Building an Effective Early-Stage Marketing Strategy with Lindsay LaShell

Hello everyone, welcome, welcome, welcome. We're so glad you could join us today for Building an Effective Early Stage Marketing Strategy with Lindsay Lachelle. We're so glad to be here with Lindsay. Welcome Lindsay.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So, um, please tell us where you're joining us from or joining us from today. Yes, I'm joining from the Bay Area. Um, so We have a very global audience with people joining us from all over the world. So please tell us where you're calling in from. In the interim, I will go ahead and briefly introduce myself. My name is Rachel Shephard. I'm the Director of Global Marketing at Founder Institute and the co-creator of the Female Founder Initiative. The Founder Institute is the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. We've launched over 5,000 companies across 200 cities in 6 continents. Continents. If you're interested in learning more about Founder Institute, we're currently enrolling across all 6 continents and you can learn more about that at fi.co/enrolling. And if you're interested in learning more about the Female Founder Initiative, you can visit femalefounderinitiative.com. So today Lindsay is going to share with us some early stage marketing guidelines and tactics. And I'm very excited to talk about this today because I know marketing can be a really big pain point for early stage startups. And she's got some very actionable advice for us today. If you could put your questions in the chat for Lindsay, and our team will be collecting those as we go throughout the webinar, that is, that would be perfect. And so without further ado, I welcome Lindsay Lachelle, CEO and founder of Diamond and Branch. Lindsay is a marketing activist supporting justice, equity, and sustainability through access to excellent marketing strategies for women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC founders and nonprofits. In addition to marketing strategy, Lindsay covers the full gamut of digital marketing, including inbound, content, and social media marketing, and web analytics. Diamond and Branch's mission is to help entrepreneurs and underrepresented founders achieve success and long-term sustainability through smart and effective marketing. So without further ado, Lindsay, I turn it over to you.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Rachel. I'm so excited to talk to you guys today. Uh, I'm going to do my presentation. Um, before I get into it, I will introduce Princess Olive behind me. She's— her official title is Princess Olive of Unicorn Castle. You can see that's where she hangs out these days. So just in case she makes a ruckus, you guys will know what's happening there. Cool. So let's get into it. Oops, that was so fast. Okay. Like Rachel said, I call myself a marketing activist. My belief is that the most— the founders that we need to see be successful should have access to the most efficient and well-informed marketing. And so that's basically the work I'm doing. My business is a certified B Corp. We're part of the Zebras Unite community. And I'm on the board for Business for Good San Diego. All of these things are obviously designed to help actual businesses get more effective in supporting supporting sustainability, justice, and equity. So anybody wants to talk to me about any of those things, you'll find out how to find me. Here's what's different about this. My background is like all over the place. And I picked up a lot of tips along the way. And the reason why I'm so passionate about teaching marketing the way that I teach it is because you folks need results. This is not theoretical. This is— we are going to talk about some strategy and lots of empathy and all these sort of soft and squishy things, but at the end of the day, I want your marketing to be more effective with less effort. And that is the thing that's going to differentiate this from most of the other marketing talks or marketing instruction that you've seen. So get excited, here we go. Okay, 7 questions to make your marketing plan smart, strategic and sustainable. Are you ready? First of all, who are we talking to? Second of all, what do they care about, right? Who are we? Why should they care? Like, don't take it personally. Not everybody's for you, right? How do we reach them? How do we make it efficient? Because we're not screwing around. I know you guys got a lot of other things on your plate. Finally, how do we know it's working? And How can we plan to make sure it gets done? None of this matters if it doesn't actually get executed. So that is my top priority as we're talking through this. In this example, the person we are going to be talking to is Princess Leia, General Leia if you prefer, Leia Organa as you like. She is, uh, what do we know about her, right? She's strong, she's smart, She's brave. And frankly, she's a little pissed off, right? She's got a chip on her shoulder. She is on the side of good every time. And she's not afraid to, to, um, tell, to put that into her actions, right? So full, full disclosure, I found this on the internet. Uh, this is not my persona and it's not super actionable. This is great for like a creative persona. but let's talk about how to make it actionable, right? Because what we need to know— there we go— what we actually need to know to make these things useful, right, are what makes them one of our persona groups, where do they get information, what time of day, what news outlets, what size of screen, all of those sorts of things, right? What is their relationship to our business or our organization? What motivates them? And then these last two questions are two sides of the same coin. What are the reasonable objections? Why would they understand everything about the opportunity to engage with your business and still say no and be okay with it? And like, understand that that's a reasonable choice for them. On the other side of it is like, what are the sweet spot? What is the silver bullet? What is the thing that will help if we communicate it well to them? Will will make it a quick and easy yes, right? So understanding why they say no and what, what makes it easy to say yes. Those are your personas. Now let's talk about what they care about. This is pretty common image. Probably you guys have all seen it before, the marketing funnel, right? There's two things that I want to specifically call out here. One is a good, one is a, we're going to reframe it. The good thing is, The language on this marketing funnel are in the persona's words. It's not our paraphrasing of their thoughts. It's actually their thoughts. It's not our understanding of what we think they care about. It's actually their words. And so we're going to use their, the I, the me, when we're building these things, we're going to use those pronouns so that we put ourselves in their shoes and develop as much empathy for their journey as possible. The second thing, the thing we're going to reframe about this is that funnel is an outdated shape. We know better. We know it's actually a flywheel, right? We know that any organization that's got smart marketing, the people who come out the bottom, that referral and retention, they just go right back around up to the top and fill it back in. They don't just stay in your orbit. They bring more people with them. So instead of a funnel, and we'll talk more about what the flywheel is, and I could talk about it forever, but like, this is, that's the, the other thing that I want to just see that, know that we can do better.

