Startup Marketing Strategy and Tactics: Executing on a Master Plan for Success

At OpenView Labs, we always strive to be helpful to our portfolio companies (via our high impact consulting projects) and to the start-up community (via our content site labs.openviewpartners.com). Being in the trenches with our companies throughout their many cycles of growth and growing challenges gives us a growing treasury of experience and proven strategies and tactics. As a result, I write on many of the successful tactics we learn through our own experience, or from successful technologies and experts.  For example, my last post was on Mobile Application Marketing, and the previous was on Apple Marketing Tactics (even though it was somewhat “mistitled” as “Apple Marketing Strategy”).

In terms of the big picture strategy, OpenView has also honed our ability to help our portfolio companies in defining their go-to-market strategy, most notably through the “Target Market Lens” as expounded by Scott Maxwell, our founder, in a recent series of posts. In putting that methodology in practice, my Research and Analytics team work really closely with many companies in researching and defining their target markets, which is really the bedrock of their market and product strategy.

However, as a painting is a masterpiece when it combines masterly painted strokes (execution of tactics) with dramatic composition (high level strategy), similarly, a marketing master plan needs both ingredients in the right proportion to succeed.

This is a major challenge at smaller technology companies because of a few reasons:

– Small companies do not have a full-fledged marketing department with talents in both marketing tactics and marketing strategy. While it is not impossible for a team member to be both tactically and strategically gifted, the fact is that some marketers are much greater at applying tactics against narrowly defined goals, while others have the knack for surveying the whole marketplace and identifying opportunities, even if they are not as great in executing actual campaigns.

– Small companies do not have the resources and scale to fully embrace the full range of marketing tactics that are available to their markets. Vice versa, a company might be caught up in executing tactical campaigns to keep the business going to spend some time and resources in defining higher level strategy and seeing other areas of opportunities.

Given those difficulties, how can a company find the right balance between strategy and tactics, as described by April Dunford in her post on the same topic last year?

A solution, I propose based on my own experience with our portfolio companies, is a practical reallocation of resources to help bring about this balance. I recommend that expansion stage marketing departments hire marketers who are strong tactically, while the senior management, in particular the CEO and VP of Sales, help the VP of Marketing (if there is one) to define and evolve the company marketing until the company has grown out of its limited resources and tight deadlines.

I suggest this because it is very easy for marketers to engage in “paralysis by analysis” while working to define the right marketing strategy for the company, while neglecting the blocking and tackling that is needed  to help the company grow. Furthermore, no market strategy is perfect and bulletproof – the market segments are constantly evolving and users and buyers are always requiring new features and looking at competitors. Therefore, marketers need to be constantly trying new tactics and techniques and be close to their targets (customers and users) and bring the market feedback and results back to their strategy team instead of focusing purely on strategy formulation. Even when we work with our companies to help them define market strategy, we emphasize the experimentation and adjustment process, which requires superb marketing tactics execution. In short, if you need to invest in your understaffed marketing department, find an online marketing whiz, a social media marketing maven, or an influence marketing pro. Leave the strategy making to your senior executive team and focus on adaptability and adjustment.