Marketing for scaleups: Perfecting your message
What happens to your marketing when you’re no longer a startup? New goals and a bigger team demand a fresh strategy. Here’s how to do it.
Mid-sized businesses, scale-ups, the middle market. Call them what you like, organisations of this size are the true blast furnace of the UK economy. Despite only making up around 1.4% of our businesses, they account for:
· 10.9 million employees, 36.4% of the workforce
· £1.7 trillion in revenue, 32.3% of economic income
That’s… huge. So why don’t we hear more about them? We’re quick to lionise our Unilevers and GlaxoSmithKlines, while the fetishistic mythos surrounding startups speaks for itself. How come the economy’s middle children are getting lost in the shuffle?
Well, there are probably a lot of reasons, but it doesn’t need to happen to you. Today we’re talking about turning growing pains into golden opportunities when you’re no longer a startup, but not yet an industry giant.
Get your house in order
In terms of messaging and marketing, the first thing to change when you graduate from startuphood is dead easy: change everything.
The game has changed from those early years. You’re no longer fighting for sheer survival, your goals have shifted to sustainable growth, maybe even exit. For that to happen, you need to demonstrate the kind of tight ship you’re running.
Before you change so much as a comma on your customer-facing marketing, take a great big hatchet to your internal comms. How are you onboarding new staff? Does the information and training you provide properly reflect your new goals?
Think about moving your orientation process to video. When you move from 10 employees to 20, then from 20 to 40, you no longer have a business; you have a culture. Properly done, video allows you to define what this culture looks, sounds, and feels like. You retain control of the vision without having to micromanage an unrealistic number of people.
Scaling up is risky business
Mid-sized businesses might have lost some of the hunger and dynamism they enjoyed in their salad days. But ya know what makes up for that?
Funding.
You’re likely to have more investment by this point, so level up your definition of a reasonable marketing spend. That can be a tough conversation, but it’s essential because you now find yourself competing pound for pound with big incumbents.
As businesses mature, they tend to lose their appetite for risk. That’s fine, but be prepared to spend more on risk-averse marketing to make up for the fact that it’s generally a bit naff.
A better approach, surely, is to retain the do-or-die bravado that got you this far. Use an increased budget to amplify those results before you get bogged down in the layers of bureaucracy which your new competition has to deal with.
Big crazy ideas from earlier in your journey now become very real possibilities. Play it safe, and you risk the sheer size of bigger businesses sieging you out of the marketplace.
Besides, those crazy ideas might not be so crazy after all when you consider…
You have the data: Use it
60% of UK startups fail within three years. If you’ve made it that far, you’re sitting on something special. Your sense of product-market fit is going to be so much more advanced than that of a startup. Meanwhile, you still have way more flexibility than bigger players.
This balance of data vs action is your biggest strength. You know, down to the penny, the cost of customer acquisition. You know, with minute precision, who your customers are and what drives them to buy.
This isn’t just an advantage you have over startups. Changing trends can cause bigger businesses to lose touch with their customers and get Blockbustered. That hasn’t happened to you yet.
Strike while the iron is hot with decisive, data-driven marketing campaigns that recontextualise you as one of the big boys.
These campaigns should have clear objectives, as well as defined lifespans. You can always reuse elements of a successful campaign, but you don’t want to strap yourself to a turkey forever. A comprehensive strategy for every campaign is non-negotiable.
Lean on your people
Finally, a scaled-up business means headcount. Startup life often calls for everyone to adopt a jack-of-all-trades approach and pitch in with everything. This isn’t just unfeasible as you grow, it’s outright counterproductive and plays havoc with project structure.
As a more mature business, you enjoy the capacity to clearly define who does what in terms of marketing. Strong leadership helps everyone stay in their lanes and avoid treading on one another’s toes.
Few people realise the benefit of this approach until it’s happening to them. Strategies get stuck to. Content becomes clearer and more effective. Suppliers and agencies receive solid instructions and expectations.
There exists a golden age for growing businesses where people have the time and focus to get stuff done, before growing into a multi-layered corporate labyrinth of inertia. Use this time wisely to get the word out.
The secret to better marketing? Scale up with Sookio
Wherever you are on your business journey, we’ll turn your natural advantages into big results, from strategy to content creation and ongoing reporting.
While you work towards the day when you can do all your marketing in house, let the experts help get you there. Contact Sookio and let’s grow together.