NEXT [Lunch and Learn] How to Build a Marketing Strategy Before You Post

Most founders are told the same thing about marketing: post more. Show up on LinkedIn, build in public, stay consistent.

But posting is a tactic, and tactics only work on top of a strategy. Research from Mark Ritson and Ipsos found roughly two in three marketers would fail a basic test of their own discipline, so a lot of the advice founders get comes from people who are guessing. If you can’t say who feels your problem most and why they’d think of you first, more posts won’t fix it.

Founder time is the only marketing budget most startups have. Spend it on the wrong thing and it’s gone.

Join us for a session on building a marketing strategy with no budget and no marketing team.

Beer Pilon has generated more than $100 million in revenue across work for Nike, Apple and PhD Media, and now runs marketing as a fractional leader for founders and scale-ups. Expect the strategy those brands run on, sized down for a startup, with the content calendar left out.

We’ll get into:

• Why “post more” became the default advice, and the three decisions it skips: audience, brand and go-to-market
• Why marketing only counts when it’s tied to a revenue number, and how to set one before your first post
• How to find your real audience by starting from the problem. Nobody calls a locksmith because they’re 25 and just graduated.
• Brand as mental availability, and why the 95% of people who aren’t buying today matter more than the 5% who are
• Go-to-market on no budget, worked through an example invoicing app for plumbers. Sized for founders with no marketing hire and no ad budget.
• The questions that sharpen all of it, like who is the absolute wrong fit for your product, and why the answers have to come from customers rather than a prompt

Who should attend?

• Founders posting every week who can’t name a single customer it brought in
• Founders who suspect their customer persona describes nobody they’ve actually sold to
• Technical founders who assume marketing can wait until they hire someone to own it
• Founders who’ve been told to “build in public” and are wondering what exactly they’re building