3. Research competing brands’ USPs and tactics.
4. Map new ideas and opportunities for growth.
5. Align company-wide goals with those of marketing.
6. Get a prioritised roadmap for the next 6 months.

Think of a marketing audit as a complete check-up of your marketing strategy.

Audits are done 1-2 times per year, and give you a deep dive into your marketing efforts to see what’s working and what’s not, and what could be optimised for better results.

You end up with a clear roadmap for the next 6-12 months.

What does a marketing audit cover?

When conducting marketing audits for my clients, I usually spend 20+ hours collecting, analysing, and formatting the information.

The resulting Google Docs file is about 60 pages long (including screenshots).

That’s a lot of hours and pages…

But if you think about it, there are also many different aspects to marketing. A well-researched and actionable marketing audit covers every aspect of your marketing strategy, from acquisition to engagement to retention.

The best way to do a marketing audit is by taking the 360-degree approach.

You should cover all the key aspects of your growth and marketing strategy, from planning and reporting to detailed per-channel analysis.

Eight key chapters of a marketing audit:

1. Results & Reporting
2. Brand & Value Proposition
3. Website/App & Acquisition Flow
4. Customer Acquisition
   1. Growth loops
   2. Paid ads
5. Social Media Marketing
6. Content Marketing & SEO
7. Email Marketing & Automation
8. Summary & Next 12 Months’ Plan

How to get started with a marketing audit?

1. Define your marketing audit goals.
2. Set up a Google Doc with all chapters.
3. Block 2-4h every day to complete the audit in 1-2 weeks.

1️⃣ Start by defining what you want to get out of your audit.

• Is your goal to improve ROI or find new ways to scale?
• Are you looking to identify weak points in your strategy?
• Just checking if your marketing strategy aligns with the CEO’s view?

Be clear about what the final audit result should look like before you start.

2️⃣ Set up a Google Doc with all chapters.

The hardest part is to start the project. Just do it.

I like writing marketing audits in Google Docs, as they’re great for formatting, including screenshots, and team comments.

Alternatively, you could use Notion or a Miro board.

3️⃣ Block 2-4 hours of time daily.

Writing a marketing audit is not a multitasking side task. Your brain needs to go into deep-focus mode where it can take in lots of information, analyse it, make connections, and come up with strategic takeaways.

I usually aim to write a full chapter in one sitting. It ends up saving a lot of time, because you don’t have to reopen all the tabs, get back into the mindset, etc.

It’s best to work on your marketing audit in the morning, when your mind’s not yet cluttered with Slack threads and meetings.

Can you use AI for auditing?

There is one part of the marketing audit where AI tools like Claude Cowork can save you time.

That’s competitive research.

I like to create a list of 10-15 competitors, and ask Claude to scrape their website and socials, then create a spreadsheet with relevant URLs, positioning and value props.

But even then, I’ll manually click each of the URLs and analyse their websites and social posts to know what’s actually there. I also collect screenshots of good examples (website blocks, USP wordings, paid ad creatives) and add them to Google Docs with my own commentary and takeaways.

As to the rest of your audit, you’ll only waste time trying to cheat with AI.

The whole point of the marketing audit is to view, analyse, and process everything with your own wise human brain.

And, obviously, you’re the only person who can come up with meaningful takeaways and next steps.

Use AI cautiously. Otherwise, you’ll end up with lots of gibberish that does not lead to any improvements or change.

95 marketing audit questions: checklist

Below, you will find five marketing audit questions for each chapter. That’s a total of 40 questions. How about another 55 to write a substantial, detailed overview?

Access the Notion page with the full checklist by subscribing to the Marketing Fix newsletter. Get the Notion Library of 95 Marketing Audit Questions.

You will find the link to Notion in your Welcome email.

Once in, you can copy the library to your account for tracking your progress. Tap “Duplicate” icon in the top-right corner.

Chapter 1: Reporting & Results

1. Have you got an up-to-date weekly/monthly KPI sheet for marketing ROI tracking?
2. Is your current marketing reporting sufficient and gives a clear overview of per-channel ROI?
3. Is there a clear marketing plan & budget for the next 6/12 months?
4. If working with agencies: Is there transparent monthly reporting on KPIs like Cost-Per-Lead and ROI?
5. Can you track the results & ROI of every marketing channel you spend on?

Chapter 2: Brand & Value Proposition

For the thinking behind this chapter, see my 10 rules of early-stage brand, marketing and growth.

1. Who is your ICP – ideal customer profile? Is there a clear understanding about it across the organisation?
2. Are your brand USPs strong enough to convert people to buyers?
3. What is your #1 touchpoint where future customers form an opinion of your brand?
4. Does your brand leave a high-quality and trustworthy first impression?
5. Does the #1 touchpoint clearly (and immediately) communicate your product and its 1-2 top USPs?

Chapter 3: Website/App & Acquisition Flow

1. Does your website leave a high-quality and trustworthy first impression?
2. Does the #1 touchpoint clearly (and immediately) communicate your product and its 1-2 top USPs?
3. Is there a clear CTA (in website header) with the next step you want the visitor to take?
4. Do you use numbers and client logos to communicate your USP + social proof on your Home page?
5. Are your product(s) and features/benefits well visualised & communicated on the Home page?

Chapter 4: Customer Acquisition

1. Do you have a clear documentation of all paid and non-paid marketing channels with results and ROI?
2. What are your TOP 2-3 acquisition channels that drive sales and revenue?
3. Have you done any offline advertising campaigns in the past 12 months? Describe results.
4. Are there any paid channels with low performance & negative ROAS?
5. Are there any channels underperforming or delivering diminishing returns?

Chapter 5: Social Media Marketing

1. What are your brand’s active social media marketing channels?
2. Are all of your social media accounts active and getting regular engagement?
3. Are your social media profiles consistent in branding (logos, banners) AND messaging (tone of voice)?
4. Is your social media content having high engagement (likes, comments, shares, DMs)?
5. Do you have a social media strategy & plan laid out for 2+ weeks in advance?

Chapter 6: Content Marketing & SEO

1. Is organic content marketing an active customer acquisition source for your brand?
2. How are you driving traffic to your organic marketing channels? Does your audience engage with it?
3. How has ASO (Agentic Search Optimisation) affected your website traffic?
4. How visible are you in ASO results compared to competitors?
5. Is your marketing content relevant and interesting to the ICP?

Chapter 7: Email Marketing & Automation

1. Is automated email marketing part of your strategy? Have you mapped it out?
2. Are your automation workflows set up for key customer touchpoints (welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, re-engagement campaigns)?
3. Do you have an email automation strategy to convert cold leads into customers?
4. Are you leveraging behavioural triggers (downloads, product actions, purchase history) for personalised automation?
5. How clean is your email list? Are inactive or unengaged subscribers being managed or removed?

Chapter 8: Summary & Next 12 Months’ Plan

1. Based on the audit & competitor research, how would you evaluate your current marketing strategy and results?
2. What are the weakest links in your current marketing strategy that lower your conversion rates?
3. What are the TOP 3-5 marketing activities/channels that deliver results?
4. What are the marketing activities with no ROI that you should stop spending resources on?
5. If you had to 2x your customer acquisition in the next 6 months, where would you focus?

Final recommendation

Summer is one of the best times for conducting a marketing audit.

Half the team’s off, and so are your customers.

Slow office days mean lower distraction. And this is just what’s required for a good, productive writing day.

Worried about not having enough experience?

That’s just another excuse. As with many things in life, Google is your best friend whenever in doubt.

Give it a go!

Not sure you have enough experience–or time–to write your own audit? You can hire me to do it for you. Read more here.

Further reading recommendations:

• 30min DYI Facebook Ad Account Audit
• 25+ Best Marketing Newsletters in 2025 – Read by TOP 5% Marketers

The post 95 Marketing Audit Questions: Free Checklist appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Every Friday, you’ll get new secret-sauce 🥫🥫🥫 growth strategies, free templates, and hacks I’ve used on 50+ startups. I also share occasional feisty opinion pieces (like this one).

…

Seasonality in marketing means that there’s a fluctuation between high-growth and low-growth periods. This applies to every type of business. 

There are times of the year when customers line up to buy your product… And there are months when it feels like the whole world has forgotten about you…

Once you’ve been through a couple of annual marketing strategy plannings, you’ll begin to notice a pattern: these fluctuations are happening every single year.

For example, when doing the global quarterly marketing budgets at Bolt, I realized that it didn’t make sense to invest the same amount of budget (let’s say 100% / 12 months = 8.3%) every single month throughout the year. 

To make matters even more complicated, Bolt was operating in 25+ countries and hundreds of cities. The seasonality that, in the case of ride-hailing, depends on the weather and consumer patterns, was not the same across different markets. 

The high season in the UK v.s. South Africa v.s. Australia meant very different things – and very different months of the year. And yet – not all marketing leads of international brands think in terms of local seasonality.

Perhaps it was the need to plan 25+ markets’ budgets in a few weeks’s time that led us (not just me, there was a whole team of smart growth people and data analysts behind the project) to look into ways to structure and automate our seasonal marketing planning.

While seasonality is different in every industry, the strategic tactics are still more or less universal. And that’s exactly what this guide will be about: understanding the basics of seasonal thinking and applying it in your own marketing strategy, on top of being aware of the latest marketing trends.

P.S. Seasonality does not only affect your marketing results. It should be a fundamental consideration for the entire high-level business strategy, including product and growth. And this makes the approach relevant also for the CEOs and other people with fancy C-letter job titles. 

Feel free to follow along the step-by-step flow of the guide or jump to any section that interests you most. 

1. The principles of seasonal marketing planning
2. Understanding the seasonality in your business
3. Building the toolset and structure for seasonal strategy
4. Implementing the marketing strategy in sync with seasonality
5. Revising the marketing strategy as the market changes

So, so, so… Let’s go.

1. The principles of seasonal marketing planning

The first rule of Seasonal Planning is: you do have to talk about it before the season begins. 

The right time to plan the next year’s and next quarters’ business strategy and marketing budgets is not at the end of January (as it happens to be in 95% of companies). This should be done in November-December of the previous year. At least a few weeks before the next quarter begins.

Because… What if your highest-ROI period for marketing is right at the beginning of January? What if this is the best possible time to invest in low-cost advertising while the competition is still recovering for a Q4 holiday period “hangover?” 

Or even if the best time to launch a large-scale marketing campaign is at the beginning of March, you will have to start talking to the agencies and ad real estate vendors already a few months ahead in time to get the best possible deals + have top-quality creatives ready in time. 

If you’d like to get a better overview of your marketing strategy’s performance, check out this in-depth guide: Marketing Audit: Free Checklist of 95 Questions

The second rule of seasonal planning: not all months are created equal.

I can’t really think of a business that would benefit from the exact same level of consumer interest throughout the year. If you look at the chart by Statista – on online retail sales value in the UK – you see that there’s always a drop in Q1 and a huge spike in Q4. 

It’s common knowledge (I suppose?) that e-commerce brands have the highest number of sales in Q3, during the period leading up to Christmas. There are the shopping holidays like Black Friday and other made-up consumer fêtes. 

So if you’re not in e-commerce, it might be a smart thing for you to not invest in paid ads during this high-competition period. 

