Marketing Strategy

What is Marketing Strategy?

A marketing strategy is a startup's overall plan to get more customers at scale.

Once you have found product-market fit, you will build on your original go-to-market strategy to get more customers. Our recommendation is to scale a marketing channel once you've received paying customers from that channel. Until then, you should keep your spend to a minimum to reduce your burn rate.

There are 12 broad marketing channels, which fit into two categories:

Naturally Scalable Marketing Channels:

1. Business Development and Partnerships
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
3. Paid Advertising / Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
4. Viral Marketing / Network Effects
5. Sales

Not Naturally Scalable Marketing Channels:

1. Press
2. Engineering as Marketing
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Community Marketing
5. Email Marketing
6. Trade Shows/Offline Events
7. Content Marketing

What's the Difference Between A Marketing Strategy VS. A Go-to-Market Strategy?

Your go-to-market strategy (GTM strategy) is the strategy you use to get your first customers, until you have established product-market fit with your product. This may include a product launch plan, and how you will test marketing channels until you can scale up. Your marketing strategy is what you will invest more once your product is developed.

You will find similar principles apply to both your GTM strategy and your marketing strategy. However customer expectations change as you shift from targeting early-adopters to the majority of your market. Until you reach product-market fit, you will want to focus more on product development than marketing.

Here Are Our Articles on Creating a Marketing Strategy for Startups: