Scaling up: Is professional marketing worth the investment?
Transitioning from a start-up to a growth stage marks a significant milestone for your company.
It’s a major step change that requires your company to gear up to a whole new level. While being a start-up was about validating your business model, gaining a foothold in the market and showing profit potential, the growth stage is about proving to investors that you can scale sustainably. Focus now pivots to turning early successes into sustainable long-term revenue growth – and that requires a push into new markets alongside higher volumes per sale.
The key to driving revenue growth? Building a clear picture of the companies that your offering will bring the most value to. After all, sustainable growth depends on customer retention as much as it does customer acquisition. So, acquiring customers that are likely to stick with you will be crucial.
Refining your ICP, customer persona and message house
Perfecting your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) – or indeed building it – will be key to successfully introducing your offering to sticky customers.
So, how do you perfect your IPC?
Take a look at your best customers and identify common characteristics. Delve into things such as their industry, location, size, maturity and pain points.
Speak to them directly or look at what they are saying about you online to understand why they are succeeding with your offering.
Take note of the exact words and phrases they use to convey the problem that your solution or product solves—speaking your customers’ language is crucial to developing an effective messaging framework or ‘Message House’,
Refine (or create) your IPC based on what you’ve learnt.
Once you’ve perfected your ICP, polish—or build—your Customer Persona; these are the descriptions of the real people engaging with your solution or products and the role each plays in the buying process. You’re now ready to position your offering, refining—or even constructing—your Message House with its targeted messaging and proof points.
Together, the ICP, Customer Persona and Message House will provide your company with clear and consistent messaging that’s vital for helping new customers understand what your offering does and why it matters to them.
Clear messaging online is particularly important. World Business Research (WBR) found that today’s buyers are typically 57% - 70% through their buying research before even contacting the brand. Nine out of 10 B2B buyers interviewed said online content had a moderate to major effect on their purchasing decisions.
Customer proof: Convincing the sceptics
But defining your ideal customer and identifying the messaging that will likely resonate with them is only the first step. Modern B2B buyers are sceptical of claims made by vendors and their sales teams. They are seeking validation from other customers using your products or services.
They want to hear what others in their industry or with the same use case have to say.
Without that insight, deals risk coming to a standstill because buyers are asking for proof from an existing customer. Without proof, your pipeline may freeze as your sales team loses deals that would otherwise be perfectly winnable.
The answer lies in customer proof—aa credible narrative coming from real customers that resonates with potential buyers. Customer proof builds trust with prospects by discussing your offering’s capabilities and features, sharing relevant use cases and demonstrating concrete impacts. It builds trust faster than vendor claims and their sales and marketing teams, reduces sales cycles, and heavily influences purchase decisions.
Customer proof – whether case studies, blogs, customer success videos, peer-to-peer conversations, or advocates speaking at events – has a positive impact on buying decisions. A Gartner survey of software buyers found that 34% of those who were confident in their purchase cited references and testimonials as influencing their decision.
In other words, creating customer proof is vital when you’re looking to acquire new customers.
Shared customer narratives improve retention
With sustainable growth as your primary focus, customer retention and increasing customer value over time are as important as customer acquisition. Forbes research found that a customer with three or more engaged users is 25% to 30% more likely to renew. It also found that as adoption improves, expansion follows.
Encouraging customers to share their successes with your offerings not only builds trust with prospects but also encourages other customers to expand their footprint or use cases. Sharing how your offering is being used creates a ripple effect across your customer base as customers teach other customers.
Sharing authentic customer narratives among existing customers is a powerful tool for growth. It helps customers get more value from what they’ve already bought from you and, in doing so, creates that vital loyalty and ‘stickiness’.
The right people for the right job
No matter how great your offering, without the right people in the right roles, it will only get so far. The small, unstructured start-up teams that used to work so well are no longer viable. When you need to prove to investors that you can scale profitably, you need people focused on what they do best. You will need a well-structured team that is ready to scale and able to delegate. Your investors will expect your founding team to recognise your weaknesses and bring in expertise to strengthen those areas—including experts with experience in engaging prospective and existing customers alike.
Don’t be tempted to skip engaging the experts. What starts out as a cost-saving measure all too often leads to missed growth targets and wasted time and money. Why?
Because dividing your time between marketing and business or technical activities will not deliver the consistency required for growth.
Marketing requires expertise in targeting, content creation, brand management and more besides.
Growth requires expert planning that aligns marketing activities with business goals.
Handling everything internally risks burn out. Critical activities such as nurturing partnerships and speaking at events get sidelined when you can’t function optimally.
As a Growth company, customer proof is one of the most essential tools for achieving sustainable growth. It’s as critical to scaling as engineering or sales operations. Investing in professional storytelling delivers customer narratives that align with your messaging and business goals.