But what if the super competitive Q3 period is also when your business is growing the most? 

While during Black Friday Meta ads cost might go up, the data by Nest Digital indicated that also the ROAS (return on ad spend)  of Meta ads was higher. So, in the end, it was worth for some advertisers to pay (say 20%) more per 1,000 ad views because there was also a (say 45%) higher buyer interest.

So what are you to make of this? 

Should you invest more marketing budget during high-competition periods of the year (especially Q3) when the cost of advertising is higher? 

If this is the time of the year when the customers’ interest in your product is high then yes, you should.

However, and this is important (!): you should not invest the same amount of budget throughout the 3-month high-growth period. You should allocate most of your budget to be spent at the beginning of that period.

As you make a big marketing investment (say running a large-scale brand marketing campaign) at the beginning of a high-growth period, you will have a heightened customer interest throughout that period. Meaning more purchases and a higher total revenue. 

If you invest an equal budget during all three months of the high season, you will lose out on the momentum that a higher initial investment would have brought. By the time the last month’s investment should begin to deliver results and turn into conversions, the customer interest has already waned.

The third rule of seasonal planning: turn up the confidence level

I’ve made this mistake myself, and I’ve seen other marketers do it: when doing seasonality-based marketing planning, the difference in marketing spend between months is often minimal.

But hey, the worst case scenario is this (done by way too many companies):

I suppose you see what is wrong with the chart… Each of these months you would spend the same amount of money.

But during some months, the investment would bring you a 200% + ROAS and in other months, you’d have a negative return on ad spend.

If you’d stop reading the article here, you’d probably go back to your marketing budget plans and do something like this: a hesitant reshuffling of the budgets between months.

But no, this is still not what you need. Even now, you will spend way too little during months with 200% + ROAS and way too much during periods of low customer interest.

What you want to achieve with seasonal marketing planning and budgeting is something at least as bold as this:

The above chart doesn’t reflect any actual businesses’ marketing budgets. But what it does reflect is the biannual marketing spend boost that far-sighted brands do at the beginning of every high season. (Yes, there are usually 2 high seasons for businesses per year. But it can vary.)

How to create an annual marketing budget that, taking into consideration the seasonality in your business, allocates the most optional percentage of budget to each month? 

Mostly, by doing two things:

• Understanding the seasonality in your business through your data, competitive research, and common sense
• Creating a planning structure and toolset that helps you to create the optional budget allocation throughout the year

And then you can just lay back and enjoy the rest of the year. Nope, just kidding! That’s when the implementation of the campaigns begins. (We’ll cover that, too.)

2. How to map the seasonality for your marketing strategy?

The most efficient way to understand seasonality in your business is to use the help of data analysts. (Not kidding this time.)

But in case you do not have an army of analysts backing you up, there are things you can do on your own. Such as…

1. Look at the month-on-month new user growth of the previous years.

This is what I do most often with the companies I’m working with. You simply ask the CEO or whoever’s in charge of the company’s growth numbers to show you the report with monthly results.

You can look at numbers like:

• New revenue per month
• New trial signups per month and cost-per-signup
• Total number of purchases per month

When looking at these numbers, take into account the external factors (e.g. covid outbreak or economic slowdown) as well as the bigger marketing campaigns and product launches that might have affected these numbers. Try to get an accurate picture of high-growth months.

2. Talk to your team

Often, the Sales team has a good overview of time periods when the customers have a heightened interest in your company’s product/service. 

Also, you can check in with the CEO or various regional team leads that have a better understanding of the seasonality in various markets. Perhaps they even already have a month-on-month report (or next year’s business budget) at hand and they can share it with you.

3. Create a spreadsheet, understand the seasonality

What you’ll need is a spreadsheet that helps you understand which months are the biggest drivers of business growth.

In the example below (dummy data), I chose the New Revenue/MRR metric to calculate the percentage of each month’s growth of the total annual growth.

Alternatively, you could use metrics like New Sales/Purchases/Subscriptions or the number of New Customers as indicators.

Now, if you would use these percentages to allocate your annual marketing budget, you’d already make a significant improvement to the ROAS. However…

You can take a step further and identify the two high-growth periods, not just months. For example, in the above report, you can see that there are two spikes: a smaller one in late spring and another in the autumn.

By allocating more marketing budget to the beginning of both these periods, you’ll get a higher return on investment as the tailwind will deliver more sales in the weeks following a big investment (e.g. a large-scale ad campaign) boost as well.

The sooner you get your marketing engine working at high speed, the longer you can reap the benefits before the high season ends with (a lump of snow).

Don’t make the marketing mistake of throttling your spend when you should be investing.

Now that you’re aware of the seasonal drops and spikes in your business growth, let’s see how you can apply this know-how and make informed strategic decisions.

3. Building the toolset and structure for seasonal strategy

Almost all marketing planning, implementation, and reporting – if you ask me – happens in Google Docs and Sheets. 

So let’s use our Google Sheet to develop a seasonal marketing planning tool.

Step 1: Enter the annual marketing budget for the next year that you’re planning to spend. 

No worries if you do not yet know the exact budget. Make a guess. The way we will built the sheet will automatically adapt to the total budget changes.

Step 2: Decide the % you want to spend each month. 

Considering that the total amount you can spend in 100%, allocate a % of this to each month. 

• Aim to spend more at the beginning of the high season
• Don’t be afraid of spending very little during the low-performance months

I personally like to add an extra row that tells me how much in % I have left to allocate – it makes it easier to play around with different scenarios.

Take some time to play around with the budget scenarios. As I did the exercise myself, I first allocated a high budget % to the two months when I’d like to invest in a big marketing campaign (or simply increased digital ad spend).

As a result, I broke the total 100% and went down to -36% when adding percentages under other months. I revised and cut down the low-gowth months’ budgets further, as well as cut the budget of the higher marketing investment in March. 

Now that you’ve got the percentages, calculate the actual €€€ budgets.

Note that this approach with spreadsheet formulas is highly flexible: if you want to re-adjust your budgets later during the year, you can do it in a few keyboard taps instead of redoing the entire chart. 

Et voilà, your next 12 months’ marketing budgets are done.

Well… Of course your budgets are not done-done. Now, you will have to allocate the budgets further between the marketing channels. 

Note how in the high-spend months, you will have to adjust the regular marketing channels’ budget % to a lower percentage to keep the budgets on reasonable levels.

Ok. Now you actually do have the annual marketing budgets more or less ready. Time to share these with the management as well as regional teams and confirm if they also think your numbers make sense.

Expect a few rounds of changes, and be adaptive to others’ feedback.

4. Implementing the marketing strategy in sync with seasonality

I’ll keep the last two sections of this guide brief. However, I’d like to share a couple of suggestions that might help you to plan, spend, and grow better.

1. Communicate the quarterly marketing budgets to your team and start preparing early.

2. If you’re planning a big marketing campaign boost during some months, start working on the ideas as well as purchasing the ad placements (offline ads, TV, etc.) early on, ideally 3 months before the campaign launch.

3. Bring the seasonality into your marketing channel selection and messaging, too. Make sure your marketing offers and promotions reflect the season and the customers’ expectations.

Point 3 in other words: people only want to drink the Pumpkin Spice Latte in wintertime.

4. If you run a large-scale marketing campaign at the beginning of a high season, make your ads match the message for the rest of the season.

(People will recognise your ads and are more likely to react on them.)

5. Don’t be afraid to start winding down on your paid marketing spend towards the end of the high season. Focus on lifecycle marketing to your newly-acquired customers.

5. Revising the marketing strategy as the market changes

Last but not least, it’s important to be flexible about your annual and quarterly marketing budgets. 

More often than not, something will happen that you do not have the agency or power to control. Like the covid outbreak, like wars… But also the trends that you could not foresee. 

Be ready to change your marketing strategy at any time. Having a budgeting sheet with automated formulas helps. A lot.

Towards the end of each quarter, check in with the management, the Product team(s), and the regional teams to see what they’ve planned for the next months. And discuss how marketing can support their goals. 

Because, after all, marketing needs to reflect the company’s overall goals, not vice versa. 

Good luck with your annual marketing planning! 

Karola

P.S. If you liked the article and aren’t yet subscribed to my weekly Marketing Fix newsletter… It’s about time to sign up here. 

The post Seasonality in Marketing – How to Plan Your 2025 Budget for Higher ROI appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

This article is based on a keynote titled 5 Mistakes and Cures for Low-traction Startups that I presented at the Growth Marketing Summit in August 2022.

The room was packed with marketers. The screen was lit up with stupid (or, arguably, lovely) cat and raccoon GIFs. The air was filled with painful truths and aha-moments.

Essentially, everyone had gathered to find the answer to a burning question, albeit simplified: 

Are we making any mistakes in our marketing, brand, or product strategy? And how to fix it? 

Are you spending your marketing $$$ the right way or throwing them straight in flames? 💸🔥🚒

How I imagine the CMOs and CEOs must feel…

Taking a step further, it’s important to realize that marketing, brand, and product are intertwined. You can’t grow if one key aspect of your company is dysfunctional.

I later distilled these lessons into 10 rules of early-stage brand, marketing and growth.

So instead of focusing on tiny mistakes like using on the wrong Facebook ad campaign structure or missing out on email marketing automation, I asked everyone to take the macro-level view.

Zoom out of your everyday work and consider your company from the birds-eye level.

Now, you’ll begin to notice the actual problems. And once you see them, you’ll be able to fix them.

But before we jump to the TOP 5 mistakes of low-traction businesses, I suppose I should briefly comment on why I am even the right person to talk about this topic…

20+ Marketing audits later…

For the past 1.5 years I’ve been freelancing as a marketing consultant, working with both B2C and B2B brands.

I’ve had the opportunity to speak to 60+ businesses and work with 20+ of them.

My favorite marketing collabs

Quite often, I begin a new marketing consultation project with a 360-degree marketing audit.

What is a marketing audit?

Read more: 80 Marketing Audit Questions – Free Checklist

The goal of a marketing audit is to understand how the company is doing in all aspects and channels of marketing and growth. 

It might also arise from burning questions like: 

“Marketing isn’t working. What are we doing wrong?”

Or…

“Are we using the full potential of all marketing channels?”

To compile a marketing audit, I request access to the company’s marketing reports, ad accounts, etc. I always set up calls with relevant team members to get their insights.

Once I have all the requested information, I’ll get to work…

Ultra busy checking ad accounts…

It usually takes ca 1.5 weeks to compile a marketing audit…

Typing down the 100th recommendation

In the end, I and my client end up with 60-70 pages’ worth of a Google Doc. It includes an overview of all the marketing channels. 

I also look into the onboarding process and product retention as it’s just as important a contributor to a company’s growth as new user acquisition. 

Below is a quick overview of the marketing audit sections that I generally cover.

Marketing audits cover more than just paid ads

In regards to each of the above topics, I share my advice on: 

🔍 The current state

🔍 Opportunities

🔍 Suggestions

We then meet with the marketing team – often the CEO joins as well – and discuss the key takeaways and, most importantly, how to go forward.

💫 Goals

💫 Action plan

💫 Work

As a result of a marketing audit, the company will have a clear understanding of how each of their marketing teams/channels/actions performs and how to improve it.

