by MKT1 Newsletter

Over the past couple years writing newsletters and working with hundreds of founders and marketers, we’ve developed a fairly-comprehensive approach to building B2B marketing. At the risk of taking ourselves a bit too seriously, we are now calling this the “MKT1 Method”—because we love alliteration and this definitely is not a playbook.

So what better time to summarize the building blocks of the MKT1 Method than an end of year post? But more than that, we hope that this becomes an evergreen intro and summary to all of MKT1’s content. Something marketers can point founders to, marketing leaders can point their teams to, and marketers can use as a starting place when looking to level up their marketing strategy & leadership skillsets.

As a follow up to this newsletter, we are launching the MKT1 Guide in early 2024. We’re taking hundreds of hours of MKT1 course content, 25+ newsletters, and way too many Figma diagrams, and putting them all together into one easy to browse and search website.

It’s currently in beta and we will be prioritizing paid newsletter subscribers to get a sneak peak and founding member pricing. 

JOIN THE GUIDE WAITLIST

This newsletter includes:

• A video overview of the MKT1 Method. I walk through a handful of slides in ~20 mins (or 10 if you can handle me talking at 2x speed).
• A breakdown of the MKT1 Method in text form, complete with links to our relevant newsletters and frameworks.
• Access to the overview slides for paid subscribers. Use these slides as you wish, just be sure to credit us somewhere.

Thanks to our end of year sponsors…

We only include sponsors when we’ve received a positive recommendation from the MKT1 community or our portfolio companies.

Ten Speed

Ten Speed is a content optimization agency for early and growth-stage SaaS companies like Bitly, Workvivo, and Visible. We dive into your marketing strategy, find low-hanging fruit, and grow your awareness, engagement, and MRR with proven SEO strategies and revenue-focused content.

Why MKT1 recommends Ten Speed: We’ve been referring Ten Speed to our portfolio companies for a couple of years now—long before they decided to sponsor our newsletter. If you need a content agency that understands both fuel and engine, creates content that fits with your unique strategy, repurposes existing content, and/or scales SEO, reach out to Ten Speed.

MKT1 Discount: Mention MKT1 Newsletter to get $1,000 off your first month.

RevenueHero

RevenueHero is the easiest way for marketers to qualify and route leads to sales rep’s calendar, right in your demo request flow, in email sequences, and sales hand-offs. Marketers and sales teams love RevenueHero’s built-in meeting hand-off, routing logs, native integrations with the GTM stack, custom branding, and insights at every step of the conversion funnel.

Why MKT1 recommends RevenueHero: You can set the perfect marketing strategy using all the (extremely insightful) advice in this newsletter and launch the perfect campaigns on exactly the right channels, but if your prospects don’t convert it’s all for nothing. That’s where RevenueHero comes in—to help you improve conversion. We’ve been recommending RevenueHero since we wrote a newsletter on improving demo request flows a couple months back. So, if you don’t have a book a meeting step in your conversion flow, try RevenueHero.

Offer: Mention MKT1 for 15% off, for MKT1 subscribers who close by January 31, 2024Subscribe

MKT1 Method explainer video

In this video, I break down the 5 principles for building a more effective and impactful B2B startup marketing function. I detail mistakes startups frequently make which led to these principles, how to avoid these mistakes, and our best frameworks and newsletters related to each principle. By following these principles, you’ll be able to drive growth faster and more efficiently in 2024 and beyond.

If you’d prefer the text version of this, keep on reading.

Guide to the MKT1 Method

Principle 1: Build your own playbook

Mistake: Copying another company’s playbook

You cannot copy another company’s marketing strategy and expect it to work for your startup. No two companies have exactly the same audience, GTM motion, and advantages at the same stage and same moment in time. 

I especially see this mistake when startups look at much later stage companies with brand awareness and product awareness and try to emulate what they do. The messaging that works for them won’t work for you. The channels they use may not work at a different scale.

Example: Lately, I see a lot of people say well “Airbnb stopped doing performance marketing in favor of brand marketing—so we can too”. Here’s the thing—you are not Airbnb (yet?!).

Solution: Build your own playbook—use MKT1’s frameworks to help

Given this, you need to use frameworks to shape your own strategy and build a marketing plan that will work for you.

Once you figure out what works, I’m in full-support of creating internal playbooks for things like campaigns, events, going after new segments, etc. It’s copying and pasting external playbooks that you need to avoid.

Related newsletters & frameworks:

• 3 DRIVERS OF MARKETING STRATEGY: Strategy drivers include product marketing research on audience, ecosystem, and messaging; your GTM motion; and marketing advantages. Use these strategy drivers to shape your marketing plans instead of copying another company’s marketing playbook.
• MARKETING ADVANTAGES: Marketing advantages are dynamics in a company’s business, product, or market that inherently drive growth. Identify these advantages and then lean into these strengths to accelerate growth faster. 

Principle 2: Impact over activity  

Mistake: Random acts of marketing

Most startups fall into the random acts of marketing (R.A.M.™) trap. Doing random acts of marketing is the opposite of having a high-impact strategy. 

