How to grow before you have the numbers from your marketing results
This article is a framework on how to operate when growth doesn’t show its numbers.
What principle to use when you're writing social media content and messaging campaigns. Especially when you can’t use/track links, DM funnels, or even visibility metrics.
TLDR / Answer: Optimize content for memorability and building trust with target customers through educational value.
That’s what creates a media ecosystem for your customer journey and drives revenue.
What is marketing
You have finite resources and media exposure, so you need to allocate them in a way that brings the most results.
To improve your results you need to iterate (usually based on measured metrics), but direct measurement in marketing is severely lacking. Instead, you rely on data that takes a long time to gather (blended campaign numbers) and is sparse (customer feedback).
What to do before getting this data? To give your content the most chances you rely on certain practices, tactics, principles, frameworks such as this one.
The right lens to look at marketing is treating it as something that makes Sales irrelevant/easy (in other words, marketing is to-many selling)
When you do this, you understand that majority of your organic/content/inbound will come down to answering questions/objections, showing customer stories, educating on the problem, getting recognition and right associations.
So it’s almost the same exact thing as one-to-one selling, but adjusted to scale and different feedback cycles.
Note: some businesses are Marketing-driven (self-checkout, no calls, low-touch) and some are Sales-driven (calls, demos, high-touch). What I’m talking about applies to both as long as you publish content.
When you’re publishing content, make it match this:
- aligned with the platform to get distribution (visibility)
- relatable to target readers (they read, react & remember)
- related to problems you’re solving (e.g. PM workflow issues)
- trust-building (showing your expertise and other good qualities)
- on-brand (I don’t mean logos, I mean values, topics, voice, etc)
IMPORTANT: don’t make a mistake of going “all-in on brand” (meaning 0 direct response focus) because you’ll fail before it brings enough revenue to sustain everything. Unless you’re a giant enterprise or otherwise have crazy budgets.
1. Memorability
You want people to remember your product when they think about a certain problem, job-to-be-done, workflow, desired outcome, category, or like they say in 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - a word.
Examples (enterprises):
Outcome - I want answers to very specific questions - ChatGPT
Problem - Scheduling calls is boring and long - Calendly
JTBD - Online meeting - Zoom
Category - CRM - Salesforce
Word - “Search” - Google
Examples (successful recent startups):
Outcome - I want my meetings summarized automatically - Granola
Problem - Building prototypes takes forever - Lovable
JTBD - Enrich data for prospecting - Clay
Category - AI video ads - Arcads
Word - “Compliance” - Vanta
And you don’t have to be an enterprise or a hyperscaling startup.
It takes a lot of time and luck to become famous on global scale, but you can become famous for certain groups of people. You can become someone’s default choice because you were their first choice in a category (or the first good one - having lots of competitors doesn’t mean they are good).
Constantly create associations with things that drive you business. Show real product use cases and results. Show how easy it is to integrate your product into their process.
2. Trust and reputation
You want people to either:
- see you as an experiment worth trying
- see you as an authority in the space
Same rules apply:
- Have a presence on social media, search, AI
- Have a point-of-view and arguments to defend it
- Share company/team information to show you’re legit
- Don’t send low-quality spammy outbound
- Don’t post slop
3. Educational value (+objection handling)
Don’t be afraid to present and pitch your product, but RESPECT the customer and focus on them, not you.
Educate them on problems in their workflow. How much are they missing? How much easier/faster/cheaper can it be? Can something be automated or eliminated altogether?
Answer questions that customers and prospects actually ask (using their language)
Show proof of work and visuals. Tell real stories to reinforce your position and not sound like AI. Turn your actual meetings into content. Use principles of effective education, potentially add humor if it helps (not distracts)
Customer’s problems and opportunities come first, your solutions and stories come after.
Be real. Showing your actual platform interface (or service dashboards, etc) is much more helpful and effective than abstract “branded” graphics no one cares about.
Iterate with data
Look at metrics like leads/users/customers over time and cohort metrics (activation, retention, etc).
See Before and After your messaging campaigns / posts / other marketing initiatives (keeping in mind the approximate required timeframe)
Like I said in Can you measure marketing, ask customers where they found you. If you have reps talking to people, create more detailed questions like “have you seen this report we published?” and similar. And read public comments they make on your posts.
This is Part 2 of my mini-series on measuring marketing and how to grow with imperfect data.
Part 1 (Can you measure marketing): https://blog.internetisdead.net/can-you-measure-marketing/
Part 3 (How to be visible on social media): https://blog.internetisdead.net/how-to-be-visible-on-social-media/
P.S. Need help growing your B2B product or service? Book a risk-free consultation