Now the real work begins!

Alright, sounds sort of legit… 

But what are the BIGGEST mistakes and priorities?

Let’s get right down to it!

Read more: 55+ Marketing Trends for 2025

🔥 Mistake #1: No clear goals

The first things in a marketing audit that I check are the company’s marketing KPI and growth reports.

I mean… 80% of the time I don’t check them as they do not exist. Rather, what’s been happening is the CEO or CMO saying:

“Let’s run some ads and find out who our customer is.”

 Or…

“We’ll find out the ROI and CPA once we start with marketing.”

Um… No you don’t!

You (the CEO or CMO in this case) should know the company’s growth forecast for the next 6-12 months. 

You should know where that growth is supposed to come from. And at what CPA, ROI, and payback period. How else do you intend to ever make your startup or early-stage business profitable?

Without clear growth goals, there won’t be a clear action plan.

The best a marketing team can do at such poorly-guided companies is to try to get “some” results. Without a long-term vision, this tends to result in wasting time on poor-quality social media posts or blog articles that nobody will actually read. 

Working 9 to 5… 🎵🎵🎵

Doing marketing without a clear understanding of the goals amounts to being busy for the sake of being busy.

If you don’t know where you want to go, you can’t get there.

If this sounds like your company, here’s a not-so-easy (and yet unavoidable) solution. You’ve got to demand clearer input from the top management.

The only fix to Mistake #1 is getting clear input from the CEO

Top management needs to know the goals

When consulting various companies in growth and marketing, I always begin by establishing a detailed Marketing KPI Tracking sheet. Together, we fill in the past 3 months to see if there’s any past data on the LTV and CPA per lead and paying customer.

Up next, I collaborate with the CEO or CMO to understand the next 6 months’ revenue goals and work down to other growth and marketing projections based on revenue expectations, churn, LTV, and expected CPAs. 

All this leads to having…

🗝️ A clear 6-month plan

🗝️ Alignment of marketing & product

🗝️ No gut-feeling-based surprises

… on the high level. And on the marketing team level, you’ll have…

💫 Clear expectations (numbers)

💫 Revenue, ROI, LTV

💫 KPIs and measurement

Ready for the takeoff

Once we know all this, we can proceed to implement the planned marketing activities and campaigns.

Moreover, as you know the expected KPIs, you can compare whether your results match the projections and make quick adjustments (e.g. channel & budget allocation) if needed.

🔥 Mistake #2: Amazing product, bad packaging

Remember that quote used in startup blogs and books around the 2000s? 

“If you build it, they will come.”

Well, as it turned out as I googled it, the words come from a movie titled Field of Dreams.

When talking to various businesses – both B2B and B2C – I’ve realized that many of them have a very strong product and there’s a high potential for finding product-market fit.

However, their website and ads looked like out of an early aughts’ financial scam.

Great products need great packaging

Around 10y ago it was still possible to build a breakthrough product and get people using it via engaging the early adopters and betting on word-of-mouth.

In 2022, this is no longer the case. Almost all business verticals are saturated with tens of businesses building a similar product. 

Even if your product is the best in the industry, you’ve got to earn the user’s trust. And nobody these days trusts a brand that looks low-quality.

People don’t buy from brands they don’t trust

Take this example of a well-known fintech company…

Here’s what their website home page looked like in 2012. (IDK how it didn’t look sketchy already down in 2012, but anyhow…)

Would you trust your money to this company in 2022? Hopefully not.

Of course, they know that design trends as well as website-development opportunities have changed over the past 10 years.

Today, the same company’s home page looks like this:

Looks 100x more legit, doesn’t it? 

It is told that your brand should be good enough not to get in the way of growth.

But how to tell whether your branding is good enough? I usually suggest a simple exercise:

Ensure your brand is at least as good as the competitors’.

But don’t just go with the gut feeling – your own baby will always look sweeter and smarter than those of others.

Ask three types of different audiences to evaluate your website / App Store listing and to grade its quality and trustworthiness.

🍪 Ask a brand/marketing expert

🍪 Ask your friends

🍪 Ask 10 neutral people

And what shall you do once you realize that your brand really isn’t as strong as it should be?

Hire a branding expert or agency to help you out.

Now, let’s get to the next mistake that’s the exact opposite of having a strong product and a low-quality brand.

🔥 Mistake #3: Amazing brand, no product-market fit

You can trick people on a date with your product…

… But they’re free to leave any time.

What this means is that you can spend a lot of money on paid advertising and other venues for customer acquisition.

However, if your product fails to deliver on its promises, the new customers will immediately churn.

I’ve often seen Product and Marketing teams fighting over this conundrum. Is it the fault of the product or marketing that you fail to attract new paying users with a high LTV?

Sometimes, as I ask during a marketing audit what the customers think about the product, I hear that all the users are huge fans and give positive feedback. 

“The feedback from 20 customers tells that the product is great…”

The problem with such easy-way-out customer surveys is that you might send an email asking for feedback to 1,000 users. But only the ones who like your brand will answer. 

The few fans would of course tell you almost anything you want to hear. But is it the information that you actually need?

Yes this is Dog I like the product

Here’s the problem…

People who are disappointed in your product do not bother to reply to your emails. Nor do they fill in the surveys.

So how can you get honest, relevant, unbiased feedback about your product?

By hiring a group of 10-20 random, neutral people who more or less fit your target audience group and getting them into a room or on a 1h call one-by-one. You can then ask them to test the product and to give honest feedback.

The goal here is to uncover the real issue. The most common issues include:

🔥 Solving an inexistent problem

🔥 Not the best way to solve a problem

🔥 Too expensive (time + money)

The solution to a non-existent product-market fit is, well, to find it. And it’s not going to be easy – you’re going to have to make substantial changes to the feature set, pricing model, or another product aspect. Or pivot completely.

P.S. By “improving your product” I do not mean building new cool features that seem like quick wins. This almost never works. A meaningful product change will probably take months, but will also be worth the effort.

Looks like we’re steering away from marketing and spending too much time on the product? Thing is, no marketing can make people use a bad product.

But let’s get back on the marketing track for now…

🔥 Mistake #4: Lack of focus

Most marketing teams are constantly on the lookout for new user acquisition and growth channels.

At one point, this will lead to your team of 1 or 20 – depending on the size of your company – working on many different channels at once.

Most of the time, focusing on so many marketing campaigns at once will lead to a big bold mess.

If this looked like your marketer, keep reading. Salvation is coming.

One of the most common suggestions I write down in marketing audits is this: Stop working on this marketing channel.

❌ There’s no point to post on social media if your posts are not original

❌ There’s no point to create another blog article on a topic that’s been covered 100x

❌ There’s no point to work with influencers if you don’t see measurable results

Consider all the marketing activities that you and your team spend time on and ask: Is this bringing us new customers and revenue? 

If the answer is no, stop working on that marketing channel.

Quite often, I recommend to my clients to focus only on paid advertising and automated emails for a while. 

If you can’t make paid ads work for you, the chances are low that you’ll find substantial growth opportunities in any other channels.

You can drag along for a year or more doing low-impact work. Or you could just spend the time and salary money on running 4 weeks of paid ads.

Instead of 12 months, you’ll find out in 1 month whether there’s a product-market fit / whether your brand is strong enough.

To explain this a little further, I’ll share a quick story from my Bolt years.

As one of Europe’s biggest mobile advertisers, we received a pitch from a new ad platform every week. They promised lower cost-per-install and lower cost-per-purchase prices than we had in Google or Facebook ads.

However, we always turned them down.

Why?

Because their platforms could reach only 1% of the people we could reach with our Facebook and Google ads. 

Why would we spend time on working on tiny marketing channels instead of funneling all our efforts into scaling and improving our top channels? 

Instead of wasting your team’s time on tiny marketing campaigns that promise low-cost results, focus on the activities that bring results on scale.

🥲 Kill your darlings and cute pet projects 

🥲 Focus on 3 high-potential growth channels

🥲 The same applies to product features

As a result, your team’s focus and output will improve. You’ll have to work less, but will yield better results.

To put this in Moomin terms: instead of reaping ten unripe green pumpkins, you’ll get one big juicy pumpkin.

Continuing on the subject of (vegetable) growth, we’re down to the last mistake…

🔥 Mistake #5: No growth loops

Whenever you bring a new user into your product, the first challenge is to keep them there for the first 3-5 minutes.

If you achieve that, you’ve likely got an excited user looking to explore your product further.

While it usually falls on the Product team to increase retention, reduce churn, and keep users happy over a long period of time, there are points in the in-product user journey that fall under the Marketing team’s radar. Such as…

• Post-signup retention newsletters that urge the user to complete their profile or try the product
• Post-onboarding requests to refer a friend
• Automated lifecycle marketing emails that keep bringing people back into the product/store

Know your retention stages – Image source

If you forget to think about user retention, you’ll be filling a water bucket with a hole in the bottom.

You might bring in 10,000 new users… But in 2 months only 20% keep using your product.

My friend where are tho?

Yup, that’s sad.

But there’s more than just retention marketing that you can do.

You can also build growth loops.

A playbook definition goes like this: “Growth Loops are systems designed to make every input to generate an output. That output is then reinvested as an input and, since this is a closed-loop system, the process repeats.

In more practical terms, the best-known growth loops are:

🍯 User-2-user referrals

🍯 User-generated content

🍯 Rewards programs

However, offering people €5 to invite a friend for another €5 promo code doesn’t quite cut it in 2022. You may need to find more attractive incentives.

For example, Revolut has upped their referral offering to €50 for every referred friend. On the other hand, they’ve also made it 5x more difficult to fulfill all the conditions.

Test various referral programs to turn one new customer into multiple new customers. By the time the first one leaves, their invitees are referring their own friends. 

The best time to ask for users to refer friends is while they’re excited about your product – either right after signup or after another successful engagement (e.g. ordering something from your store / unlocking a milestone inside the product).

🍩 Build in the initial surprise moment

🍩 Establish growth and retention loops

🍩 Keep people excited and engaged

Once you’ve figured out the biggest hurdles to your company’s growth, you’ll be able to fix the holes in your marketing and product buckets.

It’s only an uphill ride from there.

🍪 Thx for listening, thx for reading! If you’ve got an article/keynote topic you’d like me to cover next, drop me a line on LinkedIn.

—

A quick note: 

I am back from my writing sabbatical and taking on new marketing consultation projects. 

While my schedule for the upcoming months is already 60% booked with confirmed projects, I am still open to 1-2 extra interesting projects starting from October/November 2022. 

Reach out at marketing@karolakarlson.com and tell me how I could help your marketing/growth team.

The post Top 5 Mistakes & Cures of Slow-growth Companies  appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

I’d worked with them before, but coming in after a year, it all looked like a big mess to start untangling.

There were some ongoing marketing partnership deals, ad campaigns that had developed over the years, different brand messages used across marketing channels…

Basically, A LOT to grasp, review, fix or build up. 🔥

I mean… That’s how it always feels when joining a team with ongoing processes. And this is fine.

Regular “starting to work with a new brand” situation

However, after 3-4 weeks of an intense period of meetings and documenting the new strategy, things finally seem to be falling in place: we’ve got the fully new Facebook ads strategy live and running, we’re publishing blog articles (again), and the B2B leads’ number is shooting up.