You throw things out at random to see what sticks. You do check the box style marketing work. You don’t follow a strategy based on your audience, GTM motion, and unique marketing advantages aka the 3 strategy drivers I mentioned above. 

When you’re doing RAM you don’t have a clear plan for hitting your goals—and only if you get very lucky can this work.

Solution: Go for impact

You simply can’t keep doing the same things or make incremental improvements and expect to have breakout growth. You need to make a plan that will work for your startup specifically, and then you need to place calculated bets on work that can cause step-change driving growth. 

You need to think in terms of short-term and long-term growth—and do things that will not only drive growth in the immediate but also in 6 months. 

You need to build the foundation and fly the plane at the same time at a startup. You need to determine how you think you’ll grow, set goals to hit that, and then follow these plans. You should only break these plans for a random of act of marketing when it truly makes sense—not because you saw a fun billboard you want to copy or your founder heard something on a podcast. (sorry founders, had to call you out here)

Related newsletters & frameworks:

• 4 HIGH-LEVEL WAYS TO GROW:  Determine your highest leverage way to drive growth each quarter from this list: go after new market segments, capture more of your current market segment, increase efficiency and conversion rates, and increase the value of each customer through pricing changes or expansion revenue. Then, figure out what goals make the most sense.
• SET 4 TYPES OF GOALS: There are 4 types of marketing goals: KPIs, project, experiment, and ops goals. Set goals in each category per quarter to help your team make room for activities that will help drive short and long term growth.
• THE GACCS BRIEF: The GACCS is a simple yet flexible framework for writing a marketing brief. Use it to outline your goals, audience, channels, creative, and stakeholders for campaigns. Do this before you do the actual work to make sure the work is worth doing, to drive alignment on why and how you’re doing it, and to makes reviewing work easier and more productive.

Principle 3: Balance (and combine) fuel and engine 

Mistake: Fuel & engine not working together

Many marketing teams operate in silos. Oddly, this can even happen with a team of just 1 marketer. That marketer comes in with a specialty, be it product marketing, content marketing or growth marketing and leans heavily into that thing.

Startups usually over-index on either fuel and engine. Meaning, they spend way too much time creating fuel and sacrifice building out a good engine, or vice versa. This happens through hiring the wrong mix of people and by choosing the wrong mix of marketing activities. 

And even if you spend an appropriate amount of time in each area, some startups build fuel for the wrong engine or audience, and vice versa. Or dots aren’t connected across fuel activities (content and creative) and engine activities (growth channels).  

Solution: Create the right fuel and the right engine for your audience 

To build a successful marketing function you need to produce great fuel and craft a well-running engine. Your fuel needs to be custom-made for your engine and your engine needs to be custom-made for your fuel.

This analogy is the simplest way I’ve found to throw away the marketing jargon, ever-changing marketing job titles, and complicated frameworks and explain the mix of things you need to create an efficient marketing function. 

If you keep the fuel-engine concept in mind, you’ll get the mix of marketing activities correct, the right set of people on your marketing team, and high-impact work out the door.

Related newsletters & frameworks:

• COMBINE FUEL & ENGINE: Your fuel is copy, content, and design. Your engine is channels, distribution, ops, and analytics. Balance fuel and engine activities to drive impact. And make sure you have feedback loops between fuel and engine marketers—this ensures you are not only building the right fuel for the right enginem but also optimizing and getting better over time.
• FUNNEL MAPPING: To build the proper foundation for both your fuel and eneinge, you need to map your funnel. Without this, it’s impossible to set up full-funnel reporting to know what’s working, to do bottom-up forecasting, to set clear KPI goals for your work, and identify who you are targeting.
• WRITE POSITIONING & ADD TO YOUR HOMEPAGE:  Positioning is the foundation of your product story. Know what you are comparing your product to (an existing product, a mix of internal processes, etc) first. Then write succinct statements for each of these 4 things: What problem do you solve for your audience? Who is your product primarily for? What is your product? Why is it better than the alternative you just defined? Then, make sure the hero section of your homepage contains all of this info (again, very succinctly) and is the source of truth for your high-level positioning both externally and internally.
• RUN CAMPAIGNS: Campaigns are initiatives that span across fuel and engine, typically for a specific audience segment over a defined period of time. Campaigns come in many types, including events, ABM campaigns, product launches, content distribution, ad campaigns, and lifecycle marketing campaigns. Plan campaigns in advance to have the best chance at driving meaningful growth and avoiding the RAM trap.

Principle 4: Marketing orgs are not sales orgs
(and are more similar to product orgs)

Mistake: Running marketing like sales

Many founders, sales leaders, product leaders, and even marketers themselves think B2B marketing teams are just a service organization to sales—marketing only exists to generate leads this quarter. Marketing is then underutilized and limited in scope.

When you build a marketing org like a sales org, you limit the potential impact of your entire GTM org—across sales, customer success, and marketing. 

