How to prioritize marketing & stay accountable in 2024

Founders are riding the New Year high. Ready to scale your startup in 2024. But it’s hard to prioritize and stay accountable.
Most of you probably fall short on marketing because of 3 things:

1. You don’t know what strategies to prioritize
2. You don’t like DOING the strategies
3. You over-commit your time.

Today I’ll walk you through the 5 questions I ask founders to help overcome the priority & accountability gap plus how to answer them.

This will take about 7 minutes and set you up for at least 3 months.50%

Before you read on, sign up for my free marketing office hours at noon CST on January 26th. I would love to see you there!

Let’s get into it.

1. Who is your customer?

Break your customer profile into 2 parts:

The person + their pain point

• Title (Sales, Marketing, HR, Operations)

• Seniority (Entry level, manager, director, VP) Responsibilities

• Metrics for success (Revenue, retention, launch cycle)

• What is making it harder to do their job

The company

• Industry

• Location

• Size

• Other characteristics like the presence of certain titles or jobs

For example, here is mine:
B2B SaaS founders who need to do their own marketing with a company under 1- year-old and no marketing people.

2. Where do your customers spend time?

There are 2 ways I figure this out.

• If you are your customer, start where you like to consume content or get help.

• If you sell to a persona you don't know much about, google your competitors and target companies. You can see where they post and spend time.

3. What type of content are you good at?

The only way to stay consistent with your plan is do do things you are good at and like.

When planning your tactics follow these two guidelines

• Lean into your strengths. You don't have time to learn a ton of new skills Do things you enjoy. You are already stressed out enough. Like making videos? Start there.

• I enjoy answering questions, so I start all of my content by helping people on reddit and LinkedIn. I repurpose those to newsletters (like this) and posts.

4. What has worked for you so far?

If you already have some customers and data on your social media, newsletters, or website this is easier to figure out.

Just keep doing what is bringing the most volume of new contacts and try to convert them more or increase the volume.

If you don't have any traction yet, this does not have to be from personal experience. Here are some ways to figure out what has worked:

• Ask other founders in your network

• Ask your customers (if you have them already)

• Follow your competitors’ activity

• Talk to the marketing people at your old job if the target customer is similar

• Pursue “influencers” in your space on LinkedIn. People love to brag about their wins.

Once you get some data under your belt you can iterate from that.

5. How much time can you dedicate to marketing each week?

Its easy to set yourself up for failure if you build a plan that requires 40 hours of work per week.

You have other things on your plate. It's ok if you only have a few hours. Start small.

Dedicate an hour a day to your marketing.
After you see things working, you can scale it/make it more efficient with help.

Get a walkthrough of Marketing for Founders and get 3 free exclusive office hours with me to work on your 2024 marketing plan.

Need some help staying accountable and know what to prioritize? That's what we are here for!

You'll get actionable steps to get your marketing off the ground and see if Marketing for Founders is for you!

See you there! Adam