From start-ups to mature companies, mom n’ pops to multinationals, every product or service should have a marketing strategy. While surprisingly there are many definitions of strategy (and tactics)—some good, some not so good, we can all agree that when marketing is working, there will come a time when your strategy will need to scale to keep your business ahead of competitors. In this edition of Plain Talk, we’ll dig into how marketing strategies must scale to support (and keep up with) your brand and, more importantly, how to recognize the signs when it is time for a change.
- The perfect marketing strategy?
- Real-world testing of your marketing strategy
- Five components of scaling marketing
- Optimizing your marketing upgrade
- How do I know when to scale my marketing?
The Perfect Marketing Strategy?
Because of the confusion about how to best define marketing strategy, we’ll keep it super simple and then show how this approach may have birthed one of the most perfect marketing strategies ever.
- A “strategy” is what you are going to achieve. It’s the big picture.
- Tactics are the collections of actions you will use to succeed in that strategy.
A great example that most people will be familiar with is the strategy for Unilever’s Dove personal care brand. Dove’s strategy since 2004 has been straightforward: “To help women feel confident in their own skin.” Why Dove? It has all the hallmarks of a great marketing strategy.
- It’s directly relevant to the benefits of their products,
- but it has important, even powerful emotional value to their customer way beyond basic rational benefits, and
- The strategy itself is elegantly simple, with many options for execution.
From simple idea to global movement
Like all good strategies, the focus is on the destination without all the bits and pieces that will get them there. Tactics for Dove have included traditional marketing—the first Real Beauty ads were interactive billboards, as well as TV, videos like the “Real Beauty Sketches” campaign film, social media campaigns, gallery exhibits, pop-up events, global research studies, issues campaigns against the unrealistic beauty standards seen in generative artificial intelligence images and countless other examples.
More than 20 years into the Real Beauty campaign, the number of tactics and approaches supporting the marketing strategy has multiplied into the hundreds. These efforts have scaled in both type and scope as Dove transformed from a mature, slumping brand in 2003 to one of the most recognized and loved personal care brands in the U.S. and globally by 2025. In the process, Dove also tripled its sales to $6 billion.
So, what does your business have in common with Unilever and the Dove brand? Maybe more than you think. In fact, from small businesses to the biggest brands in the world, scaling marketing to meet growth goals is one challenge every company faces. So where to start?
Real World Testing
Whether you are a newer brand or an established brand trying a new strategy. This first step is really the same. Testing a marketing strategy in the real world. You’ll want to know:
- Does the messaging resonate with your ideal customers?
- Does it clearly offer you some kind of competitive advantage?
- Do people get what you stand for? Is that emotional value coming through?
Back to our friends at Dove, you might think that a big multinational launched the original Real Beauty campaign with much fanfare and a gazillion dollars, but in reality, they first tested it with a lowkey event, a “real beauty” art gallery exhibit where photographers showed artful images of women of different shapes, sizes, ages and races to show that all women are beautiful. The exhibit was a hit, and from there, they took a chance by putting up one interactive billboard (you could vote for images on your cellphone) in Times Square. A big deal, yes, but not a national TV campaign. Again, the campaign resonated with women. The messages, imagery, copy and brand values demonstrated all hit home. At this point, the brand was ready to scale the campaign nationally.
I’m not Unilever!
But let’s say Times Square is out of your budget. Fair enough, let’s talk about something more relatable. Recently, we spoke with a regional business (we’ll change names and business verticals to protect everyone’s privacy). This company had been around in the region for about 10 years and had always had a steady influx of new, well-healed customers for most of that time. Their business relied heavily on Google reviews, word of mouth and referrals from family and friends of satisfied customers who would then check them out on their inexpensive website and maybe social media before making the phone call and setting the appointment to meet. This all worked great until business began to slump 18 months earlier. Slowly, at first, and then more seriously. This led to them calling our marketing agency.