I figured it would be interesting to write about how joining a new company as a CMO looks from the inside and what are the first things to work on.

How does it feel? Where to get started? What to prioritize? What mistakes to avoid?

I hope this will be helpful for all the new (and not new) marketing team leads out there.

Week 1: Understanding the big picture + meeting the team

The first thing I ALWAYS do when taking on a new client or joining a new company is to meet the team and understand how they see things.

I started by meeting with both the management team + all marketing team members to ask them a list of questions.

You just can’t review/create a marketing strategy without knowing the company’s high-level goals.

The top-down planning goes like this – Image source

Some of the things I asked the management team:

• What are the top-level KPIs you want to reach in the next 3, 6, 12 months? Why?
• What’s in the product plans for the next 3, 6, 12 months? Why?
• What’s currently the biggest revenue-driver? Where’s the bottleneck? Why?
• What do you think the marketing team can help the most with? Why?

Asking “Why” as a follow-up to each question helps to better understand the logic behind.

E.g. by asking “Why do you want to grow the GMV over expanding the marketplace” I can either understand that the company needs to grow their revenue to land the next investment round, or we discover that revenue doesn’t matter and we need to 10x the size of the marketplace.

Also, it’s surprising how many CEOs can’t answer the question about the company’s high-level KPIs and long-term plans. Not the case with MeetFrank. Anyhow, I really recommend asking the above questions even before accepting a marketing job in a company.

So basically, instead of jumping to the projects right away, start by understanding the mission, objectives, KPIs, etc.

Mission ➟ strategy ➟ objectives ➟➟➟ Projects Image source

By being aware of the top-level KPIs and objectives, I’d be able to come up with the best marketing strategy to help achieve those.

Knowing the management team’s vision, I took a step closer to the action and met up with each marketing team member individually.

Some of the things I asked each of the marketing team members:

• Who’s in the Marketing team and what are their owned projects?
• What are the Marketing team’s KPIs and OKRs?
• How do you document things? How do you track MoM results? What charts and tracking tools do they check?
• Where are the B2C and B2B users coming from right now?
• What user acquisition tactics have you tested before?
• Who’s the typical user? What value do they get from using the product?
• Who’s the typical B2B client? What value do they get from using the product?
• What are the biggest challenges and blockers?
• Where could I help the most?

My personal goal for these meetings was to understand what’s working, whether the team understands what they’re doing, and how are the inter-team relationships.

I also wanted to understand how marketing results are tracked and measured, what are some of the things that were tried but didn’t work, and much much more.

MeetFrank recently did a CVI rebranding

In addition to meeting the team, I also did research on my own, reviewing the website, social media accounts, and ad accounts. 🕵️‍♀️

Most importantly, I user tested the product, both on B2C and B2B side. You can’t do marketing for a product that you haven’t tried out yourself.

As a result, I had many notebook pages’ worth of notes and felt even more overflown with information and ideas what to work on next.

Me telling Kaarel, the CEO, about all the ideas

At least I felt closer to untangling the mess in my head.

After 10 meetings, I had more or less the information I needed to start outlining the macro-level marketing strategy. In the case of MeetFrank, it felt easier to build the strategy from scratch than to adjust the existing one.

Above all, it meant creating a ton of new spreadsheets and guides. 🐿️ 🤓

Week 2: Creating tons of reports & documents

People have different styles of leadership.

I personally love to have a clear structure with spreadsheets and guidelines in place, so that everyone has a quick overview of their priorities, tasks, and results. It just makes me feel more on top of things and less messy. #tidy

Here are some of the spreadsheets and documents we created:

• Marketing team masterplan with KPI tracking
• Marketing team Q1 2020 roadmap
• Content marketing planning sheet
• Social media planning sheet
• Online ads strategy + creatives

On top of that, I wrote some Confluence guides on more specific topics, e.g. how our Facebook ad campaigns should be set up or what types of social media posts we publish.

Basically, I just wanted to get things moving fast, have everyone know their responsibilities + priorities, and create an overview for other teams. The latter is important to keep the entire company aware of what you’re working on and also share the timeline for projects, so they can also better plan their work.

Want to know how the spreadsheets look like? 😉😉 Here’s a sneak peek:

Marketing team roadmap

The goals of this document:

• Outline the projects that the marketing team is working on
• Give a timeline for each project + show how it’s progressing
• Have a weekly/monthly tracking for all marketing-related metrics and KPIs

Here’s how the roadmap part looks like:

Surely, the columns and first rows are completely different for each company.

The roadmap shows what’s planned + what’s done

Marketing team KPI tracking

To have a quick overview of whether our work is bringing any results at all, we created a KPI sheet with all relevant metrics.

Here’s a snapshot of the KPI tracking sheet. It includes close to 200 rows of metrics and formulas.

Currently, as we’re still figuring out our marketing strategy, we monitor the results on a weekly basis to see if there’s an uplift in results thanks to marketing activities we did the past week. Later on, we’ll likely switch to monthly reporting.

The sheet has more than 200 rows with different KPIs

Big thanks to MeetFrank’s performance marketer Olena for helping to fill in this monster sheet. 🙏

Content planning sheets

To help team members working on social media and content marketing to get up to full speed, we also set up new planning sheets for those two areas.

Here’s the social media plan we’re currently using.

The format is too scrappy for long-term but worked for a quick kick-off

The social media plan is not yet complete, and we’ll likely restructure it + add performance tracking metrics for each post (to understand what works best).

We review the social media + blog content plans on a weekly basis and inform the Design team of all the needed creatives.

Want to learn more about marketing strategy? See the list of best books on marketing to dust up your skills.

Online ads strategy

To get the new Facebook ad campaigns live, I took a bit of a shortcut through the brainstorming and planning process.

So we created Confluence guides with ad creatives and campaign setup specs together with MeetFrank’s performance marketer Olena.

That’s how the Confluence guide looks like for each campaign:

We have clear setup rules for all global ad campaign types

Instead of spending (wasting?) a few weeks of time at team meetings, discussing the best ad strategy, I just outlined the one to get started with. The goal was to get ads live fast. And later on, we can optimize and A/B test all we want. We know most of the best practices anyway, so why not implement them right away. 💁

Once all the documents were ready, we reviewed them together with the team, confirmed with the management team, and set to work: hands-on and fast-fast-fast.

MeetFrank marketing team’s spirit animal

Week 3: Launching the new strategy and checking results

As we built the entire marketing strategy more or less from zero, we also needed tons of new ad copies and visuals.

We wanted to get the ads live fast, but the designer working on ads was on vacation. 🙃

So I created the first designs on my own and then asked another in-house designer to review and improve them. We probably saved around 2 weeks in time.

Ad creatives are a constant work in progress

Our performance marketer Olena set up all the new acquisition, remarketing, and engagement ad campaigns in around one week while our designer Mo worked on all of the new designs.

After that, we could start waiting for the results to come in, optimize the campaigns, and keep working on new ideas to test.

I’m not going to touch upon creating the Facebook ads strategy for too long, as more can be read in some other articles:

• Copywriting hacks and tips for Facebook ads and social media posts

We kept looking at the results in the Facebook Ads Manager, our KPI sheets, and also asked the other teams if they see a positive trend.

The initial picture is looking good, but there is SO much more to do. 🔥

Now that we’ve got the basics covered, we can dive in to analyze each marketing activity’s results and ROI + double down on things we see driving the highest growth.

Key takeaways

By now, the first blog article is out after a month-long pause, we’ve launched a few social media giveaways, and all acquisition, remarketing, and engagement ad campaigns are up and running. 🤜💥🤛 to the team.

Our marketing intern Yelyzaveta is testing new post types on MeetFrank’s Instagram page

Looking back at the first month working with MeetFrank again, I collected a few learnings that might also be helpful for other marketers.

So here they are.

1. Make the company’s business strategy crystal clear to yourself

Do not even start to create a marketing strategy before you don’t fully understand what are the company’s 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month goals and high-level KPIs.

It took me multiple meetings with Kaarel (CEO) to fully grasp what we want to achieve and how the marketing team can best contribute to that goal.

Yes, it took some time, but at least everything we now do is supporting the broad-level company growth. Which is why the marketing teams are for.

2. Prioritize your time + delegate

Joining as a part-time, not full-time CMO created an urgent need to make the most use of my time. On the other hand, I’m quite impatient and want to roll things out asap. #cognitivedissonance

And then there were all the other teams, coming to the marketing team with their ideas and requests… Which is not a bad thing in itself, but can easily derail from the top priorities.

We actually get along very nicely with the sales team ❤️

How to handle the load of ideas and requests as a new CMO? Should you try to tackle the small things first and then focus on the big picture? – Definitely not.

It is easy to get caught up in small daily tasks and in 2 months’ time look back and understand you didn’t get to the high-ROI activities.

As a team lead, you’re hired to work on things nobody else in the team can.

So I did my best to set my focus on developing the strategy rather than helping with daily tasks.

Looks familiar? – Image source

Here’s the approach I used to prioritize my time, more or less:

• Make a list of the 100+ things you’d like to do / that people are asking you to do in the first month
• Prioritize the tasks based on the potential ROI, urgency, and their “delegateability”
• Choose 5 most impactful things and plan to finalize these on the 1st month
• Choose 10 next most impactful things and plan to finalize these on the 2nd month
• Avoid being a blocker for your team: if you can’t give them input fast enough for a task, delegate the full responsibility to them

Here are some of the things I wanted to work on, but postponed as they were low ROI (compared to writing documentation and guidelines + creating an online ad strategy): reviewing email and push notification copy, writing social media posts’ copy, writing blog articles. They’re still important, but can be handled by someone else and later.

3. Keep everyone informed about the progress

Even if you can’t do everything that all teams expect you to, show them the progress. ⏳

On top of keeping the marketing team roadmap updated, I like to post weekly updates on the entire team’s progress for the entire company to read.

Keep the entire company informed

The CEO knows we’re moving things forward.

The other teams know we probably have higher priorities than some tasks they asked help with.

Everyone knows what’s been done and what will happen next.

Perfect.

4. Roll out the MVP, then start optimizing

I am not 100% sure whether this is always the best approach.

But at least that’s how I personally like to work: Get the first campaigns out fast and leave the optimization for later stages.

We managed to create 20+ different new ad creatives and launch 10+ Facebook ad campaigns in less than 2 weeks. Now, we can focus on focus on testing new creatives, targeting, and optimization methods.

One of the new ads we created

I don’t see a big point of working on a strategy and running brainstorming meetings for 1-2 weeks, then launching a campaign, and still having a high chance of it not succeeding.

It’s much better to test things fast, fail/win fast, and then pivot or scale the marketing activities.

5. Find a good balance between micro-management and getting things moving fast

When joining a new team, I do my best to give everyone my immediate trust and assume they know what they’re doing.

At the very beginning to get things running fast + share my past experience with the team, I write more specific guidelines (like how much to spend on social media boosts, whom to target, how to write blog/ads copy, etc. to get things to top-quality faster.) In the long run, I really like the idea that my team could also get everything done without me.