Okay.

An actionable journey goes like this. Every persona gets their own journey. It's going to consider all of the issues. It's going to be very complex, right? Lots of different questions at each part of the journey. And I'll show you an example of this in just a second. As I said, we're going to use their own words, reflect demonstrated behavior, right, as much as possible. We want to draw on our experience and our, and our customer validation. And it will include those objections and opportunities that we identified in the, in the persona profile, right? Those should all show up there. So just really quick, I'm going to add this in. If you have never sold the thing to a single customer, then here are some guidelines for how you might do this, right? This is specific to a very early-stage startup, so I want to make sure you guys get this. First of all, don't hesitate to stand in for them. If you are somebody who would buy your product, then you understand what's great about it, right? That's okay. I, I used to have a startup t-shirt that said, "Your mom is not a valid test market," and that's only true if your mom is not a person who would buy your product if it weren't yours. So really, like, it's OK to put yourself in that— in their shoes. Do the best you can. The next thing you're going to do is firsthand observations. If you have even a few customers, then you know what kind of questions they ask and what they care about. And then finally, finally, after you have built something out, then take it to a human for validation. If you go to a human for validation first, it becomes way too open-ended and it's really easy to get it wrong. Shall I stop here? Are there questions about this? Shall I keep going into the example?

I think let's go ahead and dig into the example a little bit, and I think some founders might have some questions, but please don't forget to put your questions in the chat for Lindsay. She's here to answer, you know, not just questions about marketing in general, but also if you have specific ones about your company too. So feel free to put those in as well.

Sure. Okay. So here's the example we're going to use. I call this the messaging matrix. This is Princess Leia's journey as she's considering a new kind of beer, right? We're— so, so in this example, we are a brewery, a specific one. You'll see. And her journey, this is obviously very simplified from your customer journey, but this is actually how this goes, right? At the beginning of her journey, she's like, I want to try something new.

What should I try?

She might be standing in the grocery store aisle. She might be bellied up to the bar, but in her head, she's like open to, I want to try something different.

Right.

And then when she sees what's available to her, her values kick in and she's like, hold on, I'm not going to support the empire with my money. So I need to make sure that this is an independent brewery. Right. After she's resolved that for herself, then it becomes about where can she get it? And then if it's wonderful, we get to the bottom of the funnel, which is actually the flywheel, right? And she's like, everybody needs to know about this because it's wonderful. And so that's— you can already start to see how the bottom connects to the top in that case. So when you're doing a journey, it's going to be a lot more complex than that, right? Because there are going to be many questions at each level. This is where the— this is a gross oversimplification, but it helps us Make it actionable. That's the point. So now it becomes about us. Who are we and why should they care, right? Maybe some of you will recognize this logo. This is the Stone Brewing Company logo. They are a really big, actually, independent brewery here in San Diego. Here's what I think their brand pillars are. They talk constantly about excellent ingredients, awards they've won, all of their crazy high standards. Consistent excellence is a huge part of their messaging, right? They are also fiercely independent, and they are one of the leaders in the independent brewery industry, right? They've got whatever, all of the logos, all of the associations. They love to talk nasty things about macrobreweries. In addition to being independent, they actually spend quite a lot of energy supporting other independent breweries. So one of the ways that this takes place is that they actually have a distribution company that doesn't just put their beer on the shelves, but puts other competitors' beer on the shelves. Because they truly believe that a rising tide raises all boats, right? So these are the stories that they're bringing to their marketing. Here's what I want you to see about them. Your brand pillars are limited in number, right? They are not about what you do. They're about the why and the how. They are authentic. If they're not for real, man, it'll show. They won't work. And when I say they have to be meaningful to your audience, I don't mean like emotional tug on your heartstrings meaningful. What I mean is that it needs to be like literally an idea that they care about. Like it means something, right? That's all. And then for internal use only. This is not marketing copy for sure. Stone has never published that thing. This is just me reading their marketing, right? Lots of, lots of brand pillars are really easy to see. McDonald's, right? Cheap, fast, consistent. That's easy. But not everybody has pillars that are that easy to see. So here's what's going to happen. If we understand our audience and we know what makes them tick, we know what they care about, and we have our brand pillars identified correctly, we really know who we are and what we have to offer, then what we're going to see is those things will match. They'll match in very specific ways. Here's what it looks like. If you're Princess Leia, Let's be honest, you don't care if it's an independent brewery if the beer is no good. So excellence is actually the thing she cares about the most in her awareness stage, right? That, that seems very, very clear like that. Again, at that point, like she doesn't really care about your values if your beer is no good. So start with that story. Then when her values kick in, that's when you meet her with the story about how independent we are. And then when she's asking about where do we get it, that's when we hit her with the story about how we support all these other breweries and we're out all over the community, you can find us anywhere, right? And then finally, when she is ready to talk about us, we want to cue her up with stories about how great our beer is and how we are independent, right? Because that's, that's going to be the thing that makes, makes the difference for her. That values alignment is really precious. So I have done this with B2B, B2C, nonprofit, pre-revenue, like you name it, I don't care what your model is. This is, this works if you know who you are and you know who you're talking to. Rachel, you got a question?

