Marketing AMA: When You Need A Little Boost

Marketing AMA | Marketing 261

Marketing is Complicated, Sort Of

Marketing originated in bringing goods to physical markets for sale or trade. Setting prices, showing products, promotional shouts of “Get your apples here,” all happened in one place.

If it was only that easy in today’s startup world, right?

Today’s marketing involves creating relevance for your brand, building awareness of your product or service, developing compelling validation for your solution, and taking the right mitigating actions along the path to purchase. All with limited resources and sometimes with tiny, non existing budgets.

Marketing AMA: Ask Me Anything

We believe this entire process can be made more effective and does not have to be as daunting as it seems. Our AMA sessions are formed to help CEOs and marketing leads recall that marketing retains its simple, uncomplicated foundations if it’s backed by:

  • a well defined strategy
  • an organized & attainable plan
  • purposeful execution

By targeting your marketing efforts around these three interdependent drivers, we’ll help you focus your marketing initiatives so they all lead to measurable business growth.

How It Works

This is your time to inquire about your marketing strategies, programs, campaigns, budget, content, SEO, or just brainstorm on ideas. During your marketing AMA session, we can recommend practical and proven strategies and techniques for what’s working, what needs improving, and what’s simply eating away at the budget.

To be respectful of your time, we like to keep all sessions to 60 minutes. To get the most out of your time, we recommend the following:

  • Focus on 1-2 specific questions
  • Know your marketing goals for the quarter/year
  • Understand your marketing funnel metrics
  • Have an idea of budget
  • Be acquainted with your target audience

What’s Been Asked

  • I have headcount to hire one person this year. Who should I hire, a product marketing manager or someone for demand generation?
  • What events should we be attending?
  • How do I go about starting a newsletter?
  • What marketing tools should we have in our marketing stack?
  • Is SEO important?
  • When do I think about a re-brand?
  • How do I know what to focus on? There are so many moving parts!
  • Should we incorporate webinars?
  • What automation tool should I buy?
  • Should I spend money on AdWords or SEO?
  • How do I get more leads?
  • No one is coming to our website or blog. What do we do?
  • I am not getting an leads from social media, what are we doing wrong?
  • How often should we be producing a new blog?

Questions We Might Ask You

Not all these questions will be asked to you during your session. And it’s certainly ok if you don’t have answers to the questions we might ask. That is why you are here, right?

  • Does your company have a positioning & messaging document?
  • Do you have a well defined marketing strategy? Is it written down?
  • Has the leadership team seen the strategy and are they on board with it?
  • What is your biggest converting channel?
  • What’s your budget? Do you have it itemized?
  • How many unique web visits per month to you get?
  • How many convert to a lead/download?
  • How many convert into a paying customer?
  • Where are people getting stuck in the funnel?
  • What is your cost per lead? CAC? LTV?
  • What is your quarterly marketing spend?
  • Who is your competition? In one sentence, how are you different?
  • Do you know your funnel metrics?

Get Started

We look forward to hearing your marketing questions and learning more about your business. If you need to cancel your AMA session with us, please give us at least 24 hours notice. Book your marketing AMA session using this calendar link.

By Michelle Urban

Michelle Urban is the founder of Marketing 261, a digital agency for startups. With a hands-on, get-it-done attitude, she and her team focus on executing measurable plans to get real results. For over 15 years, she’s built scalable marketing programs for demand creation, lead generation, customer advocacy, and engagement. She’s also a wanna-be writer and weekend windsurfer who occasionally binge-watches Netflix. Ask her about the time she danced with Oprah and Beyoncé on live television.