If you’re launching a business, chances are, you’re focused on marketing. Selling your products and services to people you already know will only take you so far. To get beyond your inner circle, you’re going to need to market your solutions. 

The challenge is that not all marketing is created equal. Plenty of startup founders enter the market without a clear strategy or a solid plan for execution. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really work.

In this post, you’ll learn a few tips for how to craft a high-converting, growth-generating marketing strategy for your startup or small business.

This post is not a step-by-step guide for creating a good marketing strategy - you can get that for free here. 

Instead, this blog is designed to share 5 lessons that all successful startup founders have learned about marketing. 

1. There’s really only one way to measure marketing success.

Marketing your startup revolves around one simple goal: generating qualified leads. That may seem like an obvious thing to say, but more than 90% of startups will fail. Fourteen percent of those fail because of poor marketing, and even more than that if you consider how central marketing is to sales. 

Attracting a qualified lead isn’t just getting someone to fill out a form. Qualified leads are people who trust you, and people who would want to do business with you. That means that your marketing needs to be focused on building relationships with real people. You need to care about your prospects, and provide value to them.

You’ll evaluate the quality of your relationship-building and marketing efforts by measuring the number of leads generated.

Brand-building, media relations, advertising - none of these are an end in themselves. (I know a lot of PR gurus who are going to hate me for that.) Rather, these are all different steps and strategies for attracting, engaging, and converting people and businesses. 

You can spend a lot of money - or a little - on building a marketing program. Depending on who is building it, you’ll probably get a differing advice on how to measure success. Remember that there’s really only one way to measure success in marketing: qualified leads. 

You can track and analyze other metrics to determine how healthy your marketing program is, and I’d encourage you to! As I’ll talk about later, analysis is an essential step of any marketing program. Why? That analysis will show areas for improvement and opportunities for growth. However, that analysis should never come at the cost of measuring or prioritizing leads generated.

When you embark on your marketing journey to grow your business, don’t forget why. Losing sight of the goal - building relationships that result in qualified leads - is the best way to fail to hit it.

2. Your best marketers are paying you.

You read that right.

Your best marketers are paying you, because your best marketers are your customers. 

Happy customers are your brand’s biggest asset. Here’s why:

• They will spread the word about your incredible products and services to their network. 

• When a customer tells your story, they tell it in a language that’s likely to convert other people like them. 

• Your customers can create and share content about their experience with your company (sometimes referred to as user-generated content or UGC)  that you can amplify through brand channels.

• Leads generated from existing customer referrals  tend to close at a higher rate and more quickly than other sources.

That’s not to say that you don’t need marketing. Rather, I believe that a relationship between a brand and its customers should be symbiotic, and that marketing is one great way to strengthen that relationship. 

Marketing campaigns can provide the language and the framework for customers to understand the company and share their experiences; encourage and amplify customer referrals; activate unidentified evangelists in your customer base; support the Customer Success team in their efforts to deliver an exceptional customer experience; and much more.

3. Good marketers will Prioritize actionable metrics.

As I’ve written about before, defining the right metrics is really central to any growth strategy. In growth-focused companies, I’ve even seen that the entire team is willing to live and die by the numbers, if they’re in agreement about what those numbers should be. Good marketers understand this.

More importantly, good marketers will invest time and energy in defining the right numeric goals for their business or client, and build strategies to help reach those goals. They’ll avoid the trap of vanity metrics.

According to HubSpot, vanity metrics are “data such as social media followers, page views, subscribers, and other flashy analytics that are satisfying on paper, but don't move the needle for your business goals. They offer positive reporting, but no context for future marketing decisions -- something actionable metrics can do.”

When actionable metrics are defined and agreed upon, good marketers aren’t afraid to pin their names to the numbers. They’ll get into the weeds and try to understand the story their data is telling them.

To create good metrics, you need a baseline, a goal, and a hypothesis for how to get there. If that’s not a part of your marketing strategy yet, you know what you need to do.

And if you’re working with a marketer who can’t or won’t provide clarity on actionable metrics, consider that a red flag. No exceptions, no excuses.

[Read Also: The Best Growth Marketing Blogs to Bookmark]

4. Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success are all on the same (bigger) team.

One common mistake I see in businesses of all sizes is misalignment between the marketing, sales, and customer success employees. This happens a lot in larger companies.

It’s easy to see marketing, sales, and customer success as three distinct teams with three discrete goals. After all, the skills and expertise needed in each role are different, that’s true, and the day-to-day of the job is also different. 

When you look at their jobs from the buyer’s perspective, the picture shifts. To the individual buyer, they are all representing different stages of one relationship with the company. 

These three teams each have a direct connection to the customer, and thus, to the overall business’s growth. Reminding your marketing, sales, and customer success teams that their job is to serve the buyer at every stage of their journey - from lead, to prospect, to customer, and on to evangelist - can help ensure that everyone stays aligned. 

If everyone believes that the ultimate goal is to best serve the buyer, you’ll have a true north that can keep your team in sync and ensure you keep moving forward. 

It also has the powerful effect of building trust across departments. Marketing will still spend every day working on better ways to generate qualified leads, and sales will still be focused on the clearest path to a closed-won deal. Customer success will still be growing customer relationships and encouraging referrals. 

The magic will really happen in the buyer’s experience, because alignment reduces friction in the sales process. 

Misalignment between these three teams creates real wrinkles for your growth strategy. Imagine you’re pulling a wagon, but all the wheels are slightly bent. As you move forward, the wagon jolts around and tries to roll in different directions. That is not going to be a smooth ride for the passenger, your customer. When marketing, sales, and customer success aren’t in line and working toward the complementary goals, it creates a less comfortable experience for the customer - and your employees.

5. Marketing creates momentum.

The reason that marketing is such an important part of the growth process is this: marketing creates momentum.

It’s difficult to start from scratch. Marketing helps your company get over the initial inertia in small business and startup growth. Consistent, continued marketing helps generate momentum and keep those leads coming in. 

Marketing starts with attraction. 

If you’re in the early stages of growth, nearly everyone is a stranger to your brand and your solutions. You can’t just push your brand in front of those strangers and expect them to take action. Well, you can push your brand in front of them, but it will be expensive, and there’s no guarantee they will be interested.

Instead, it’s more cost-effective and more trust-building to focus on attracting strangers to your company, and invite them to begin exploring how you can help make their lives better. That attraction? Well, that happens through thoughtful, lead-centric, growth-focused marketing.

Some business owners put marketing on the back burner, particularly at the beginning. For some, marketing seems expensive, opaque, and time-consuming. (Done poorly, it can be all of those things.) I don’t mean to diminish that risk; we’ve all gotten spam in our email inbox and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the risk of bad marketing and marketers is everywhere. But marketing doesn’t have to be that way. If you’re working with a growth-focused marketer, you will gain much more than you risk losing, including lots of clarity into your funnel, your customers, and your brand. 

At the end of the day, the decision to sideline marketing is also a decision to choose a harder road to growth and profitability.

The best time to build a strong, healthy marketing program was yesterday. The next best time? Right now.

Take the first step right here, right now.