Yes. So Tunji put in the chat, if, if who are we and why should they care in regards to that question, she's like, what if we, the startup, are brand new, especially the who are we question? How, how should a founder go about sort of understanding pillars and discovering those very early on?

Yeah, I have, I have a really great, like, there's some very simple design thinking exercises that you can do. It really is about focusing on the why you're doing what you're doing and the how you're approaching it. Right. If you can answer those two questions, that will basically fill in the rest of it because you have to be careful about the what, because if it's the what, then you're competing on, you know, cheeseburgers. That's not what you want to compete on, right? So focus. So the easiest way to do it is like brainstorm all the reasons you're building this business, all of the folk, all of the outcomes you're aiming for, all of the feedback and testimonials, anything, any thoughts that you can gather, and then sort it into themes, right? You can, this is one of the exercises we do in a really hands-on way when you work closely with me is like that process of identifying the brand pillars. But that's like the short, short version of how to do it.

Awesome. Hopefully that was helpful, Tunji. Thanks so much, Lindsay.

Yeah. So this is a sweet moment, right? Now we have this insight where what we understand is that all of our awareness channels only need to say one thing. They need to say, they need to talk about how excellent Arbeera is. That's it. If all of our awareness channels talk about excellence, No matter what those channels are, we know that we will hit the mark with Princess Leia, with this persona, right? All of our end, all of our consideration channels, they only need to talk about independence because we've already got the excellence thing dialed. She knows that. Now she's on to the next thing. Our content can move on to the next thing too. So this is one of those ways that you can see the strategy getting connected to the tactics in a real way. Okay. Now, here's where we're going. How do we reach them, right? This is your channel strategy. So here's what we're gonna think about. Existing behaviors. Do not try to suck your audiences into places where they are not already there. Like you don't have the time and resources. By all means, when you have, you know, $50,000, $100,000, $500,000 a month to spend on branding, then you can build an audience wherever you want. Until you're there, you gotta, you gotta stick to where they're at, right? You're gonna leverage your organizational strengths. Think about the type of business that you have, the type of audience you have, and like, where's the sweet spot? Is video an easy thing for you to produce? Is it impossible? Is it like, where, where are these things? Don't make it too hard on yourself. Repurpose and reuse content forever. This is the thing I talk about on LinkedIn a lot. If you're interested, Just, we're too lazy. Be lazy. And then we're going to look for overlaps, right? Because Princess Leia is just one persona. We've got Chewie, we've got Rey, we've got a whole bunch of other people that are also buying our beer. We can't, we probably don't have the resources to speak specifically to each one of them on a different channel. So we're gonna have to look for some overlaps and, and do some blending there. And that helps us be more efficient. So for Princess Leia, her channel strategy looks like this, right? She's going to hear about us on Instagram, in theory. This is only one, right? There's a bunch of different channels, just like there's probably a bunch of different questions, but simplify. So she's going to hear about us on Instagram, and then she's going to do a search to validate that independence that she's looking for before she becomes a customer, right? What we want her to do while she's there is look at the Product Finder, because that will tell us, that's the signal that will tell us that she has an intention to buy. And so she doesn't see it the first time, then we'll hit her with some retargeting ads and bring her back and get her excited that way. And then once she's got the beer and it's wonderful, then we're going to incentivize her to get back on Instagram and talk about it. And you can check me on this. If anybody has access to a Stone beer bottle or beer can, what you will see is an Instagram handle and a hashtag. They're very intentional about making sure the bottom of that funnel connects to the top of that funnel. That's what they're trying to do there. Okay. But that's only the first step, right? We've got our channel strategy. Now is about the efficiency. Now is about the flywheel. And again, I could talk about the flywheel forever. I'm going to try to keep it concise, right? The point here is that we're going to reflect actual user behavior, right, on all the channels. We are going to line up calls to action really intentionally, and I'll show you like what that looks like for Princess Leia. Allow for entrances anywhere, right? Leia can walk into a bar, Leia can bring a friend, go to an event. There's lots of different ways that people can get in, get into the Flywheel, right? And then the secret, the don't miss this one thing, is engage existing customers to create new ones in every possible creative way you can, intentionally and over and over again. Everybody knows your cheapest customer is your old customer. Your second cheapest customer is an introduction from your old customer. So leverage that intentionally all the time. Finally, don't lose sight of the fact that we're not trying to build an email list. We are actually trying to build a business. So focus on the business outcomes of your marketing. Don't get caught up on followers. Here's how we do it in the context of the matrix, right? So for Princess Leia, what we're looking at is if we, we are doing a great job at the, um, at social media, right, at the awareness channel, then all of the awareness channels should have the same call to action on it, which is go learn more on our website, right? That's what we want her to do because that is the signal that we have observed that means that she's engaging with our, our brand and is going to learn more. So we get her to the website. All of the calls to action on the website are get your hands on our beer, right? That's the next step. So what we're doing is very intentionally laying out the stepping stones right? And as I said, when you get a beer bottle in your hand, it's the call to action there is post on Instagram. So here's how I think about it. A Japanese garden has these sections of it, like most of the time the paving stones are either like rocks or poured concrete or bricks, and they're very tightly bound together, and it's this lovely like linear pattern, right? And then there will be these moments where the stones are uneven. They're different sizes, they're different shapes, they're different elevations. And you really have to keep your eyes on your feet in order to not fall, right? And that's an intentional thing that they did because when you get to the end of the pathway and you have the ability to lift up your eyes, you are rewarded with this glorious vision, right? It's a view that they have crafted. So they've basically hidden it from you by keeping your eyes on your feet. That's what these next steps are. If you understand what your audience cares about at each step of the way, you can lay out those paving stones so that when they get to the end of the path, it's such a quick and easy yes to engage with you in the way that you're asking for. That's the, that's the process that we're building here. Okay. Last thing. How do we know it's working? Right now we got to measure it. It's so easy at this point because we've got these, these rows set up, right? We know metrics have to be quantifiable. We know that we want to make sure we're connecting the behavior with the intended outcome. Keep it simple. And my advice is— your, your investors will feel differently about this— my advice is track growth instead of discrete goals. I like percentage gains on a regular basis, right? Make sure you're getting better all the time. Because if you set up discrete goals, then that can muddy the waters in terms of what are you trying to accomplish, right? Again, we're not here to build an email list. That might be part of it, but that's not the business for most people. So here's the deal, right? If our awareness channel is doing its job, then one number will tell us that. How many new follows do we have, right? That's the new opportunity that we have generated through our content. Easy. If our consideration content is doing its job, we will see an increase in branded searches, period, and visits from search. Like, so straightforward. You can evaluate these things. And the best part about it is, as you're evaluating these, you can see which ones are changing at different rates. So if you see all of the channels are working and then there's one that's not working, you're like, okay, it's that content. It's that part of the journey where, where things start to fall apart. So this becomes so straightforward to understand from the point of view of the person who's executing it, because they know why, they know what calls to action they're putting out there. They know what is the purpose of them. We're going to simplify it to make it actionable.