Unintentional marketing
When we met with the owner, the first thing he said was that they had “never done marketing.” However, after hearing their story, it was clear that they had been doing marketing. The social media, reviews and referrals were driving traffic to a website that was driving phone calls for in-person meetings where business was closed. A pretty classic “funnel.” And the strategy, while more from the hip, was also pretty clear. They were offering very high-end, high-quality products that let customers experience their own success while also letting the world see that they had “made it.” (This was a luxury product.) Not perfect, but it checked the boxes of product relevance, purpose and emotional benefit.
When the client said they had never “done marketing,” what he meant was that they had never paid for marketing or paid media. And that was scary for him.
Five Ways To Scale Marketing for Business Growth
Like the business in the example, many people think scaling your marketing strategy is about spending a lot of money and while spending money is an option and sometimes a necessity, the truth is more nuanced. There are really five ways to scale your marketing strategy.
1. Scale your reach
If you are talking to 100 prospects this month, talk to 1,000 next month. This is top-funnel stuff, but it’s really worth thinking about. Why? Because it requires some understanding of your capacity as a business. Too much reach, and you may not be able to adequately service the leads that come in. This can damage your reputation, cause negative reviews and word of mouth and alienate once-interested prospects.
Scaling reach should also include the consideration of new geography and marketing channels. For example, a brand that only sells locally at retail may decide it’s time to open a web shop, or a company offering services in Louisville may decide to open an office in Lexington or Bowling Green.
2. Scale your frequency
If, on average, you are connecting with a prospect one or two times, determine if you have a higher purchase rate if you are connecting with them four or five times. Frequency is typically seen as a paid media metric but can be relevant to virtually any touchpoint along a customer journey.
3. Scale your engagement
As you move further down that marketing “funnel,” you invariably bump into engagement. While typically seen as a social media metric, engagement can come in all kinds of flavors.
In addition to social media likes and shares, if you send someone an email and they click on your blog and read it – boom, engagement. Open a direct mail piece and take action—engagement. Wealth managers love to invite you to a seminar over a fancy steak dinner—engagement. Pass out a sample of ice cream on the sidewalk—engagement.
The opportunities for engagement go on and on and are important because, unlike awareness, these engagements start to offer more context and meaning to how customers can think about your brand.
4. Scale your message
A solid marketing strategy (like Dove’s) lends itself to many different expressions of the brand beyond just ads. Their work with artificial intelligence issues groups to push AI companies to generate more realistic AI images of women is an example. While effective in supporting their mission, the efforts also generated significant PR, which, of course, gets back to customers.
Other examples of scaling their message include:
- Highly emotive social media videos (yes, they will make you cry)
- Influencer partnerships
- Content offerings like real beauty tips
All of this allowed them to scale their messaging for greater reach and personalization. We think scaling your message is one of the more interesting spaces. Remember that regional company? They had email addresses for virtually all of their past clients but were not doing anything with them. Emailing interesting news in the space, offering referral incentives and inviting past customers to leave a positive review on Google were all missed opportunities at very little cost.
5. Scale your investment
There we said it. Sometimes, you just need to do more of what is working, and sometimes, that costs money. Most of the ideas above involve some kind of investment, from late-night sweat equity for bootstrappers to increased marketing budgets for larger companies. The right way to think of these investments is to start with what you realistically expect to get out of them.
How have your business goals changed? What does growth look like in your plan, and what is a reasonable investment to achieve that volume? Sadly, there is no “formula” for this, as the answer is different if you are a restaurant, a cosmetic surgery office or a software product. That’s why even as you scale your marketing strategy, we recommend testing the tactics that are most likely to be fruitful.
Also, you layer tactics to accomplish the different missions in the “funnel” from awareness to engagement and sales.
Leverage Data To Optimize Scaling
Sometimes, the “d” word (data) comes up, and some readers just glaze over, like we shot them with a tranq dart. But hear us out. Data can be really useful without the need for a statistician. Here are a few things you can do that will help you scale your marketing efforts and save money while you do it.
