Marketing Success Starts With a Solid Foundation

By Jane Willis from Proper Rebel

www.goproperrebel.com

We love the concepts of growth marketing: listen to users, test and learn, be discoverable, get viral reach, leverage partners and platforms, and empower your influencers.   And we believe that your marketing programs will be much more successful if they have an insight-driven, rock-solid foundation from which to launch marketing activities.  By this we mean a clear understanding of the buyer journey and customer’s pains and gains, which inform the messaging platform and your go to market model.  

My business partner, Joan Bodensteiner, and I have launched hundreds of products at large companies like Adobe and VMWare, fast growth small businesses and start-ups.  We have led strategy exercises at major corporations and have also experienced the “shoot from the hip” style of start-ups.  We thought: ”How can we leverage the best practices of both?”.

Proper Rebel is our new venture that is dedicated to helping companies create a lean, but powerful foundation for strategy and marketing by blending the best of the corporate and start-up ways of working to improve business outcomes. It is fast, it is  insight-driven, and it will save you from making mistakes later down the road by taking the time to build a solid, yet flexible foundation.

We have a list of the Five Deadly Start-Up Marketing Mistakes on our blog. As an example, one of them is “Not knowing the details of a customer’s journey through purchase and active use”.  The point is that if you don’t know how your customers make buying decisions and who is involved, it is unlikely you will create a marketing and sales experience that easily motivates them to purchase.  

Our Founders Network workshop is a hands-on experience in which you will create a solid marketing foundation for your business with our help.  We’ll share our process and templates, and we’ll give you some fun exercises and games that will get you thinking and creating.  We’ll  cover:

• The Buyer’s Journey Map:  Detailing the customer experience in purchasing a product like yours  to help you align your messaging, content and actions with THEIR way of buying.
• The Circles of Influence:  Setting up an actionable plan to leverage influencers and resources that motivate a prospect and seal a deal.
• The Messaging Platform:  Based on customer insights you will create a messaging strategy that hits on the emotional pains and gains to connect and motivate people to take action.
• We will also cover selling models, competitive research, and how to set and test pricing.

Our participants tend to walk away with an actionable plan and the knowledge and tools to help them with the next product or marketing challenge. These foundational elements will help you build your initial marketing strategy, and will help you troubleshoot and improve existing marketing programs.