That's the work here. Okay.

Last piece. This kind of looks like a calendar. I call it the generic month. Plan, right? This is the part where we hold ourselves accountable for taking that plan and getting it out into the world. So here's what it looks like. It's exactly what it says on the tin, right? Generic month plan. So it's every month. It doesn't change. It's realistic. It's a commitment, right? It only shows what you need it to show. Paints a picture, timing, delegation, ready? We only update it when there are new opportunities, new resources, when it needs to change. So the point of what we're going to do here is basically say, okay, everything that recurs on a monthly or weekly basis or daily basis, we're going to put it onto a calendar and that way we can plan for it. And that way we can hold ourselves or others accountable for executing it. We know exactly what we are trying to do. Here's what it looks like.

Whoops.

Here's what it looks like for if Stone is trying to get to Princess Leia, right? So notice a couple of things about this. You'll see like the social media, Leia and Chewie, right? Attract on social, right? So what I've got is like, here are the channels we're talking about, here's the outcome. So that tells me for sure that I know excellence is the story because I know that's the attract brand pillar. And Leia and Chewie are the personas that we're trying to reach. You guys might not know this, Rey, Jedi's in training, they're not allowed to be on social media. So that's not an access point for her. So we need to make sure that we're engaging with her in other ways, right? Notice that we are at the end of the week mostly focusing on this audience that is going to be buying beer and attending events in bars and in breweries. Right? That's not an accident. Notice that we have an email set up on Thursday, 2 days before our monthly brewery event, right? So all of these things are sort of engineered thoughtfully to make sure that we always have— we know what's going to be happening and when and how so that we can make sure we've got the right content going into those, um, into those newsletters or social media or whatever. What else? Oh, notice that there's a report. We look at the numbers every, every month. That's intentional. This is part of the marketing work, right? Articles get published on a separate cadence from the email so that we don't ever feel too overwhelmed. All of these things are just about making sure that you've thought about when it's going to get done so that it becomes a priority. Needs to get done. That's it. Those are your 7 questions. That is your process. I flew through that content. Rachel, I hope there are some questions.

Yes, we definitely have some questions. So the first one of which is coming from Layla. She said, when we are new, should we only focus on just one persona or multiple?

Such a good question. So if you have an idea of who your different personas are, then my advice in terms of prioritizing is to start with the one that is gonna be the, the just biggest bang for your buck. Who is the widest audience that is the easiest to reach that will generate the most impact? If you're not sure about that, then I actually might develop— when I'm working with clients, the way that we approach that question is actually to, to build the personas and the market and the messaging matrix for everyone that we think is a persona. And then based on that, we can see how much work is it going to be to speak with this person or with this person or how, right? Then you can sort of start to prioritize because What you might learn is that one of them is going to be really easy, but you have to do the act, you know, you have to do the work to understand how easy or hard they're going to be or how important they're going to be to the business.

Right.

When you talk about the difference between referral sources and actual customers or customers that won't generate more customers because of some of their persona quirks.

Right.

So there's all those sorts of things I like doing, like doing all the planning and then evaluating there where you think the biggest opportunities will Okay, great.

And then we've got some follow-up questions on that, which is when you're— when a lot of our founders in the audience are at the earliest of stages, so how can they use data to further identify and narrow their target audience if they're still in the process of figuring out who these personas are?

