Simplifying (and ultimately resourcing) your founder-led marketing approach is the key to growth

If you’re doing all of the marketing, utilising every channel, following all of the popular advice, and wondering why it’s not really landing - you’re not alone.

It’s one of the most common first conversations that I’ll have with founders and business leaders, and it’s usually quite simple to fix. By taking a step back and doing less.

Stay with me, I’ll make it make sense.

The past few years have seen a marked increase in marketing advice flooding social media channels saying that you should be launching cohorts, building communities, starting a podcast, getting AEO in place (note: it’s still just good SEO), sending newsletters, and doing all the stuff that creators are doing to get your on their course.

As an established SaaS or B2B product or service based business, most of the creator marketing advice is just not going to help you, simply because that’s just not how your audience buys. They are still buying (albeit with greater power than ever before) in more traditional buying cycles.

This applies even to the AI security product I worked with last year.

And the key word I want you to remember here is trust.

Overview of key marketing theory in less than 30 seconds

Marketing theory focuses on the 4 Ps - product, place, price and promotion. There’s structure behind each one, and when done properly, underpins your entire marketing strategy. It’s a model that still works 60 years later and still acts as the blueprint to what marketers learn when they are being trained and is still largely used throughout DTC and B2B.

However, it’s the rise of SaaS businesses and the incoming rise of performance marketing that’s managed to truncate these pillars into the 1 P of promotion, as it’s the most visible and easiest to understand. And this is where business leaders get stuck, but, as you're in charge, you get to determine all four.

And this is important because, ultimately, landing promotion without any of the other strategic pillars put into place becomes the hardest thing you can get to work.

It’s like attempting to put together a Lego model without reading any of the instructions.

So, how can you get your founder-led marketing engine to start working?

Take a step back and start to put your strategy and plan together again, aligning with the core marketing basics:

- who are your customers?

- what problem do they need solving?

- how do you solve that problem?

- where do they find their information?

- what are they willing to pay to solve the problem?

- how can you reach them?

If you don’t have any of that in place then running all of the ads across all of the channels just becomes expensive noise.

You need to be targeting the right audience, with the right message, through the channel(s) they use.

So getting the proper strategic thinking written down first, ensures that when you start again with 2 channels but targeted properly, you’ll get better results by doing less.

Try it today. Write down everything that links your customers, look to see if your messaging reflects that and focus on the channel that is showing the best engagement.

I’d also bet that you have a capacity problem too

You’ve read all of the advice above and are thinking WTF that’s so much work. It is and that’s ultimately why businesses that rely on founder-led marketing for so long feel like they’re behind and nothing is working.

It’s generally because the business has grown but marketing efforts haven’t as the founder has got busy so marketing activity gets relegated again

The businesses that grow all have dedicated marketing resource fully focused on ensuring you’re targeting the right audience with well thought through campaigns and activity.

If you know you need to start growing beyond the founder-led marketing approach. Get in touch to discuss how I can help you do so.