How to scale up with a strong marketing strategy

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noice before defeat.

This is the famous quote by Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, which encapsulates the importance of both strategy and tactics, ideas and execution, the long and short.

As high-growth tech business go from scrappy startup to sophisticated scale-up, it's important to understand why strategy matters after the initial months or years that were focused on pure tactics.

As the startup matures, more sophistication is naturally required across the board - from hiring and ops, to branding and marketing.

As the UK's favourite marketing agency for tech businesses, we share the components of a good marketing strategy to help you in your scale-up journey:

First up, who exactly is your target audience?

Starting the first 'C' in Japanese theorist, Kenichi Ohmae's 3 C's framework, your customers.

Simply put, without your customers your business does not exist, and without deeply understanding their pain points and desires, there's only so far marketing can go to serve them.

Whether this research is conducted as qualitative interviews, focus groups, synthesising quantitative questionnaires, anecdotal feedback, or via social listening, a solid marketing strategy will go as deep as possible in understanding your customers, with the goal of translating these findings into actionable takeaways. (So that we can move from strategy to execution!)

Next, who is your competition?

How are your competitors positioning themselves? What activity are they doing, on what channels, and what's the messaging they're using? It's important to not get distracted in the rubber-necking, or to let FOMO get the best of you, so focus on what really matters, including the key learnings if there's anything to action.

Who you are as a company?

Whilst we can follow customers and competitors, these insights should serve as a guiding light, not a forced instruction manual. With that in mind, looking inwardly at the organisation and unearthing the authentic mission, vision, values, and purpose of the business help to decide the overall direction of the marketing strategy, and inform how best to win.

Ultimately the best marketing strategy is one that's tailored precisely to your unique business. At bloom, we custom craft each and every one of our client's marketing strategies to get them on the right flight path to success.

Bonus: A good marketing strategy should also educate

We don't mean this in a patronising way, but include some marketing science to educate team members from other departments and help bring everyone on the journey. It makes for a more enjoyable experience and key stakeholders can more easily understand the "why" behind what we're doing.

If you're looking to scale your business to new heights, simply book a call here to find out more about Bloom and what makes us the preferred marketing partner to the UK's top startups.

Bloom is an award-winning marketing agency specialised in brand performance, to help businesses achieve the next level in their growth journey.

With work featured in the likes of Forbes, The Independent, and Sifted, we are proud to have delivered tangible results to our high-growth clients.