BY SARAH AYLWARD, OWNER & PRINCIPAL, STORYWORTHY STUDIOS
Years ago, I was the Marketing Manager at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. I ran marketing strategy for the entrepreneurship, tech innovation, venture capital and private equity MBA programs, among others.
That's a lot to type, let alone say. My title? Even longer, if you can believe it. But I'll skip that detail for now.
I started in 2012, and it was an interesting time to be at Kellogg. We had a new Executive Director (shout out to Linda Darragh), who redesigned the entire program — roughly one quarter of the school — from the ground up. I got a front-row seat to the entire design process, and helped the team build a world-class program.
Even before we kicked off external marketing, I had unbelievable access to learn from real-world entrepreneurs and VCs, brought in as adjunct faculty. The team designed new experiential learning-based courses, workshops, as well as a two internal accelerators backed by venture capital firms.
Forget the old-school approach of developing a business plan and seeking outside funding. The new emphasis was on proof of concept. Everything from the lean startup methodology to business model canvases, designing thinking, and launching an MVP (minimum viable product) was critical. And that's all before you take on outside funding.
It was thrilling to work with student, faculty and alumni entrepreneurs who weren't the Silicon Valley archetype. They weren't living in a community still benefitting from local talent available post-dot-com-era, or abundant venture capital firms a short driving distance away. They were Midwesterners. Living in an underdog tech community. (Chicago has come a long way since 2012!) They were the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done founders.
These entrepreneurs knew that to get high value Series A and B rounds of funding, while operating outside of traditional tech hubs, they needed to first attract an enthusiastic customer base to prove product-market fit. This meant launching lean, and wearing many, many — emphasis on many — hats.
So when these same student entrepreneurs (and in many cases, alumni entrepreneurs) began to struggle with growing their teams and operations to match their business trajectory, they knew they had a problem. But, like many of us, they were too close to their problem to identify it for themselves. Luckily, the team at Kellogg had brought in real-world entrepreneurs, VCs, and private equity operators, who had been there, done that, and could easily identify the pain point.
The problem came down to something simple: delegation.
Why entrepreneurs struggle with delegation
See, the challenge most entrepreneurs face when they start to get traction is to hire the right experts, and let them take the helm, so that they can focus on drawing the map, and navigating the ship. It's hard to step away from every area of the business, particularly when you've put your blood, sweat, tears — and probably your life savings — into your company.
But delegation is critical to support growth for a startup, because it allows the founder or founding team to continue to focus on the big picture — to envision a bold future, and create the map to get there.
Here, though, we encounter another problem. The time and expense of attracting, hiring and retaining high-performing talent. Pre-pandemic, the average tenure of a marketing manager inside of a company was roughly two years. But commitment to a company has been made even worse with the tech layoffs that started in 2020, and have continued for the past four years. But therein lies the opportunity.
How outsourcing marketing can accelerate growth
There are incredibly talented marketing pros with deep experience readily available to jump in to temporarily scale your marketing capabilities. You can find them inside of agencies, marketing consultancies like our team at Storyworthy, or on freelance platforms, like Braintrust, Clutch, MarketerHire, and more.
It's a talent strategy so successful that even the largest companies in the world have adopted it. In fact, our team at Storyworthy collaborated with Walmart, the Fortune 1, to support the launch of new voice and text shopping experiences in collaboration with Google, among other projects.
So, if it can work within a large, globally-distributed enterprise, imagine the impact it can have for a startup team.
But here's the thing — most entrepreneurs know this already. What they may not have considered, however, is how to design their workflows to accommodate a remote-first team of freelance marketing pros, who can work with their existing team.
Here's a scenario for you...
Molly is the founder of a fintech startup in Boston. Molly has invested in her own business, with backing from a team of Boston-based angel investors. Her team has grown quickly in the past 2 years. She has four people in operations, six in sales, six in product development, three in customer success, plus a fractional CFO.
She knows she needs to invest in marketing, but Molly doesn't have the operational budget to bring on a dedicated full-time team, so Molly and her sales team have been doing ad hoc marketing to support their cold outreach sales approach. They have been able to leverage their existing networks to sign deals with great companies, but they haven't yet been able to scale beyond those contacts.
Here's a solution for you (and Molly too, I suppose).
Before Molly hires a fractional marketing strategist or agency partner, she...
- Sits down to map out her 1-year, 2-year and 5-year growth goals.