Yeah, this is hard. And I, you know, I don't use I don't use mailing lists. I don't use big datasets. I use human interaction like on social media or on, or like actual in-person when that was available to us and when it will be again. Right. So just go out into the world and do some searches. See what you can find. Like there's a lot of people on social media putting a lot of public stuff out there. And I think There's not there to me. I would rather have actual human profiles that I understand what motivates them and get those validated than have a big dataset that says, oh, this is what people spend, right? Or this is what people want to buy or whatever, because then if you're missing the empathy, then you're missing an opportunity.

Got it. And then also along those lines, Do you have any specific suggestions for customer development? So a lot of our founders will do customer development, and that may look like, you know, like you're saying, talking to people on social media or in person. Do you have any specific strategies that can lead to gathering more data to further define these audiences and these personas beyond the demographics, right down to like the actual buyer's journey and the customer behavior?

Yeah, I mean, that sort of speaks to what I, what I said earlier, which is always bring them something, bring them a competitor, bring them a problem, bring them something that gives them something to react to. Even if it's like, I love like testing wireframes, right? Because people, if your wireframes are well labeled with the exact, with the right content, like it can literally be a piece of paper where you're like, hey, solve this problem, right? So there's a lot of very, very low-budget ways to do that.

I love that idea of wireframes though. We've suggested that a lot to founders, which is like, if you have a landing page or something that you can, you know, sort of understand how people are using it and understand why they're not clicking on the button that you thought they would or why, You know, what about, you know, your pillars or your marketing actions are missing that is not, you know, getting them to the end result that you—

Yeah, I think it really, for me, it's the work of doing that, that customer journey in, in their own words, understanding how they approach solving those problems for themselves or how they avoid solving those problems for themselves or whatever that looks like. Once you get inside their head, um, and, and start to like really, really lay it out with a lot of details, lots of things open up. When I work with clients all the time where it's like, oh, this is a feature we didn't know we needed, and it's a thing they're asking for, and so obviously we need to build that. Or this is a whole bunch of content we're not even addressing that we know we need to. And so really like getting, getting super detailed on all of the ways that they evaluate their own problems and understand their own, use their own language to evaluate the opportunities to resolve those problems. Like that, that's just, it's gold. It's so good.

It really is. It's really helpful to understand, you know, and to talk like, you know, at Founder Institute, we're almost 12 years old at this point, and we still talk to founders every day, one-on-one, to just understand What brought them here? What are their top questions still? And to try to, you know, continue to develop solutions for their pain points, right? As founders.

Yeah. And I, you know what, I just want to add to that really quickly because there are so many, especially early stage, that like they have some personas or they maybe have done some of this journey work or some of these brand pillars. And I, I want to encourage you to sort of realign those to this process. Because if you— I've never seen a business that has done that journey in that way before I talk to them. And that is so important because if you just, if you have the personas that you have without doing that deep journey work, then it's not going to inform the rest of the tactics and you'll miss an opportunity to get really well-informed on your channel strategies. So I will— like a lot of people come to me and are like, oh, I've already done this. And I'm like, have you?

Yes. And what I love about the matrix too is that inherently marketing is really overwhelming, particularly when you're a founder and you have 20 other jobs that you have to do as well as be the marketer for your company. And so putting it in a structure and then just working off that structure to get things done can be really, really helpful. Yeah, we have one more question from Rachel about personas, and she said, how do we define the personas? What about, what about them are we qualifying? How do we know if they're different enough to be separate?

So, and that actually speaks to this other thing about demographics that I didn't address earlier. So it becomes about their motivation. It becomes about why do they purchase. Or how often, right? It's about that relationship. And the— in fact, I think today on LinkedIn, the post was about the call to action. It is the call to action that differentiates them because some of your customers will be buying for as a gift. Some of your customers will be giving, will be, you know, making donations one time. Some of them will, right? All of these things. Some of them are never gonna be your customers, but they're a persona because they introduce you to customers, right? So to me, I sort of define it with like, what is their motivation? And then what is their call to action? And if those two things are the same, they're probably in the same persona. Like you might need to differentiate, you know, demographics. Obviously there's lots of demographic patterns associated with, you know, social media usage and technology and stuff. But I would be very careful. In fact, in, in the detailed teaching that I do, I explicitly say do not differentiate on demographics unless we see it reflecting in other ways motivation and behavior. So I, yeah, really, really focus on like the, the motivation. What do they need from us? And call to action, what are we offering them?

Okay, great. And we've got some, some more questions on this, which I'm excited about. So Anne also said, should we prioritize— and this kind of touches on something you, you said, which is that there are people who are bringing other people, and then there are people who are your customers. So Anne's question is, should we prioritize the user or the client, the one who pays us? For example, is a free mobile app with an ad business model. So Is it the person who's clicking through the ad or is it simply the people on the app that are helping it grow?

