Marketers are often short on time, especially marketers at startups. Since startup marketers are also held responsible for an impossibly broad array of disciplines, we desperately need a better way to prioritize.
It’s relatively simple. There are activities in marketing that provide repeatable, scalable, highly leveraged results. Bandwidth-constrained marketers should prioritize these activities each day, week and month.
This is not to contradict Paul Graham’s advice to “do things that don’t scale.” That advice is timeless and valuable. In a marketer’s world, that may mean replying thoughtfully and in a personalized fashion to each inbound inquiry or conducting customer discovery interviews with the product team.
But when you’re done with that each day, go down the list in this priority order:
Owned Media
The reason we start with owned media in the media order of operations is that it doesn’t make much sense to try to get earned media (press) or buy media until you feel like you are making the most of your owned media. Otherwise, you’re wasting your ad spend. Strong product-led brands can spend almost nothing on paid media because they’ve done such a good job on owned and earned media.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO is one of the most highly leveraged activities in all of marketing. If you can attain a top-three organic position for an important keyword phrase, you’ll likely be able to harvest big rewards for weeks or months.
2. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): CRO is also highly leveraged. It indicates better targeting, better product-market fit, and it results in improved cash flow. Your business can leverage the benefits of compounding revenue growth sooner. I list CRO in the owned media section because, while it spans owned and paid media, you’ll be able to move the needle most effectively in owned media, using things like more personalized onboarding communications.
3. Content: This one is tricky. It’s not highly leveraged, until it is. As most bloggers or podcasters will tell you, the audience doesn’t grow right away. It requires the patience to toil away for weeks or months with no visible results, until finally, you achieve critical mass.
Earned Media
The reason that earned media comes second is that, once you feel comfortable with the state of your owned media — and you think that your story is an authentically interesting one — getting press coverage can be a lot more cost-effective and persuasive than buying attention via paid media.
4. Referrals And Word-Of-Mouth: While not exactly “media,” this traffic is certainly earned and can be potent. Just make sure that your referral program has as much attribution data built in as possible.
5. Press Outreach: If your story is an interesting one, don’t be shy about pitching it. Be realistic about how interesting the story is, though. If you do catch the attention of a journalist, be prepared to be transparent. The journalist and their audience will appreciate that.
Paid Media
I find that this is the least-leveraged of the three main media types. Teams are lured to it because of the instant gratification and addiction to data, even if they know how rampant digital ad fraud is. That said, if you have solid attribution reporting and can confidently calculate a positive return on ad spend (ROAS) per campaign, go for it.
6. Paid Search: Paid search is one of the most leveraged forms of paid media. Since Google is clearly the dominant search volume source, I find that you really only need to focus on Google Search. You can automatically copy over your Google Search structure to Microsoft Search, however, making it easy to advertise on both networks.
7. Paid Social: These days, your brand’s organic reach on social is a fraction of what it used to be. The good news is that paid social is still a cost-effective way to acquire new customers, especially if your story and user experience are buzz-worthy.
8. Out-Of-Home (OOH) Advertising Or Radio/Podcasts: Depending on your objectives and audiences, OOH and radio/podcasts can be highly effective forms of advertising, and the ad mediums are continuing to grow. Don’t assume that OOH is only for large-scale campaigns. I’ve seen many startups taking OOH into the 21st century and making it affordable on a broader range of budgets.
After these three main media types, work on channel development. This may take the form of affiliate marketing or co-marketing partners. Much like a quality content strategy, channel development takes a long time to bear fruit. Done correctly, however, it can eventually bear a lot of fruit.
This same prioritization logic applies to which kinds of marketers a startup should hire as it grows. Hire a web developer with SEO expertise before you hire a paid media manager, for example. Start by hiring the skills that will lead you to repeatable, scalable, highly leveraged results. If you are looking for a jack-of-all-trades generalist, sometimes referred to as a “full-stack marketer,” make sure that generalist enjoys the more leveraged activities and doesn’t mind spending a lot of their time on them.
If you manage your marketing day according to these priorities, you can increase your productivity and improve the results for your brand. If you can take it a step further and convince the executive team to design the objectives and key results (OKRs) for the marketing team around these priorities (as well as customer outcomes), you may take your brand to the next level.