Hi there 👋
I had the most amazing experience with a brand the other day. Two brands actually. I attended Drift’s GTM Lab online event, and shortly afterward, the Drift team reached out to me with a personal email invitation to co-create some content together and the 6Sense team (one of the event’s co-hosts) reached out with a personal invite to join their marketing community. Incredibly, neither of them have tried to sell me anything. 🙏 Whatever marketing operation wizardry they were doing behind the scenes to identify me as prospect and to engage me as a human being … it worked!
Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Marketing leadership: How to connect output to outcomes
May I tell you a story about one of my (many) failures?
I care a lot about brand. I believe that the best companies in the world are those that put brand as the foundation of their business, infuse brand into all their marketing efforts, and give brand all the resources and reverence that it deserves.
Therefore, I believe brand should have a place among the company’s top goals.
And yet, I can count multiple times when I have failed to keep it there.
Most recently, the discourse around startup marketing has been to prioritize short-term gains and maximize cash rather than to over-invest in areas with long-term payoff like brand. The thinking goes, let’s make sure we’re going to be here for the long-term first before we decide to invest in the long-term.
So where is brand’s place in a short-term world?
In the backseat.
This is the failure I found myself wallowing in … my failure to keep brand on its lofty pedestal, my failure to advocate well enough for the thing I believe in.
But! I did find a silver lining.
Whenever I’m going through leadership moments like this, when I feel like my vision for the impact of my team doesn’t land as clearly or resoundingly with my peers as I would like, I tend to take these two approaches:
Short-term: What matters to my peers? Connect my marketing outcomes to the company’s most important outcomes
Long-term: What matters to marketing? Build the case for marketing goals as a driver for company goals
Here’s how this looks in practice.
Short-term: What matters to my peers?
Such a huge part of being in marketing leadership is managing “sideways” by building relationships with your leadership peers. One of the best ways to do this is to understand what’s important to them and to frame marketing’s impact in a way that helps them out.
Case in point: One of the things that a lot of leadership teams care about right now is efficiency.
So if I want to keep brand impact top-of-mind at the company level and among my leadership team, I need to connect the dots from brand investment to efficiency. Okay! I can do that! Instead of talking about metrics like brand reach or aided recall, I need to start talking about how brand investment can shorten the sales cycle, can increase velocity of a funnel, can decrease cost-per-lead from Direct Response spend.
And instead of having a brand Key Result all by itself, I have a brand as an input into a company-level efficiency metric. The output of our continued investment in brand will drive an outcome that is cross-functional and highly important to all teams at the company.
Long-term: What matters to marketing?
You and I both know the huge impact that marketing has across so many areas of a business. But not everyone else does. :) That’s why I like to build consensus for marketing investment by breaking down marketing’s outcomes into nested goals. It works like this.
Start with a company goal, like ARR. This is your North Star
Then create sub-goals for your marketing that build up toward ARR. Likely this would be things like pipeline generation, signups, win rate, or expansion revenue
You can also create sub-sub-goals that build up toward your sub-goals. Perhaps your pipeline number has sub-goals for paid pipeline, non-paid pipeline, and marketing-qualified leads
By making sure that everything you do on the marketing side is attached to outcomes that drive top-line business results, you stand a much better chance of building a case for the value and impact of your team.
The goal
The goal, of course, is to make it second nature for others to consider marketing’s goals as critical to the company’s success.
This will bring positive attention to your team.
It will make resourcing easier.
It will make you more influential.
It will hopefully make it so that you can put brand as a company goal whenever you want! (kidding / not kidding)
Misc.
30 Days Analyzing Apple’s Effortless Microcopy. Great list of quick wins for copywriters
Inbox Zero tutorial for anyone who needs it
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
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