Yes. Well, so in that particular— so I have two answers. In that particular case, you have a tipping point problem, right, where you have to have enough, enough users to even be able to sell the ad revenue or the ad space. Right. So there's, so there's a chicken or the egg thing. And the opportunity there, I think, is that every, every visitor should have a great experience, right? That's the goal, is ultimately that you just, you don't want to, um, you don't want to miss opportunities by not being perfect for the small audience, so that as the audience grows, you're continuing to attract the right people. Um, that is an indicator of a larger, more general piece of advice, which is it has to start with a product, right? If that beer is garbage, the flywheel will not work. So it has to start with the product and the cust— the— at the— from the moment of conversion and usage and adoption, like that needs to be the top priority. Because if you don't get that right, you're gonna have like nothing else is gonna be efficient. So prioritize that. And then once you've got that dialed, you get your, your referral channel set up next, right? That's the next thing. And then you work up through the channels from there. So here, so like, first you work on the consideration stuff, and then you build the awareness channels. Uh-oh, I just saw lightning. So, because here's what you don't want, right? You don't want a leaky funnel. You don't want to spend a bunch of time and money on social media channels that are going to bring a bunch of people to your website and have that website not be answering the questions that they need to have answered. You don't want to lose that opportunity. It's like the metaphor I always use is if you're going to send invitations to a party, make sure you've got food and booze and music and toilet paper. Otherwise, no one will ever come back to your party, right? Those invitations will never work again. So make sure you get the real stuff done and then work out from there.

Awesome. And then kind of switching over gears a little bit to a B2B question, because we got a couple B2B questions pop in. So forgive me if I'm mispronouncing your name, but Said, when we are building a software for an enterprise developer, but they aren't paying for the software, the enterprise will target for marketing the enterprise decision maker or the developer. And then I would add to that also, you know, any specific tips or tricks on how to be more efficient in the B2B marketing sales cycle.

Yeah, I think that is a really interesting problem because it really does come down to like There's a lot of B2B models that operate on a referral is your first customer, right? Like, this is how HubSpot built their business. I would look at them because HubSpot started with, we are going to equip marketers to be better marketers, and then they're either going to adopt our software or they're like, they're, they're no one who is reading HubSpot's blog is also the decision maker who signs the check to buy HubSpot. right? Those people are either, they work for the people who sign the checks or the people who sign the checks are their clients. And so either way, what you see, what they did really successfully, right? Like these guys, they, they support content with solving problems for the individual that needs the tool. And then it becomes, you also set them up, by the way, you'll see this in your, in your journeys when you build them. Is that a lot of times in a B2B context, part of your work in marketing is equipping your entry audience to sell to the decision-maker audience. So you will end up doing things like writing sales PDFs that are actually not for your primary marketing audience. They are for her boss, right? And she's the one that, that will consume that PDF and decide whether or not to sign. So that's actually really what it is, is when you think about, again, you just go through the journey, what's important to them at each stage. And lots of times in B2B context, you see that the bosses don't even have the awareness and the consideration steps. It's like for them, there's like 2 questions at the consideration level, you answer those, and then you're in, and that's it. But there's a— that's really the process is to consider how all of, all of the different downstream motivations and questions it needs and meet them.

Yeah, HubSpot really won on the content strategy because there is not a marketing question you can ask on Google that a HubSpot article doesn't appear as one of the solutions. And so that definitely was a key piece of their growth for sure. So wonderful. When Zane said how to find the— how do you find the right marketing team for your early-stage startup? So as you're building your team out, Who should you look for? And especially if you're hiring one person, what skill set should, should they, should you look for?

You know what, I'm going back to my slides because I want to show you something. This, this generic month plan tells you what you need to hire for because it's got your social media calendar on here. It's got your email newsletter. However this thing shakes down, right? You, you see when, when you put this plan together, you know what the inventory is, you know what you're capable of or what you can commit to. And then it becomes very easy to quantify, right? Oh, I need somebody who's going to be on these channels these days a week. I need somebody who's going to do X, Y, and Z. It— there is always a need for great content creators. Like there is one thing, because I don't do that for my clients anymore, right? So I have built a network of marketers who are freelancers and agencies and stuff like that, and I refer work out all the time, and it's very difficult. It's just— there's just not enough hands to go around because people grow up and they go do other things, right? So that's sort of how that goes. So I don't have any real advice for, um, for hiring. That is, that is not my area. But I will say that in terms of understanding clearly being able to delegate and communicate what needs to be done and what it is you're looking for, this can serve as a really nice sort of scope of work. If you're going to like test a freelancer, you can give them a, you know, give them a couple of months and say, this is what we're going to do or whatever, however that works. I'll just throw in one other unsolicited thing. If you're considering unpaid, offering unpaid internships, I'd like to encourage you not to do that because the only people who can take unpaid internships are those who have quite a lot of privilege already. And if you have business, if you have get business value from their work, then ethically, I think it makes sense to pay them for it. So that's just, that's like one tiny little soapbox for me.

Um, and I think that that's, that it's super important to think about too. Like, I love that you laid it out with like, this is what you need to do. So this is who you need to hire because The hardest part about a marketing plan is executing on said marketing plan consistently and efficiently. And I will say, as a marketer myself as well, it is super hard to do that. And but consistency is one of the, you know, main keys to success when it comes to marketing.

Absolutely.

I love that advice. So, um, Cara Moco asks, how can I engage existing customers to create new ones? So at the end of that flywheel, when you wanna bring people back around, Instagram was the example with Stone. So what are some other examples founders can learn about?

