Top 5 marketing laws for scale-up success

The marketing industry has experienced extreme fragmentation in recent years, with everything from digital purists to brand guardian angels, to T-shaped marketers and evangelical generalists. With many marketing professionals specialising in certain areas, this makes it even more challenging to cast and assemble the right marketing team for your high-growth tech startup.

As a company looking to scale new heights, particularly during challenging times, there is little to no room for overlooking the marketing function of your fast-growth & high-pressure business. Marketing remains a top priority as the business grows, and your team needs to expertly balance the longer-term brand-building with short-term activations in order to achieve scale-up success.

From the award-winning agency behind the likes of UK Top 5 Startup, Tempo, or Airbnb's swimming pool hire rival, Swimple, our experts have assembled the non-negotiable marketing laws for scale-up success:

Customer first, always

Ok, a fairly obvious one, we know - but it's first place for a reason. In Japanese organisational theorist, Kenichi Ohmae's '3C Model', a robust strategic framework starts with the Customers (followed by Competitors and then your Company - including vision, mission, purpose, etc). The reason why is because without customers, you have nothing.

Customer-centric, customer-led, customer-first, customer-obsessed... Whatever you want to call it, these terms exist for a reason.

But the trick is (a) identifying who your target audience exactly is (you may be taking feedback or listening to people who actually don't fall into your category, therefore risking wasted resources by going in the wrong direction) and (b) once you know who your target audience is, finding as much as you can about your ideal clients. As much as you can! Go beyond basic demographics (age, location, marital status, income level, etc). and tap into deeper psychographics - i.e. what keeps them up at night? What are their desires? Fears? What does a day in their life look like? The more you can find out, the more detailed you can go, and the deeper you know them, the better your marketing.

It's a balancing act

The truest art form of marketing is about balancing - balancing long-term brand-building with short-term activations; balancing customer acquisition for aggressive growth with nurturing loyalty & advocacy with existing customers; balancing the emotional advertising to connect with audiences and the rational benefits to drive conversion; balancing the numbers on a spreadsheet with the creativity that speaks to human emotion.

Having a senior, generalist marketer in your team - or an integrated consultancy like Bloom - helps guide the business in the right direction, irrespective of specific channels or strength biases. As a totally media-agnostic agency, at Bloom we focus on what's the right, specifically tailor-made strategy & media mix to help you achieve your ambitions - reverse-engineering the end goal to take your startup into scale-up mode.

Goodbye funnel, hello hourglass

You're likely familiar with the sales or marketing funnel - portrayed as an upside down triangle and called a funnel as the numbers "leak" on the way down, this is where audiences go from awareness level at the top (i.e. they've heard of you) through to interest and consideration (i.e. they're thinking about buying from you) to conversion (the final cash-parting).

This concept is in need of a re-vamp, as brands often overlook all the great stages that follow that final conversion point in the funnel.

Once customers have converted, it's vital to retain them - encouraging loyalty and even advocacy, once they're fans of yours to achieve the holy grail in marketing: word of mouth. Like free advertising, word of mouth (WOM)* advertising

*Fed up with every other word in marketing being an acronym? We get it, which is why we've created the definitive glossary of marketing acronyms you need to know. Bookmark it here.

Read more about the marketing hourglass and how it can help your business go the next level, here.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted

You know when a marketing agency quotes Einstein they've got the battle scars of justifying brand-building to the money people!

Look, digital marketing has exploded in recent years - thanks to a rich cyborg named Zuck - and it's certainly not without its benefits. The learnings that can arise from performance marketing make paid digital media campaigns pretty addictive - with internal teams even gamifying things like A/B tests and taking bets on which copy+creative combo will "win". The instant gratification and undebatable results have helped the likes of Meta and Google become two of the biggest tech companies in the world.

But just because something can be measured doesn't necessarily mean it's worth measuring.

This is where every metric has its own meaning, with actions relating to different customer intent, signalling different things.

Don't take the black & white numbers as gospel, we're marketing to more than just users; we're marketing to humans.

Just because it takes a long time, doesn't mean it's less important

Bloom is firmly positioned as the UK's favourite tech marketing agency, having worked with many startups over the years. We say that not to chest-beat, but to let you know that we totally get it. Customer acquisition is like oxygen in the early days. All eyes are on conversions and everyone is focused on growth.

But the moment you're able to start thinking a little bit further out than just a few months, invest what you can in building your brand for the long-term.

Here are a few hard-hitting stats that prove brand is far, far more than just "the fluffy stuff":

• Brands are often the most valuable asset in a company, on average at around 20% of the total business valuation. (Source: Why brands matter by Brand Finance and IAA)

• Consistent brand-building has demonstrated up to 33% increase in revenue for businesses. (Source: Oberlo Brand Statistics)

• Emotionally-connected customers have a 306% higher lifetime value than those without (Source: Findstack Branding Statistics)

• A strong brand triples the speed to profitability. (Source: Clutch, Brand Resources)

• On average, people pay 11% more for branded items. (Source: Kantar, Pricing Power)

• The world's most valuable brand is Apple, valued at an eye-watering $482 billion (Source: Interbrand, Best Brands)

Just think: the next time you're at the supermarket, which tin of baked beans do you reach for? 😉

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We understand that marketing your brand is a long process with a wide range of marketing tactics and techniques involved. The competition is at an all-time high and it's increasingly reckless as we write. If you're unsure about how to scale up your business, then speak to the UK's favourite tech agency, Bloom.

Bloom is an award-winning marketing agency for high-growth tech startups and scale-ups in the UK. Whether you need an expertly-crafted marketing strategy, or you're interested in social media marketing services, Bloom exists to take scrappy startups to sophisticated scale-up mode.

Book a no-obligation 30-minute call with our team here to see how we can help your business grow (or Bloom!)