- Determines her marketing budget based on her revenue and goals.
- Describes her fintech product's existing customers, backed by her company's data, and describes which customers they're going after.
- Puts the sales pitch talk track (not just the customer-facing slides) she and her team have honed (and know by heart) on paper, including what makes their product different, and what pain point they're solving for customers.
- Reflects on what inspired her to solve this pain point.
- Creates a list of customers with contact details.
- Creates a list of competitors.
- Upgrades her tech stack to allow fractional strategists to collaborate with her team (Google Workspace, Slack, you name it).
- Ensures she has team buy-in to bring in outside marketing support and encourages her team to support successful onboarding.
- Creates a collaboration cohort, so that the fractional marketing team has points-of-contact beyond herself, specifically in operations, sales, product and customer success.
Molly uses this information to create a project brief that helps fractional marketing strategists — like my team at Storyworthy — respond with pitches and proposals that include actionable plans and accurate bids.
How to design a fractional marketing team partnership
When working with a founder like Molly, our team puts together the right strategy, based off of initial conversations. Often we scope a Discovery Phase separate from the primary SOW to allow us to co-design the strategy, and plan of action, before we dive in to deliver on that plan.
- Discovery & Customer Persona Development
We kick off a discovery phase to better understand your business, products or services, your unique value proposition, market position, competitive assessment, and speak to your team — and your customers — to ensure there aren't blind spots or missed opportunities. Don't have a value prop or competitive assessment? Maybe you don't even have bandwidth to prep like Molly did on the list above. That's okay, we can build it with you. - Marketing Tech Stack Architecture
We'll set you up with necessary tools, such as an email service provider (ESP) like Mailchimp, a social media scheduling and measurement tool like SproutSocial, a lead discovery tool like Apollo, a project management tool like Asana, and marketing-specific Slack or Microsoft Teams channels. And we'll ensure your Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are properly set up to track success. - Strategy Planning & Timeline Design
Next, we jump into designing a unique growth marketing strategy. We back into a timeline based on deadlines aligned with key dates (e.g. a product launch), or aligned with your quarterly business goals. This is especially critical if you have a board of advisors, or angel investors to report to. It's also important to show a growth track record of success when pitching to VC firms or corporate VCs. - Team Assembly
Based on our strategy, we'll build a bench of marketing pros, with expertise in areas like content, digital marketing, email marketing, UX/UI design, website or app development, PR and more. - Design the Funnel
We'll get specific on precisely which types of content and campaigns we'll produce, which content pillars are most important to your target customers, which stories we'll tell, and who will tell them, across each stage of the marketing funnel. - Analysis & Reporting
We'll create dashboards to track performance across each channel, campaign, and piece of content. This will help ensure our strategy is resonating with our target customer personas. We'll experiement to ensure we get it right, and pivot when we don't. - Customer Feedback to Fuel Innovation
We'll design specific opportunities to get feedback from your customers to inform our marketing strategy, and help your team consistently learn how to create even more successful products, services and experiences. - Build a Virtuous Lifecycle
It's more expensive to sell to new customers, than to existing buyers. So we'll address this from day one. We'll create a customer lifecycle plan to ensure you have a deep understanding of your various customer journeys, and ensure customers receive the right messages, at the right time. This will help to grow customer relationships, without overwhelming them. And, we'll run A/B tests with customer segments to ensure our messaging is working before we send to your entire customer base.
This probably sounds like a lot. And you know what? It is!
Which is exactly why it's important for founders and founding teams to bring in a bench of experts, and let them take the helm.
Marketing pros like our team at Storyworthy have done this before. So we can leverage our experience, tools, skills, and networks to stand up a marketing plan, scale your marketing muscle, and outpace competitors.
What does this mean for founders? It means you can develop even more compelling products. You can focus on scaling operations, hiring high-performing talent, developing strategic relationships, traveling to conferences, participating in industry podcasts, and much, much more.
Maybe you'll even resume that hobby you've been missing as well. And if like many entrepreneurs, your hobby is building your business, might we suggest shuffleboard or bocce ball? They're pretty laid key. We're speaking from experience.
Need help growing your startup? Contact our team to kick off a conversation.
hello@storyworthystudios.comRelated Reading
Developing a Brand Story? Here's an Exercise to Get You StartedHow to Develop Customer Personas That Drive Growth & Retention
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