Mm-hmm, yeah, so the process that I would take is to understand when are the moments that your customers appreciate you the most. What are those moments for them? When do they understand your value? When do they have the light bulb of like, oh, this is amazing, or oh, I'm so excited about this, right? Is it after they click buy and they get an incredibly delightful email that confirms the purchase? Is it like, when are the moments? Is it, you know, I work with a purpose-driven software company. For them, it's like after The 20th hour of use is when the light bulb goes off on their users. And so we set up a system where, like, after the 20th hours, the database triggers an API that sends an email that invites them to tell their friends. Right. And it's like, it's very clear. So it really is like, look again from their buyer's journey of like, what's the difference between somebody who purchases and somebody who won't shut up about you? Right. Somebody who really becomes a huge, a huge fan. Find those relationships, find those moments, find those channels, and then just make more offers, right? Be like, if you love this, tell your friends, be super specific, right? Our happiest customers are X, Y, and Z. Our happiest customers solved this, right? Be super specific. Take all of the guesswork out of it, both on the front end of your marketing, but also in the referral channel is just like, Be on the nose. Don't make anybody wonder if they know the right person. Make it clear whether or not they do.

I love that you're, you know, bringing everybody. It's, it's, you make it super easy for them, as you said, because, you know, customers want that easy journey, that very frictionless journey as they, you know, are working with your brand. And founders, if you're struggling to kind of understand anything about this and like how to find the right person, I would say like definitely think about what brand right now is something that you love. It's something you'll tell your friends about, something that you'll evangelize for, as Aja just said in the chat, right? If there's a brand that you are already a customer of that in some way, use that same thought process to build out something.

Exactly. Yeah, do you know, Rachel, that sort of reminds me of something else, which is that like For some reason, we tend to think of marketing that we receive as very different from marketing that we put out. And you just sort of nailed it where like a lot of this can be like, just take a step back and look at the marketing that you receive. See the ads that you don't click on. See the emails that you don't open and think to yourself, why don't I open those? And then you can put yourself in your customer's shoes and say, well, they don't open them for probably a similar reason. So how can I overcome those? right? Just take a little step back and say, because we all take it for granted, the marketing that we consume every day. And I think that just a little, just a little pivot to help us understand that we are, we are being marketed to constantly. We can learn from that.

Absolutely. Like Lindsay and I are both dog people. You saw my dog in the background earlier and Olive's in the background as well. And And so like I've noticed that Subaru, the car company, is incredibly targeting dog people. Like they go after dog people. They are a dog car company. It is one of their pillars. And so you can start to notice things that are pretty interesting as well as you start to put on like a marketing hat and use that to observe.

Guess what kind of car I drive?

Oh my gosh, really? Oh, that's— That's hilarious. That was just an example. That's wonderful. So see, marketing works, everybody. We can definitely make this work for your brand too. So wonderful. So kind of along those lines, we've talked about data a lot of times and so how data is informing our marketing strategy. So what Oliver wants to know, are there any marketing tracking tools that you recommend, any sort of platforms or things like that that you're using to gather data?

It's a really good question. I don't do a lot of that anymore. So, uh, I mean, I obviously like Google Analytics is sort of one of my cornerstones and Search Console. Uh, I am a Moz subscriber. I pay HubSpot. Um, full disclosure, they pay me also. I'm a HubSpot partner. Um, But I don't, I don't get too heavy into the deep analytics tools. And honestly, if you're, if you're here for this talk, those tools are probably sufficient, right? Like, it's fine. Like, start with the free tools. The way that I have my reports set up— no kidding, again, I'll go back to this, this— the way that I have my report set up for myself is a direct reflection of this, where my— I put together a Google slide deck that's like, okay, what are my awareness channels? And I go into those awareness channels and I take screen grabs of the numbers and I put it into the doc. And then I write some notes of observations of like what might've caused those numbers to change, what changes I made month over month that would, that would adjust those numbers. And then I use— so Google Slides, My favorite thing. This is what's here. And then I save it, like give it a new name, right? This is, this is January marketing report. And then I just go in and update the same thing and do it again the next month and save it as February marketing report. So it's, um, at this level, right? The thing that you're trying to do is make sure that nothing is broken. You are trying to identify problems and opportunities. And basically, if you're, if you're committing to consistent execution, all the numbers will go up and to the right, at like slower or faster, as long as, as long as you're committing to this and doing a plan. So then it really just becomes about like, where are we missing an opportunity? What do we want to try? How do we think that's going to move this number?

Absolutely. Like there are a lot of free and low-cost tools that can help get you by very early on. But I would say if you don't have Google Analytics on your site yet, you should probably go do that right away after this call because they're incredibly informative and do really help you understand who's actually, you know, visiting your website, who, who, who are you reaching on awareness and consideration, and then how are they moving through your site as well.

Yeah, it's the, it's really that piece of like the, the understanding why you're looking at the number, right? It's like what we're looking at here on the screen. It's like, well, if our awareness channels are doing their job, then we will see new followers. And then that's basically all you have to do, right? If you don't see new followers, then you have to try a new approach to your content. If you do see new followers, keep up the good work. You know, it's pretty, pretty straightforward. And that's by design so that we can actually like get some information that's useful.