It’s always better to explain the macro-level plans, the right logic of thinking, and share the best practices than to say to people “here’s exactly what to do.” Even if I don’t 100% agree with the output all the time, it’s better to have an independently working team.

As a new CMO, you’re allowed to change the rules of how things should be done quite a bit. But remember that you also need to earn the team’s respect by sharing guidance that’s relevant + then also acting by it yourself.

6. Bonus tip: Get social credit by bringing plants to the office

If you’re the creative CMO type, one thing you can do that affects the entire team’s work results is to make the office look nicer. Yes, it’s quite low-ROI to just make the office feel better to work at. But then again… Is it?

It feels so much better 🌿🐒🌿

What’s next?

O.M.G. there is still so much to do.

Currently, the highest priority is to measure results, roll out the next test projects in our global marketing strategy and scale up the acquisition on both sides of the marketplace.

We’re also hiring a full-stack marketer to work on our blog content, email marketing funnel, and many other projects. Download the MeetFrank app to see the job offer and apply.

The post 1st Month as a New CMO – Where to Get Started? MeetFrank Case Study appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

As there were so many great questions and a surprising variety of topics, it felt like a good idea to also document ‘em in this blog. I also reviewed the answers and added bits and pieces to give more context + suggest further reading.

Up next, you’ll find a mix of marketing advice, career confessions, and opinions on a range of marketing-related subjects, from how to get published in TOP marketing blogs to the “agencies vs in-house team” debate.

The Q&A is categorized under a few headlines, so feel free to navigate to the sections that interest you the most.

• Growth hacking
• Learning as a marketer
• Online advertising
• Reporting and measurement
• Rebranding (from Taxify) to Bolt
• Content marketing
• Career and work-life

P.S. if you have any additional questions, you can still submit these on the GrowthHackers AMA page.

One last thing… I’ve had a few people reach out to me and ask how did I get picked out by GrowthHackers for the AMA. I just wrote to them saying I’d like to do one. They said yes.

🚀 On growth hacking

Q1: Can you talk about an experiment that was a really big win or led to some breakthrough insights at Bolt? – Taavi Kalvi

When I joined Bolt in 2017, one of my first tasks was to come up with better creatives for our Facebook ad campaigns. So I figured what people care about most when ordering a ride… Duh, the cost of the ride, of course!

I created a new type of Facebook carousel ad that no other app in the industry was using yet. The carousel ad included 5 cards with popular routes in a city and showed the average cost of the specific ride (which was much lower than with regular taxis).

These ads picked up super well and are still one of our top performers. We even see some competitors using the same ad format now. 😄

Q2: What has been your number one learning/lesson from your entire marketing career? – Liis Laisaar

One of the things I learned early on is that you should always try to go a bit wild and test things that others haven’t tried yet. A lot of the best-performing marketing hacks/projects are not shared in marketing blogs.

So, you should make up your own.

For example, when working on content marketing and SEO in the project management software startup Scoro, I had an idea to compile a list of 50+ project management tools, include Scoro as #3, and thereby be listed as the first Google search result for the “best project management tools” keyword.

First, my manager was strongly against the idea: why would we promote our competitors?

However, I kept pushing to test out the idea and it worked: our listicle soon ranked as #1 result on Google and we got thousands of website visits and tens of new leads from there every month.

Today, Scoro has published more than ten similar list articles and these make up a huge part of their website’s organic traffic.

A good starting point for coming up with original ideas is to first define the goal you want to achieve. As you know the outcome, it’s much easier to figure out how to get there.

I also like browsing Facebook ad examples or graphic design galleries such as Behance, thinking how I would use some ideas I see on the brand I’m working for.

Q3: If you were giving a lecture at university to a group of MSc. students in a marketing/entrepreneurial class, what philosophies, tools or books would you share with them? – Taavi Kalvi

I recently wrote a blog article on how to learn marketing where I shared all the advice I wish someone had given me when finishing high school.

I’d say that the most crucial skills for every marketer are creative problem-solving and critical thinking, as well as writing skills and understanding the basic foundation on how human psychology works.

You can find the list of my all-time favorite marketing and branding books here: 49 Best Marketing Books – New and Classics

Q4: Have you ever a situation where you had been skeptical about some idea, but as a result, it proved a great move? What was that? – Maksymilian Plociennik

My manager at Bolt who taught me to be a lot more critical and always question the ROI of different projects. Whenever my team proposes something that I don’t think is a good idea, we talk it through and see if we can run a small-scale test to check the ROI.

For example, we tested animated Facebook ads some time ago and they performed worse than static ads. So we paused the ads and didn’t waste any more time scaling the video ads to additional Facebook campaigns.

Fast forward 6 months, we tried different a type of video ads (longer ones, another design) and they performed much better. So it’s always worth to test all ideas you think may bring results and even revisit some tests multiple times.

On the other hand, there have also been many cases where I’m skeptical about an idea but still agree with the team to run a test. Even if the test fails, it’s still a success in the sense that we’ll know it in the future and won’t do the same mistake twice.

NB, make sure to document your tests!

Read more: Facebook Ads A/B Testing – Why, What and How to Split Test

Q5: What do you recommend for someone getting started from scratch on building their personal brand? – Saura Johnston

Based on my experience, a good way to get started is by creating a blog and writing about the topic you want to be known for. This can also be some other channel, e.g. Instagram. Also, guest blogging and interacting with people on LinkedIn or closed Facebook groups doesn’t hurt.

For the past few years, I’ve received all my job offers via this blog or LinkedIn as people have read my blog or know me via a network of mutual marketer friends.

I recently started an Instagram account project about our houseplant hobby with a friend.

The key takeaway from this Instagram project is that it’s HARD to grow followership.

It takes a lot of persistence and continuity to build up an extensive following on the platform. To push through, you must be truly passionate about the topic you’re building your personal brand around.

Another good starting point is to look at the websites or social media profiles of people who have already made it. Scroll down to their very first posts and see how they got started and which parts of their content gained traction.

 ⭐ On building a marketing team

Q6: What has proven to be the key deciding factor when recruiting new people to your team? (Which qualities make the best team members and employees in marketing (e.g. experience, willingness to learn <– how to validate this, etc.?) – Liis Laisaar

Having interviewed tens and tens of people while growing the team in Bolt, I realized at some point that you will get the right feeling during the interview if a person is a good match to the team. There’s a kind of special connection and understanding that you get when meeting the right candidate to a position. Things like speaking at the same terms, understanding each others’ questions, having similar opinions on specific topics…

I always look for the proactive “let’s get things done” attitude and evaluate the candidate’s home task and previous work experience. I never look at a marketing candidate’s educational profile as this is not what matters (at least not in Bolt and most other successful tech companies).

I also like to hire people with good copywriting skills and a creative problem-solving-oriented mindset.

Additionally, I follow the rule of “If it’s not a YES!! it’s a no” when hiring. If a candidate doesn’t seem to be the perfect fit for the role, we’ll just keep looking rather than making the wrong hire.

Once you’ve hired someone, you’ll spend tens of hours onboarding and training that person. So you should only hire people if you think they are the very best person to fill the role.

Q7: How do you set up your team KPIs? Do you work with some framework, e.g. OKR? – Karolina Krolicka

The global marketing team at Bolt is currently using a quarterly OKRs approach. We make sure that all OKRs are measurable and directly linked to the projects that a particular team member is working on.

Which leads me to a book that everyone in a high-level management position I know recommends (so do I): High Output Management by A. Grove.

Q8: What is the ideal marketing team structure? – Vasyl Sergienko

There isn’t one single ideal marketing team structure that would fit all companies. But all marketing teams benefit from having clear ownership of projects, clear reporting structure, and team leads not having more than 8 direct reports.

Example team structure by CoSchedule– Image source

I personally like to keep the global marketing team functions centralized in the HQ rather than, for example, having a separate Facebook marketing function in every market.

Also, I would rather build a central marketing team with clear ownership for every function. And only then start to split their resources per region as the company expands to more markets. Instead of building a fully functional marketing team for every different region.

Q9: I saw on Bolt’s website that you are currently hiring for marketing roles in 4 different countries. I’d love to hear more about your experience leading an internationally distributed team. What are some challenges you have faced? How do you handle communication and deliverables among many locations? – Hale Schneider

I’d say that the main challenge is always finding the best people, no matter where they’re located. Also, as our HQ marketing team is based in Tallinn, Estonia, it’s a bit harder to find people with international experience than, say, in London.

However, note my answer to the previous question: We still prefer to hire to the centralized team over building out regional marketing teams with all functions.

The good thing is that Bolt is a very international company and we have teams in 30+ countries around the world. So we have built up a strong information-sharing system that involves internal wikis, Slack channels, and regular all-hands meetings where the information is shared between everyone globally.

Markets where Bolt operates

I’ve gotten used to discussing things with people on Slack or via a call that having a team that’s based across multiple locations is a natural way of working.

We always set quarterly OKRs and focus for each team and give them relatively much freedom on achieving those results.

Q10: How to balance between creativity and data-driven culture? – Vasyl Sergienko

First of all, you can also be creative around the ways of interpreting the data.

Different people can look at the same data and come up with different takeaways. Also, you need to be creative to come up with new ideas to improve the results reflected through data. So I’d say that the data-driven and creative approaches go very much hand in hand in today’s marketing.

Q11: Agency or in-house? Why? – Liis Laisaar

I always prefer in-house marketing teams to agencies as the people’s motivation to grow the business, test new things and get results is times higher.

In-house people genuinely care about the company and go the extra mile to make things work. Having worked in and with agencies, I have seen projects often handed over to interns which can lead to low-quality work and poor results. It also takes a ton of time to onboard agency people and to keep communicating with them on a daily basis to approve ideas and changes.

In Bolt, we’re growing so fast and changing things up all the time, so we need to be able to get new campaigns live in less than 1-2h sometimes. This would never be possible when working with an advertising agency.

I do see a benefit to using local agencies if there’s a need for local contacts to execute a one-time marketing/PR campaign.

Agree with the PROs in this chart – Image source

💸 On online advertising

Q12: What’s the number one mistake people make when trying to improve the performance of their PPC campaigns? – Taavi Kalvi

This really depends on the campaign… But that’s not the answer you were hoping for. 😀

Usually, the biggest PPC mistake is looking at the wrong metrics and KPIs in the first place.

Let’s say your goal is to get new B2B clients for a SaaS tool. So you optimize your campaign on getting new leads. When trying to improve your campaign results, you want to increase the number of leads or lower the CPA (cost per acquisition) of leads. While optimizing on this, you may forget to look at the quality of the leads, so you may end up with more leads with lower quality. So always try to optimize your PPC campaign performance towards more revenue, not mid-funnel or vanity metrics.

Another mistake is always optimizing your PPC campaigns around the same thing.

For example, you want to optimize your Google Search PPC campaigns, so you add new keywords + negative keywords. Maybe, instead of working on this, you should test another channel (like Facebook/Instagram) or another campaign type instead. Or another target audience.

As I’m already ranting on the topic, I also often see Facebook marketers A/B testing small changes. It’s generally more efficient to run tests with variations that are clearly different (e.g. not the color of a CTA button but an entirely different creative vs the current one).