Get a good dashboard (or two).
Today, there are hundreds of dashboard solutions that will drop your data into easy-to-read graphs and charts. We find that the right dashboard probably depends on your business so we are “fluent” in a few but a great dashboard can make the other data steps a snap.
Look for patterns.
Whether you are small or big, you have access to data that can give you at least a good idea of what is (or isn’t) working. Small businesses may have an email system like Mailchimp, giving them access to open rates, click-through, etc. If you have Google Analytics 4 set up, you get tons of data that can show you what people are doing on your site, what search terms they used to get there, etc.
If you are using paid search, Google Ads console can give you a bunch of information on what’s delivering as well. Big companies are typically pretty sophisticated in the data they can collect but often do not have time to dive deep and pull out the insights. Finding repeatable patterns in your data can help you efficiently scale your marketing without wasting a pile of money.
Benchmark.
Once you’ve found those patterns and insights, record and monitor them. Benchmarking gives you a target to hit but can also be the “canary in the coal mine” if something has changed or gone wrong. Benchmarks can also help you to track long-term trends in your business that will help you predict future conditions and opportunities.
Optimize.
While patterns and benchmarks are extremely useful, they should also be the jumping-off point for additional optimization. Marketing is a living thing and rarely stays still for long. New tools, trends, competitors, campaigns, heck a change in the weather can all impact a marketing campaign so probing for new opportunities is recommended.
When Do I Scale My Marketing?
Timing the expansion of your marketing strategy through new tactics, geography, messaging, channels, etc., can seem pretty mysterious. After all, who wants to spend more money, right? So, we think the best way to take the stress out of the “when” is to set some clear gateways in advance. There are a few ways to look at when to scale:
Consistently hitting your business KPIs
When your brand is consistently meeting or surpassing your targets – sales, market share, new customers, whatever success looks like, that is a pretty clear indicator that you have outgrown those KPIs, and it’s time to scale.
High marketing ROI/ROAS
We all want a great ROI, of course, but if your marketing strategy is delivering exceptionally high returns, it probably means you are playing it too safely. Very high returns on marketing spend can indicate that there is more capacity in the market than you are currently tapping. This can be the ideal time to methodically open the marketing purse strings and make more magic.
Operational capacity grows
Years back, a nameless (cough, now huge) organic dairy brand was growing and marketing heavily and got picked up in all the big grocery stores. The brand became so popular, so fast, that they actually got caught introducing non-organic milk into production to keep up with demand. Don’t do that. On the other hand, if you are building out capacity deliberately, plan ahead for its use by looking at the expansion of existing markets and the addition of new ones.
Competitive pressures
Sometimes, the market forces your hand. If a formerly smooth business has been upended by an aggressive competitor, you have entered the eat-or-be-eaten phase of your brand’s story. Case in point? Ten years ago, the top five U.S. vodka brands included names like Ketel One, Absolut, Grey Goose, and Stoli. Absent from that list was a little brand called Tito’s Handmade Vodka, which, of course, now sits atop that list. In fact, at 11.5 million cases, Tito’s is not just the largest vodka brand in the U.S., it’s the largest spirit brand. Aggressive expansion and well-timed, creative marketing to the trade and consumers left the Absoluts and Grey Gooses (Geese?) in the dust.
Get expert help scaling marketing for business growth
Marketing guru, author and business leader Rishad Tobaccowala often says, “The future does not fit in the containers of the past.” Translation? What got you here may not get you there, and he’s absolutely right. America loves a growth story, but for every unicorn success story, there are thousands of stories about brands that don’t make it. While there are a number of possible causes for these tragic flameouts, from market conditions to supply chain issues or acts of God, the one pitfall you can control and overcome is how and when marketing should play a role in scaling your business. With well-considered scaling triggers, good insight and a smart approach to how and where you scale, growth can be yours, even in times of uncertainty.
If you need a hand timing your next marketing scale-up, drop us a note here or give us a call at 502-499-4205.
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