Absolutely. Okay, so really quickly, let's shift gears a little bit to social media marketing. So, Ursula and Diana asked, I used Instagram promotion, but unfortunately I couldn't reach more followers. How can I increase my sales and followers via Instagram? And I think this came up because it was one of the specific examples as well. But any thoughts on Instagram? And if not Instagram, you know, just one social media channel in general, how can, how can they better optimize?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's, to me, is I would go back and make sure that Instagram is a conversion channel for you, because it is for some organizations, but it's not for everybody, right? Lots of people have a much longer funnel than that. So what is, what is considered a win on Instagram, right? For Stone, it's a new follower. If they put a campaign on Instagram that does anything other than try to grow followers, they're wasting their money. Right? Because nobody, nobody clicks from Instagram to get beer. That's just like, at least in the United States, that's not how the world works. Right? You can't do it that way. So it's, so it's like not a thing. So for me, it goes back to the journey and understand what are the questions they're asking as they go through their buyer's journey? What are the channels they're on while they're using it? And if it is, I'm on Instagram and I'm thinking about this and clicking buy, then great. Then, and you know, if you didn't get the results you want from it, then I would, I would go back to the, um, the questions and objections at that, at that part of their journey. Make sure that your messaging is aligned with what we know they care about. Right. But it's also totally possible. It happens all the time. People put a campaign on social media. You know the metaphor I use? I have like so many metaphors. I'm just going to keep doing this. You know the metaphor I use? It's proposing on a first date. For lots of organizations, social media advertising amounts to proposing on a first date where it's like, actually, I need to see who you are. I need to know who you're about. I need to get a little bit more information before I want to make this commitment. If you just come right at me with, you've never heard of me before, but now I'm going to ask you for a commitment. That's— that can be a bit much. So, so take your time to build the, build the funnel, build the journey and meet them where they are the whole, the whole way.

Absolutely. And kind of along those same lines to think about what mindset they're in, you know, when it comes to channels as well.

So, totally.

Mihaila asks any thoughts on using LinkedIn for B2B products, which is why I brought that up, because people are in a networking mindset on LinkedIn. And I'd love for you to elaborate on your thoughts. Thoughts there too, Lindsay.

Yeah, I mean, I love LinkedIn, if you haven't noticed, for my own, for my own purpose. The, the mindset thing that Rachel said, I think is really right on here because a lot of people like I had a, I saw an ad for jewelry on LinkedIn and I'm still mad about it because it's like, yeah, sure, I'm a woman and I'm on LinkedIn and you can make some assumptions about my income or my, you know, whatever my job position because I'm on LinkedIn. And that's an easy way to target me. But I am not thinking about buying jewelry when I'm on LinkedIn. That doesn't make any sense. So, so just because your audience is there is not the same as that's where they want to hear from you. So it becomes about the mindset. It becomes about like, what am I trying to accomplish while I'm here on LinkedIn? I am trying to build my professional ability and network, right? I'm trying to learn and I'm trying to, to grow my contacts. And so if your product meets that need, either one of those needs, then it absolutely has a place on LinkedIn, right? Then you absolutely should figure out who you're talking to and how in order to engage them on that platform.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, when you have a multichannel strategy, which most people do, you can say the same thing many different ways across many different channels. And kind of along those lines, Lavender wanted to know how many marketing or social media platforms should we choose? How many should, should an early-stage founder sort of choose and stick to at this stage?

Yeah, that, that goes back to this situation here, right? You should prioritize. So one of the things that I recommend is actually going through the work of figuring out how much time you can commit to on a weekly or monthly basis, putting it on your calendar, and then seeing what are the opportunities to fill that time. So, you start with the one, with the channel that is the most important to reaching the most audiences, right? Whatever that is. Like, actually, I'm gonna interrupt myself. I'm back up. First, build all the one-time assets. Build all your evergreen stuff first, because that sort of speaks to that, like starting closer to the product and working up the funnel, right? Once you get to the point where you're implementing social media and newsletters and these sorts of things, what you really want to do is add them on one at a time, as you know, you have capacity to do them. Because what, what you really want to avoid is starting on 5 things, realizing you don't have the capacity to keep all 5 of those things going. It is better not to do it than to do it inconsistently. When I find, and you'll see this on a bunch of my social media channels, a bunch of my clients, when we decide we're not going to be active on a channel, we put a sign up, we change the image that says, we're not active here. You want to see what we're up to? Go find Lindsay on LinkedIn. Absolutely classic San Diego weather. So, Yeah, so like just start, start with one thing that you know you have to do. Then if you have more time, add another thing and then add another thing, but make the commitment to get it done because inconsistency will kill you faster than inaction.

It hurts.

It's like it breaks, breaks a little bit of trust from people who don't know you.

Absolutely. That is, if you were going to take one thing away today, I couldn't agree more. Like it's, it can really, you know, be damaging to be really inconsistent. And so, okay, awesome. So, so Lindsay, you've been wonderful. I think the founders have learned so much from you today. How can they find you if you want to share a little bit more about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So there's my email. If you would like your own copy of this, of this slideshow, it's actually a link to the Google Doc. You just shoot me an email. You want to find me on LinkedIn, that's how to do it. And then I am starting a small group sprint on April 8th where we work through this in weekly sessions as small groups. And so that if you're interested in getting a little bit more guidance and a little bit more accountability on getting this stuff right, that's what I can offer.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Lindsay. You've been a wealth of information for us today. We really appreciate your time and taking questions from the founders. Thank you to everyone who joined us. I think it's time for me to take my dogs out. Hi, buddy. All right, everybody, have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you so much for joining us.