A/B test with visible changes in variations

Q13: Which do you prefer when entering a new market: a) start wide and get maximum exposure OR b) start with as specific targeting as possible and expand later based on already collected data? Why? – Liis Laisaar

It depends on the product and your marketing budget.

In Bolt, we’re marketing a consumer product relevant to most people, so we can use wide targeting in our online ads and let Facebook and Google algorithms to optimize our campaigns based on results.

If you’re marketing a niche product, I’d recommend starting narrower. If you already have a user base, I recommend using Facebook Lookalike audiences.

Q14: What is your approach to influencer marketing? How do you measure its success? – Ane Voje

We have a very data-driven approach to all marketing activities and influencer marketing is no different. We measure the CPA of new users acquired through our influencer marketing activities by counting the referrals made with each influencer’s unique referral code. We also check the reach and CPM of the influencers’ posts and compare it to our other online channels’ metrics.

Q15: What needs to be done to perfectly grow your business throughout the social channels? – Soner Alemdar

A: I’d say that the key thing to succeed in social channels is to constantly create value to your audience. This can mean sharing useful advice, giving away free stuff, informing people about special offers – whatever people can benefit from.

For example, Bolt shares relevant blog articles for drivers

Also, as the organic reach on Facebook is very low (as low as 2% of your page likes), you should always put some boosting budget behind each post.

You can find more social media marketing best practices here: 28 Facebook Ad Hacks for Social Media Growth

Q16: What would you do, if you have to lead a business in the grey market? You know, in a situation, where you can’t promote your brand on Facebook, Reddit, etc. – Maksymilian Plociennik

Tricky… And truth be told, I haven’t marketed such a product before. My first approach would be to find industry influencers and try working with them. Also, building virality to the product so it will pass from person to person. And testing out affiliate marketing.

Q17: Should a new company first focus on client acquisition only or should branding also start from the get-go? – Andreas Velling

You need to understand your brand’s mission and key value proposition from the get-go. But especially with new brands, earning some revenue and getting to the first 1000 paying users should be the priority, so I’d focus on acquisition campaigns first.

You don’t necessarily need to run brand-only marketing campaigns, but can integrate the branded message in acquisition ads.

🤓 On reporting and measurement

Q18: What do you think about marketing automation and who is responsible for that in the team? – Vasyl Sergienko

Marketing automation is a highly relevant project when working with a large scale of users. In Bolt, we have multiple teams working on automation, for example, our Lifecycle marketing team.

Q19: This is a very open-ended and more of a process question and how you go about things but with Bolt being in different markets, how are you able to work and adjust as best you can in creating and executing marketing plans for the different product offerings in each market? I can imagine what “success” or “failure” in one market can be totally different for another. You may have already covered a little bit of this with Mr. Hale Schneider’s question. – Kian Paras

We’re able to use quite a global approach when it comes to marketing in specific countries. Our product offering is not that different from market to market and we focus on promoting our main service above others.

However, we work with local teams to understand each market’s specifics. If you compare Bolt’s social media or blog to some of our competitors, we’re still much more local in our approach.

Q20: How do you approach branding/awareness? Is this just a “side-product” of having the right messages or do you have separate branding campaigns? – Andreas Velling

We do not run a lot of branding-only marketing campaigns as we’re a highly performance-driven company and like to work on things that we can measure.

However, we’ve set the key brand messages and all our performance marketing campaigns and most social media posts also revolve around those messages.

Recently, we launched a green initiative to make all Bolt rides in Europe carbon neutral. It’s a good combination of branding mixed with digital communication channels.

Social media post on the Green Plan

There’s another reason we don’t focus on branding campaigns: as our main brand asset is our product. As long as we’re providing the best ride-hailing experience in a city, we’ll get new users through word-of-mouth and keep the existing ones happy as well.

⚡ On rebranding (from Taxify) to Bolt

Q21: What was your approach for the launch campaign – which channels and assets did you find most valuable and why? – Kati Kuustik

As I set out to work on the first rebranding campaign I’d ever done, I was surprised by how little information about rebranding you can find online. There were literally no articles sharing usable know-how on how to rebrand a company. Only stuff on “how to pick your brand’s name” = useless.

During rebranding, our most valuable channels were those that helped us reach the highest number of our app users: PR, in-app messages, and emails.

We also used other marketing channels like online ads to communicate about the brand name change from Taxify to Bolt. Also, Google Search ads were very helpful in making sure that people will find our website and app store listing with both the old and new brand name.

I’ve found that there are quite many articles on how to do the rebranding / decide if you should rebrand, but very little information mostly on how to approach the launch of the new rebrand.

Q22: What goals did you set for the rebranding launch? – Kati Kuustik

Our main goal was not to lose users and the volume of rides not to drop. There were, of course, a set of lower-level goals that every involved team monitored.

Q23: If you had to do it again, what would you do differently? Or what were your biggest learnings? – Kati Kuustik

The thing with rebranding is that you probably (and hopefully) only get to do it once. 😅

If I had to help a company go through a rebranding again, I would focus on planning early on, having clear timelines, and making sure that all teams follow it. Which is what exactly happened in Bolt and why our rebranding went (almost) smoothly. Although there are always some last-minute surprises…

I’d also start preparing the new brand’s marketing assets and CVI (in case you want to change it) earlier and upload all new ad campaigns in advance. It took our 2-person advertising team weeks to replace all of our 5000+ online ad creatives.

🎡 On content marketing

Q24: What’s the biggest challenge for a B2C company related to content marketing strategy? – Eduarda Lemos

In my opinion, the biggest challenge for all brand blogs is understanding how to create extra value for your users that they can’t find elsewhere.

For example, at Bolt we focus on blog articles that share useful information to our drivers. This information is much harder to find compared to lifestyle-related advice for riders (as there are so many blogs and magazines already creating this type of content).

Q25: How do you manage the content production process understanding that each country has different personas/language, etc.? – Eduarda Lemos

We try to keep our blog content as evergreen and universal as possible and localize it to many languages. Sometimes, our local teams also write additional blog content targeted at their market specifically.

At some point I started to write English copy while thinking how it would sound in Estonian or French, to make sure everything is easy to localize to our 20+ languages.

Q26: Aside from your blog, I’ve read a lot of your guest posts in different blogs and platforms. I am a little biased towards the Copy Hackers one and KlientBoost as my favorites among your written guest posts but the Adespresso ones and Entrepreneur piece are up there too. What was your mindset like early on in figuring out which blog/publication/platform to pitch and how did you pitch to guest post or wrote for them? – Kian Paras

I started out pitching to 10+ marketing blogs, and it was very hard to get in initially. Once you already have a few strong articles in good blogs (in my case, HubSpot and AdEspresso) you can pitch to the next ones and will have proof of your writing quality to present.

You can read more about my guest blogging journey here: After Guest Blogging 50+ Articles, Here’s What I Learned

However, note that you won’t get much extra traffic to your blog from guest posting. For example, when I published an article in Entrepreneur, only nine readers looked up my profile and website.

The main value you’ll get from guest publishing is:

• additional blogging and podcast invitations
• job offers and help requests
• high-quality backlinks

🎢 On career and work-life

Q27: What’s an average workday look like for you? – Mary Green

My regular workday is always full of surprises, project managing some marketing campaigns, attending meetings & job interviews, discussing ideas with the team, and sharing information between teams.

But my favorite days are the ones where I disconnect from Slack and email for 4h or longer and focus on macro-level planning and improving the current team/reporting structure.

Q28: What is your biggest struggle currently? – Karolina Krolicka

When growing as fast as Bolt, you run into a lot of struggles.

I’d say the biggest challenge is understanding the business impact and ROI of all the different online and offline marketing activities that we’re doing.

We’re testing and learning something new every month, adding layers of data analytics to our campaign reporting and improving the attribution between different marketing channels.

Q29: How much of your life is dedicated to learning your craft and improvement? I love hearing how others invest in their craft. – Rob Fulton

I feel that I can learn the fastest through my work. Also, running a blog around Facebook advertising helps me stay aware of all the best practices and latest hacks.

I like to research what other top brands are doing and do a monthly review of their social media channels and blogs. Another great way to learn about new best practices is to talk to other marketers. You can even reach out on LinkedIn and propose to have a call and share your key learnings.

Also, whenever I’ve got time, I follow some industry newsletters and listen to podcasts.

I shared a long list of blogs, books, podcasts, and newsletters I like in this article, might be helpful: https://karolakarlson.com/2018-key-learnings-facebook-ads-marketing/

Q30: I remember reading your work and learning a little bit about your career profile while I was doing college internships and I only graduated in 2017. From the outside, it makes it seem like you “Bolt(ed)” upwards so quickly (jk, bad pun) or rose up relatively quickly but you may see it differently.

What is your work-life balance/integration prioritization or however you call it like, especially when you were just getting started!? Because you have Bolt, the blog, possibly other side hustles, and clients although you did mention you do not have the capacity at the moment, and possibly other hobbies and personal pursuits. You may have alluded to it with Ma’am Mary Green’s question but gosh it makes it look like you worked 24/7 to get where you are at. I personally think it’s super cool with all you’ve done so far and I can imagine some of your best work is yet to come. 🙂 – Kian Paras

About the work-life balance… I guess that early in my career I was so into marketing, looking at it as my job, hobby, relationship… (kidding about the last one :p)… But seriously, I think I easily worked at least 60h per week, also spending the Sundays working on either planning for Botl or writing to my blog.

By now, I’ve taken a step back and try to limit my workweek to 50h max. It’s become more about managing my time and focusing on the high-impact items only, removing meetings from my schedule, and learning to say “no” to more low-efficiency projects.

However, I believe that if you find a career you’re really passionate about, working the extra 20h per week doesn’t feel like a burden. Instead, you’ll be thrilled to learn by doing.

I would also say that I was very lucky to have the right opportunities to enter my life at the right time. E.g. I got an email from the CEO of Klientboost inviting me to freelance for their blog and Bolt reached out to me just as I was about to leave my past company. So it’s all about doing good work and noticing the good opportunities as they arise. You’ll be offered cool jobs only if you put yourself out there.

The post AMA with GrowthHackers – 30 Questions and Answers appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

All I had done was feasting on marketing blogs and podcasts for the previous two months. I was so into digital marketing that I thought I knew everything.fa

As I soon found out, the SaaS marketing world turned out to be a lot more versatile and exciting than I’d thought.

But you know what… It all worked out.

Better than my 21-year-old self could possibly have imagined.

During my last two years as the Digital Marketing Manager at Scoro, we’ve:

• Increased the number of monthly leads by over 300%
• Built our blog readership from 1.6k to 32k monthly organic visitors
• Published tens of new landing pages and hundreds of ads
• Grown into a team of full-stack marketers

However, I’ve got some big news.

Today is my very last day working as the Digital Marketing Manager at Scoro.

Looking back, I wanted to share the key learnings on SaaS marketing that I’ve discovered on this two-year journey, 35 of them to be exact.

SaaS marketing strategy – key learnings

When I joined my first SaaS startup two years ago, there was no all-encompassing marketing strategy in place.

So we started by…

• Defining our buyer personas
• Finding out who’s our high expectation customer – the people who enjoy your product’s most complex and differentiating benefits
• Thinking what are our potential customers’ pain points that our product could solve

SaaS Marketing Lesson #1:
Find your High Expectation Customer

There’s an amazing article on the High Expectation Customer by Julie Supan who’s worked for Airbnb and Dropbox.

