Marketing for Startups: A Full-Funnel Strategy For Sustainable Growth

‍A fully integrated and diversified marketing engine is the best anchor for sustainable growth. 

This is when you will experience the benefits of scale and compounding—i.e., the payoff from consistent brand-building over time and the analytics rigor to pivot to profitable unit economics, not just cost efficiency. 

But you won’t get here overnight. 

The ‘RUN’ stage is a natural evolution of the journey you started after attaining product-market fit.  

At that time, you focused on scaling one channel to acquire users or generate volume [units/revenue] in a repeatable manner. Once you captured this low-hanging fruit, you expanded from intent-based targeting to broader interest or demographics targeting to drive consideration across channels. You also invested in building creative capabilities, CRM/MarTech, and a holistic measurement approach to manage scale and complexity effectively. 

So, what does this fully integrated marketing engine look like? Let’s dive in. 

1. <span class="richtext-line-highlight">Channel Strategy: Scaled & Diversified </span>

• You should have a balanced mix across brand marketing, performance marketing, and owned/organic channels. This ensures you are well balanced across the short and long term and between acquisition and engagement/retention growth motions. 

• If you’ve been consistently investing in brand or broader reach campaigns, you should see material traffic flow via direct and organic channels, growth in referrals, or inbound leads to sales teams. Not sure about how much to invest in brand campaigns? Review these recommendations by funding stage. 
• ‍With the scale of first-party data and investments in MarTech capabilities you’ve made, CRM and in-product communication [email, SMS/business messaging, app/product notifications] should fuel evergreen engagement and retention campaigns deployed to manage the end-to-end user lifecycle. 

This is the right time to raise the bar for performance marketing and focus investments primarily on acquiring the most valuable or profitable prospects. Here's how: 

• Suppression: Exclude all existing users from new acquisition campaigns. Avoid targeting ads to existing users unless they are high-value, at risk of lapsing, or can’t be engaged via owned channels.  

• Lookalikes: Use CRM and web/app audiences to identify the most profitable audiences & cohorts. Activate these as seed audiences across ad platforms and build lookalikes.
• Review & refine unit economics: It’s better to avoid performance marketing for low ticket size or low margin services - unless they are: 
  • Loss leaders: proven ability to cross-sell/upsell & boost AOVs [Average Order Value]
  • Subscription-based / recurring purchases - in this case, transition to LTV-based bids vs. single transaction bids

     Value-based bidding: 

• Where possible, you should plan to transition campaign bids from Maximize Conversions [volume] or Target CPA [Cost Per Action] to Maximize Conversion Value [E.g., revenue/LTV] or Target ROAS. 
  • This is particularly useful if there’s a high variance in value across your conversions.
  • This is straightforward for e-commerce businesses as online revenue can be captured in real time and used to adjust bids. 
  • For companies that realize revenue off-platform or have a lag, it’s recommended that they pass back 30 conversion values within 30 days [the bare minimum is 15 values] so the algorithm can optimize to value more accurately. ‍

2. ‍Measurement & Analytics:

At this level of scale and channel diversification, you should have this trifecta of measurement solutions to build a complete picture: 

• ‍Multi-Touch Attribution for real-time optimization of online channels. ‍
• Marketing Mix Modelling (MMMs) to understand all-up correlation across media & non-media variables [Inputs] and business outcomes [Outputs] ‍
• Incrementality Tests to determine causality - either at an individual channel or market level. These tests are considered the gold standard because they answer the critical question: “Would this conversion or outcome have happened without this channel?”

Here are a few reasons why online attribution is insufficient at this level of channel scale & diversification: 

• Online attribution is essentially an assignment of credit based on click behavior; it doesn’t tell you what channel caused the outcome or conversion. 
• It fails to measure the impact of offline channels and dark social [messaging, chat services] that strip out UTMs. 
• It also tends to overestimate the effect of lower-funnel channels like paid search and underestimate upper-funnel channels. 
• As attribution is calibrated at the user or identifier level, it cannot accurately track cross-device behavior or account for ad blockers that disable tracking. 

Note: Relying on online attribution alone can lead to a warped media spend allocation [e.g. a skew towards short-term activation] or ignorance about the impact of non-marketing variables like seasonality or distribution on your marketing effectiveness. 

3. <span class="richtext-line-highlight">Primary Focus:</span>

‍These are the key questions you should ask yourself to get a full understanding of the role of marketing across your business: 

• What business impact is marketing driving at an all-up or integrated level? 
  • Remember to measure both absolute revenue/pipeline/LTV and target guardrails for efficiency or effectiveness [e.g.. LTV/CAC]

• Do we know how much of the outcomes generated by marketing are truly incremental - at an aggregated or channel level? 
  • Do we know what happens if we turn off specific channels or campaigns? What would we lose? ‍

• Are we seeing leverage with our brand marketing investments?‍
  • Are campaigns that drive awareness, consideration, and preference reducing our dependency on short-term activations that fueled our initial success? 
  • Can we forecast the timing and lag effect of brand lift studies or share of search improvements on downstream metrics? Is this view aligned with finance teams? 
    

• [Bonus] Do we understand the drivers that make our marketing more effective? 
  • How does this change with seasonality, price changes, or competitive moves? 

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