Many leaders from other teams don’t recognize that marketing orgs are closer to product orgs. 

Solution: Recognize that building a marketing org is more like building a product org than a sales org

Recognize that marketing is different from sales in these 4 ways:

• Marketing should focus on the entire funnel, not just MQLs or “Pipeline”. Marketing’s purview should not be limited to top of funnel or even MQLs. They should help influence conversion throughout the funnel and focus on the best lever(s) for growth at any given time (see the 4 high-level ways to grow framework).
• Marketing should have a broader set of goals than sales: Not just KPI-focused goals, but measurable project goals to incentivize short and long-term thinking, efficiency, and growth.
• Marketing should own 1 to many communication channels: Marketing has access to the tools and skillsets to automate communication across multiple channels—and make sure the content is on message.
• Marketing is a multidisciplinary team with many more unique roles than sales: The marketing team needs to have the skillsets to build an efficient engine and tell a great story that fuels the engine. There are 20+ unique roles in marketing without duplication—sales has way fewer role types.

Think of building a marketing org like building a product org:

This is often a lightbulb moment for recruiters and technical founders. Like product, marketing at its best is multi-disciplinary, thinks in terms of short-term goals and long-term projects, and builds “products” (marketing content is best thought of as a product!)

Related newsletters & frameworks:

• B2B STARTUP MARKETING ORG CHART: Organize your B2B marketing org chart into 3 primary sub-functions: growth, product marketing, content & brand. 
• GROWTH MARKETING ORG: Growth marketing means different things to different startups. Regardless of semantics make sure you have full-funnel conversion and support for your specific GTM motion.
• MARKETING COMPARED TO SALES: Unlike sales, marketing is a multidisciplinary function that must focus not just on quarterly revenue, but on full-funnel growth short and long term. 
• MARKETING TEAMS SHOULD BE MORE LIKE PRODUCT TEAMS: Like product teams, marketing at scale needs to have designers, analysts, (no-code and web) developers, producers/project matters, and a deep understanding of audience and product.

Principle 5: Hire π-shaped marketers

Mistake: Hiring the wrong marketing leader

Most founders I talk to—no matter the stage of the startup—have mis-hired marketing leaders at least once. And this doesn’t mean they’ve hired “bad” marketers. It simply means they’ve hired the wrong marketer at the wrong time for their startup.

The primary reason for these startup marketing mis-hires: hiring a marketing leader or first marketer who doesn’t have the breadth needed to set strategy across all areas of marketing, plus the desire and ability to do the actual work. The earlier stage the startup the more critical the ability to zoom in and zoom out. The marketing leader must design the plane, build the plane, and fly the plane all at the same time.

For marketers, this is a good reminder that if you are an expert in one area of marketing and don’t have a strong desire to learn other areas, being a head of marketing may not be for you. And that’s totally okay, lots of great marketers lead sub-functions of marketing and have amazing careers. 

Solution: Hire π-shaped marketers with depth in multiple marketing sub-functions

The role of a solo marketer or marketing leader at a startup includes:

• Building strategy based on your audience, GTM motion & marketing advantages (aka the 3 strategy drivers mentioned above).
• Ruthlessly prioritizing, optimizing, and going for big bets.

• Partnering cross-functionally with nearly all teams in the organization, but especially product and other GTM teams.
• Engine: Identifying key growth levers; testing & scaling channels & campaigns.
• Fuel: Figuring out company & product story—and telling it.
• Combining fuel & engine: Running campaigns, for the highest leverage audience segments and funnel stages.
• Balancing 4 types of goals and work: Hitting KPI goals, completing projects, testing new things, and building the foundation by hiring and setting up tooling and analytics.

For early marketers and marketing leaders at any startup stage, the experience needed to get this work done includes:

• Π-shaped skillset: An expert in one sub-function of marketing, proficient in a 2nd, working knowledge of the 3rd, with enough breadth to understand how all areas of marketing work together. The 3 core subfunctions of marketing include: product marketing, content & brand marketing, and growth marketing (of which demand gen is a subset). To know which type of π-shaped marketer is best, identify if you have bigger gaps on the fuel or engine side and hire to fill that gap.
• Startup experience preferably with the same GTM motion (self-serve, hybrid, sales-led). Just general B2B experience often isn’t enough. GTM motion experience is often more valuable than experience with the startup’s exact audience.
• A marketer who wants to work at that stage startup and understands the role. 

Related newsletters & frameworks:

•  π-SHAPED MARKETERS: π-shaped marketers are an expert in 1 area of marketing and proficient in another, with breadth across all of marketing.
• GTM MOTION IMPACT ON MARKETING ROLES: There are 3 broad types of B2B GTM motions: Self-serve, sales-led, and hybrid. Make sure your marketing strategy, activities, and team are aligned with your specific GTM motion.

Remember: Build a marketing plan uniquely suited for your startup, prioritize impactful work over random acts of marketing, and make sure you balance fuel and engine. You’ll be sure to drive growth faster next year.