If you’re unsure how to answer the following questions, chances are that you’re struggling to position your SaaS product in the market.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #2:
Keep true to your target audience = don’t try to sell to everyone.

Even though we had defined our buyer personas, it sometimes happened that our marketing activities got derailed and we were trying to serve a larger audience than we should have.

This led to delivering low-quality leads to the sales team. Fortunately, in the quickly adaptive environment of a SaaS startup, we were able to quickly recover.

Seriously – the more we worked on defining our target audience, the higher ROI we saw across all marketing channels.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #3:
You absolutely must know your UVP and mission statement

Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is a brief statement that describes your product’s benefit to the customer while differentiating you from your competition.

That’s the utmost reason why anyone should buy your SaaS product.

You should also be clearly aware of why your startup exists in the first place.

Test your mission statement by following this framework – do you know your target customer, your product’s benefits, and the key differentiating element?

Translated into a mission statement, the result will look like this:

If you’re unable to clearly identify your core value offer, you’re going to struggle when developing future marketing messages and organizing big campaigns.

Moreover, your entire team will feel demotivated when working without a clear mission.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #4:
Keep true to your mission statement

Once you’ve set your SaaS company’s mission statement, you should actually act by it.

Offering potential customers a big discounts or trying to keep employees happy with nice office perks isn’t going to cut it.

Today, with tens of thousands of SaaS products in the market, the key differentiator isn’t your product’s features, it’s your branding and mission.

You should regularly ask “Why does our company exist other than to make money?” – knowing the answer will also make it easier to communicate your product’s value to the user.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #5:
It’s all about growth

Looking back at the past 24 months, I wish I’d focused even more on growth. I feel like we occasionally got stuck in doing the same things over and over again just because they worked.

However, the biggest increase in our marketing results has come from constant optimization and new ventures.

Key takeaway: Be constantly on the lookout of new ideas to improve your lead flow and increase conversion rates.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #6:
Your growth plan needs to include clear actions, not just nice numbers

It’s not sufficient to just write down the anticipated numbers, you also need to know how to achieve this growth.

The way I’d set up a SaaS marketing strategy is by setting up growth goals, e.g. 10% growth every month and then contemplating how this growth will be achieved.

The growth plan should be created by a large team of people (from marketing, sales, product teams), each contributing their knowledge and ideas.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #7:
There are multiple ways to increase sales

Here’s a graph by KlientBoost, illustrating how every stage of your SaaS conversion funnel is converting at a different rate.

In the end, only a handful of website visitors become paying customers.

If you want to grow your MRR by, let’s say, 10% every month, you have two options:

• Optimize the conversion rates of your conversion funnel stages
• Get more people into your conversion funnel

It’s up to you to choose which path you prefer (usually, it’s the combination of both).

However, the choice should be intentional and every action you take driven by your SaaS company’s long-term marketing strategy.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #8:
Failure = Winning

There’s a simple correlation between the failings and gains in your marketing team’s work.

The more you fail, the more you’ll also grow. That’s because you’ll be testing a significantly larger number of new tactics.

Failure = Testing = Winning

While many of our ideas didn’t work out as expected and cost us some leads and budgets, I’m glad that we tried.

Many experiments also turned out to be great success and helped us increase the number of monthly leads (and sales results).

SaaS Marketing Lesson #9:
Don’t optimize for leads. Optimize for growth.

Speaking of results and sales, you should be aware that new leads do not necessarily translate into more sales.

Leads ≠ Sales

You can get thousands of low-quality leads, but if none of them converts into paying customers, you’ll soon be out of business.

When I started managing Scoro’s AdWords account and working with PPC agencies, I discovered we were targeting lots of keywords irrelevant to our product.

While these keywords brought in leads at acceptable CPA (cost per acquisition), they never ever converted into buyers.

After we cleaned up our campaigns, we started getting more qualified leads.

Key takeaway: Measure the number of qualified leads you get from every marketing channel, not just the overall lead count.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #10:
Track the right metrics

The more I’ve spoken with successful SaaS marketers, the more I’ve grasped the importance of tracking the right marketing metrics.

So what are the right SaaS marketing metrics you should track?

I would suggest that you select 3-5 key marketing metrics that you use for decision-making and only then build a list of supporting metrics.

These 3-5 key metrics should be directly tied to your company’s growth, thereby they could be:

• Increase in MRR
• Cost per acquisition per paying customer
• Average lifetime value

The CPA per lead could be a secondary metric that you use to evaluate the performance of marketing campaigns.

Of course, your SaaS metrics really depend on the product you’re selling. Maybe none of the metrics I just mentioned makes any sense with your particular strategy.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #11:
Trust in your LTV

Until recently, I had never thought of the customer lifetime value as a key metric to SaaS marketing strategy.

However, your average users’ LTV can easily predict how much you should be willing to pay for leads and paid customers.

You should opt for the CPA to be 3 times lower than the LTV, meaning for every dollar you put in your SaaS machine you’re getting 3 out.

However, I’ve seen many SaaS companies struggling with this paradox: Once they find a marketing channel with a positive ROI, they keep limiting their budgets.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #12:
Once you’ve found the perfect growth channel, use it to its full potential

Most of the successful SaaS marketers I’ve talked with aim to find marketing channels with a positive ROI and then use them to their maximum capacity.

For example, if the avg. CPA for a paid customer on AdWords is $1,2k and the LTV of that customer is 10k, it would make sense to extend your marketing budget as much as possible to grow faster.

Once you’ve found a profitable marketing channel, increase the resources spent on it. E.g. if you’re happy with your Facebook ads CPC, increase your Facebook advertising budget.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #13:
Segment your LTV by marketing channels

Not all of your SaaS marketing channels bring identical leads.

You can conduct an analysis on different lead segments and see what’s the average LTV across different channels, countries, and other customer segments.

You’ll find it a lot easier to evaluate whether a marketing channel has a positive or negative ROI.

You’ll also avoid keeping some poorly performing campaigns running and won’t close the ones with a high potential due to generalizing.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #14:
Know when to say “We tried but failed”

Working in SaaS marketing has also taught me a couple of lessons about sunk costs.

In terms of marketing, a sunk cost is a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered. And often, it makes us want to keep pushing a failing marketing incentive in the hopes of it starting to work.

In SaaS marketing, it’s especially important that you notice the budget-draining projects early on, before they exhaust your budgets and resources.

Train yourself to be the wake-up-call for the entire marketing team whenever it happens.

Here’s an easy litmus test for uncovering low-performing projects.

Ask your team: “If we could devote our resources (time and budget) on a different marketing project, would we?”

If you’re able to name some ideas with a bigger potential, that’s where you should focus.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #15:
Prioritize based on numbers and data

A couple of days ago, I read a blog article by Peep Laja where he mentioned that many marketers prioritize their website A/B tests by the ease of implementation, not the possible gains.

Let me repeat it…

Often, marketers choose their projects by the ease of implementation, completely ignoring the data.

Guilty as charged.

Where you spend your time and resources should be directed by data, not your gut feeling or comfort zone.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #16:
Set up a strong lead tracking system

If I could turn back time, I’d travel back to 2015 and set up a comprehensive lead tracking framework.

Customers have so many possible touching points with your ads/content and take so many different actions before converting.

And if you’re unable to track all of it, you’ll have no idea of what actually works.

So looking back, I’d draw up a customer journey map and start using tools like HubSpot, Mixpanel, and Kissmetrics in the early phases of SaaS marketing.

Using those tools is crucial to understanding how our leads and customers interact with your ads, content, and the SaaS product.

Content marketing – key learnings

When I joined Scoro, one of my first tasks was to create a content marketing strategy and start publishing articles that would translate into sales.

In the past 20 months, we’ve grown our blog’s organic traffic from 1.6k monthly visitors to 32k visitors/month.

That’s a 1,843% growth.

However, the fastest growth has happened in the past 11 months while we grew our traffic from 6k/month to 31k/month.

In fact, I wrote an in-depth article on the SEO hacks and content marketing tips we used, you can read it here: From 1.6k to 31k Monthly Blog Visitors in 20 Months – How We Did It

So how did we achieve the nearly 2,000% growth?

And how can you replicate the success in your SaaS startup’s blog?

SaaS Marketing Lesson #17:
Give instead of taking

As a general rule, SaaS companies aren’t non-profits.

This means that every presentation, gift or blog article ever made should translate into sales.

That’s true, but don’t take it literally.

Before you can take, you should learn to give.

So instead of contemplating your masterplan on how to get everyone buying your product…

Think instead how you could provide value to your target audience.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #18:
Don’t publish content for the sake of publishing

WordPress users produce about 84.3 million new posts and 41.8 million new comments every month.

The top 1% of these posts are read by 99% of the readers.

If your goal is to create content that’s engaging people and will ultimately help to increase your SaaS product sales, you can’t just publish any content.

When I joined Scoro, the company was buying articles from an agency in the US. These articles were a content marketer’s nightmare – 600 words long texts lacking any actionable advice.

As you may have guessed, nobody read nor shared those articles.

Only after we started creating high-quality and SEO-aware content, did the leads start to pour in.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #19:
“Quality vs. Quantity” is a wrong approach

After managing Scoro’s content marketing strategy for two years, I’ve learned that while consistency is the key to success, so is the quality of the articles.

So what are you to do: Choose the quality over quantity or vice versa?

Actually, you should aim for quality and quantity.

When given a choice – take both.

After publishing 2 articles per week for a short period of time, we decided to cut it back to 1 article/week and focus on publishing content with higher value, while maintaining the weekly schedule.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #20:
Awesome content will get the attention it deserves

I’ve heard so many marketers complain “We’re publishing high-value content, but people just won’t find nor read it.”

That’s so untrue!

Take this blog you’re currently reading. It’s only 4-5 months old. However, all the previous three articles have been widely shared and read.

How? – By being packed with value.

Of course, there are the “superstar” blogs that have accumulated large readerships and can now enjoy even their mediocre articles getting thousands of shares.

And of course, it also depends on luck to some extent – will people notice and pick up your articles.

However, if you’re just starting out, you need to work hard on writing content that’s on par with the very best articles on a similar topic.

That’s the only surefire road to building a popular blog.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #21:
Publish original content & research

While high-quality content can help build an engaged audience and expand your marketing funnel, it’s the original research that can bring you near-magical results. ✨

Here’s an example by Ahrefs: an article based on original research and measuring how much time it takes to start ranking well on Google.

High-quality and actionable research articles get picked up by other industry blogs and will become widely shared.

That’s exactly the kind of attention you need on your SaaS product.

Now that you’re all excited about conducting original research and publishing an epic blog article, I’d also like you to consider the next rule…

SaaS Marketing Lesson #21:
Measure your content marketing ROI

The ROI of content marketing is different from say, paid advertising, in that it’s not as clearly measurable.

Content marketing can be perceived as a top-of-the-funnel tactic that’s attracting new audiences without necessarily converting them into leads.

And that’s just fine.

If you can prove that content marketing is supporting your marketing funnel and eventually, sales, it’s definitely worth pursuing.

However, I’m a lot more sceptical about eBooks, webinars, Twitter chats, and other similar large-large content formats.

I’m not saying they’re not working, especially if you’re an established company with a large marketing team, like Marketo.

However, when we calculated the benefits we got from publishing and promoting eBooks and thought what else all those resources could have brought us in terms of leads and sales, it was a lousy deal.

As eBooks didn’t have a positive ROI in the case of our SaaS marketing strategy, we focused our time and effort on other activities with a higher ROI.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #22:
Do guest blogging only if you have a clear goal

You’ve probably heard all the marketing influencers tell that you should be guest blogging to acquire high-quality backlinks and get more website traffic.

Well, that’s only halfway true.

While guest blogging can certainly help you get quality backlinks, it isn’t necessarily worth your time.

For 10 hours of your marketing team’s time, what has more value:

1. Writing a top-notch guest blog post for a popular blog and giving away all your rights to the content.
2. Writing a 10x SEO-optimized article for your own blog, getting all the branding benefits, and later thousands of organic visitors.

Tim Soulo has written guest posts for tens of marketing blogs.

In his experience, writing a guest post in a top blog brings you about 100 website clicks.

The key takeaway here is that you shouldn’t be writing guest posts for the sake of driving traffic to your website.

Rather, write guest articles to establish your brand as an industry expert and build relationships.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #23:
Build relationships with other blogs

There’s another awesome benefit to guest posting that you could aim for: the relationships you build.

When we got started with Facebook advertising, I wrote a guest post on AdEspresso’s blog titled 6 Facebook Advertising Hacks I Wish We Had Known Before Launching Our First Campaign

The collaboration didn’t end there.

They asked me to become a regular contributor, which in turn led to new guest contributions in the top marketing blogs such as:

• Content Marketing Institute
• Social Media Examiner
• Copy Hackers
• AdEspresso
• Kissmetrics

Later, I was able to include Scoro’s marketing tactics as examples in my articles, getting us lots of quality backlinks.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #24:
Build relationships with other SaaS brands

If you take a good look at brands and people featured in blog articles, they’re often the same across the web.

That’s because those people and brands have built relationships with each other.

For example, my latest article in this blog featured SaaS marketing hacks. When compiling the article, I also interviewed some successful SaaS marketers.

After I’d published the article, those marketers also helped to promote it and shared the article with their audience.

Here’s another example of collaboration of Venngage, Aggregate blog, and Copy Hackers – we partnered on an infographic and blog article.

If you’d like to read more about how we grew Scoro blog’s organic traffic and which SEO tactics we applied, read this article: From 1.6k to 32k Monthly Blog Visitors in 20 Months – How We Did It

Paid advertising – key learnings

Paid advertising is an integral part of most SaaS marketing strategies.

Even if you’re lucky to be driving sales with “free” marketing activities such as content marketing and social media marketing, you can use the paid ads to accelerate your SaaS startup’s growth.

At Scoro, we focused mainly on two PPC channels – Facebook and Google AdWords – and combined them with some smaller paid lead sources (review sites, display ads, LinkedIn ads, etc.)

Paving our way to a solid PPC strategy wasn’t always the easiest challenge.

Luckily, we also had many small victories on our journey that made us want to test even more new ideas.

However, it wasn’t always as sunny in the PPC land.

When we got started with Facebook advertising, we failed to attract any new leads.

Why?

Because we were targeting a cold audience and trying them to sign up for a free product trial right off the bat.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #25:
Most people don’t care about your salesy ads

The cold hard truth about your SaaS product is that most people just don’t care enough to buy it.

If you set up a Facebook ads campaign targeting a Saved Facebook audience (based on people’s location interests), and show them an ad like this…

Most people will be like…

They’ll never click on your ad nor sign up for the free trial you’re offering.

That’s because you’re serving your sales pitch too early in the sales funnel, asking for too big a commitment.

In the Awareness stage of your marketing funnel, focus on educating and helping your target audience instead of jumping right on the sales pitch.

Read more tips and hacks in this guide on SaaS Facebook advertising.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #26:
Target sales messages on remarketing audiences

One of the a-ha moments we had regarding our SaaS startup’s paid advertising happened when I set up our first segmented retargeting campaigns on Facebook.

To the people who had previously visited our landing pages about Project Management Software, this Facebook ad made a lot more sense:

When delivering sales messages to Facebook Custom Audiences of past website visitors, we finally started to see some positive results.

Key takeaway: Start by attracting cold audiences with soft-sell ads and organic reach. Then, create paid remarketing campaigns targeting people that already know about your SaaS product.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #27:
Segment your remarketing audiences

Once we had set up our Facebook remarketing campaigns, we started looking for ways to optimize them.

One of the best ideas we had was to segment our website visitors into several groups.

This way, we were able to create more personalized marketing messages, depending on which exact landing page our audience members had visited.

Instead of delivering the same offer to everyone who had visited our website in the past 30 days, we only targeted our ads on the visitors of specific landing pages and blog articles – the people who were most likely to start a free trial.

As a result, our average Facebook marketing CPA decreased by 80% while the number of total conversions grew.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #28:
Good design is paramount

In the past 12 months, I’ve spent a lot of time on creating, managing, and optimizing both Facebook ad and AdWords campaigns.

One key thing I’ve learned is that design matters. Big time.

We’ve tested tens of different Facebook ad designs as that’s one of the key elements that makes the biggest difference in Facebook campaigns’ performance.

Learning to design basic visualizations isn’t as difficult as you might think. Start with a tutorial of Illustrator or Sketch and soon, you’ll be able to create all your SaaS company’s ad designs.

If you’d like to learn more about A/B testing your ads, see this guide on Facebook ad testing.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #29:
Don’t leave the PPC strategy (entirely) up to your marketing agency

Having worked with several PPC agencies, here’s what I think:

No PPC agency is as invested in your SaaS company’s growth as you are. That’s simply not possible.

Yet even though the agencies aren’t always perfect and answering your emails as often as you’d like, you still need them.

It’s a tough relationship.

95% of the time, hiring a PPC agency won’t immediately bring the results you’re hoping for.

Now, the way I imagine the perfect SaaS-agency relationship goes like this:

• Your in-house team sets the long-term and monthly PPC strategy
• Your PPC agency sets up the ad campaigns (writes the ad copy, designs ads, sets up the campaign structure)
• Your in-house team regularly reviews the paid ad campaigns and asks for small changes and optimization

Key takeaway: Even when working with world-class PPC agencies, you should still review your ad campaigns on a regular basis and contribute new ideas for improvement.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #30:
Keep testing new (and old) marketing channels

Even though you’ve found your top-performing marketing channels, there may be even better ones out there.

Moreover, the paid advertising channels that didn’t work in the first place could deliver good results the second time you try.

Set up a dedicated monthly “testing budget” for experimenting with new marketing channels. There’s a chance you’ll uncover a hidden gem.

SaaS marketing– general learnings

SaaS Marketing Lesson #31:
Don’t let your growth slow down

Once you’re in the frenzy of month-over-month growth, do your best not to let it slow down.

Trust me, it will be hard to get back on the train later.

Be constantly on the lookout for small tweaks and improvements that either bring more people to your marketing funnel or help to increase the conversion rate at different stages of the funnel.

However, remember that if you write month-over-month growth into your marketing strategy, you also need to add how you’re going to do it.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #32:
Keep your eyes on the road instead of competition

Scoro is a project management solution and guess what… There are hundreds of different project management tools out there.

However, none of these tools does all the exact same things as Scoro.

While you might feel the urge to copy your top-performing competitors… You should work in proactive mode rather than reactive.

Adjusting your goals and marketing tactics by perceiving your competition will get you derailed quickly.

There’s no single SaaS product in the world that would have 100% matching audience and solution with yours.

Or if there is, maybe you should rethink your UVP (unique value proposition).

SaaS Marketing Lesson #33:
Listen to your customers

When marketing a SaaS product, it’s incredibly easy to get caught up in the industry jargon and emphasize the wrong product benefits.

That’s why you should devote at least 5% of your time on learning what your customers think, how the interact with your product, and what are their core problems.

Yes, you really should reach out to 5-10 customers every three months and conduct survey in the meantime. You could also listen to the sales calls, read customer support emails, and check analytics to see how people use your product.

Listening to your customers helps to:

• Realize you product’s top benefits
• Improve your marketing messages
• Uncover missing / unnecessary features
• Discover how to keep your customers happier
• Improve your product’s UX
• Reduce churn

SaaS Marketing Lesson #34:
Think of your customers as people, not numbers

You sign up for a free SaaS product trial and for the next 12 months, your inbox is going to be flooded with their marketing emails.

Sounds familiar?

More emails and push notifications ≠ more customers

Don’t forget that your leads are real people and respect them by sending them only the marketing messages that are truly relevant to them.

A couple of lead nurturing emails is all good, but if you lock them into your marketing funnel forever, sending them irrelevant content every month, you could damage your brand instead of getting more customers.

Respecting your customers also applies to every other aspect of your SaaS strategy – sales calls, support emails, product developement – don’t forget it’s the customer you’re building the SaaS product for.

SaaS Marketing Lesson #35:
Keep reading and learning

When interviewing new potential marketing team members, I always ask what blogs and magazines they like to read.

That’s one of the key indicators whether a person’s passionate about marketing.

There are so many insightful articles and resources on SaaS marketing. Just to name a few:

Intercom on Starting Up eBook by Intercom
The Beginner’s Guide to SaaS Conversion Optimization by ConversionXL
The entire blog of First Round Review by First Round
The best SaaS newsletter I’ve seen this far by Hiten Shah

If you’re managing a SaaS marketing team, you could schedule the “reading hours” to every second Friday and make it a habit to share new tactics and ideas with the team.

What’s next?

As I said at the beginning of this article, I’ll be leaving Scoro as of June.

It’s both sad and exciting to be leaving.

I’m planning to take a looong vacation, go travelling, and devote even more time to reading and learning. I’ll also be working on some freelance projects.

In the long term… Who knows…

The post 35 SaaS Marketing Lessons I Wish I’d Known 20 Months Sooner appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Most marketing (and sales, and customer support, and…) teams aim for a 10% month-over-month growth in key metrics.

Let’s get 10% more leads, 10% more cold calls, a 10% improvement in feedback scores…

The problem with 10% growth goals is that they nearly always fail to inspire. 10% seems attainable without a huge effort, by improving the current processes. In the end, no big steps are taken to bring about a significant improvement.

Another issue with 10% is that when it fails, the difference is so small it doesn’t deserve further investigation. Achieving 0-5% growth instead of 10% every month means no growth in the long term.

What if you aimed for 10x growth in results every 3 months instead? ??

Ambitious long-term goals make us think out of the box and inspire to go through complicated changes with real impact.

Brands won’t redesign a poorly-performing website when aiming for a 10% growth in sales. They do it when aspiring to bigger goals.

Here’s a challenge: when thinking how you could improve your team’s results, instead of being “reasonable”, dream big.

Think what you’d do if you had to 10x the results in 3 months with an extra 100% budget.
Think how you’d run your team if their (& your) jobs depended on getting the 10x results.
You won’t discover new tricks when playing by the old rules. So, change the game.

The post Think 10x Instead of 10% appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.