The Most Costly Mistakes We’ve Made as Marketing Leaders

Co-written with Yam Regev. Translated from the Hebrew original published in Calcalist and in Startup for Startup

Inefficient marketing in a startup can lead to its closure if it's in the early stages, and significant value loss for more established companies. The reason is that marketing inefficiency not only drains the company's cash but often fails to deliver the business growth marketing aims to achieve.

We wrote this piece with the goal of helping every founder and marketing leader avoid mistakes as much as possible by optimizing their marketing framework, strategy, tactics, and the organizational culture of your marketing department. And even more important - to reassure everyone who’s experiencing one of the following, to know that it’s part of your growth process, experienced by countless marketing leaders before you, and this too shall pass.

What works for our competitors will surely work for us

• Inefficient: Not everything that shines for your competitors is gold. Let go of this approach and reduce the noise about what the competitor launched or improved. It has no value. Yes, we need to track market trends and competitor activity, but not aim to copy the specifics obsessively. We never truly know what truly "works" as outsiders.

• Efficient: The only data that matters are your data on how your traffic behaves, what's happening with your profits, and how your pipeline looks. Create internal benchmarks. It's okay to look for some benchmarks and studies, but everything will be very different according to your venture, its age, the experience your team has accumulated, and a billion other parameters. Keep your eyes on the ball concerning your data or foundational assumptions.

Our sales are down, maybe offer a coupon?

• Inefficient: Those who don't need your product won't need it more for 50% off. And if we expand this insight a bit more - if the only way to generate a significant sales volume is through discounts, probably the price does not match the purchasing power of the target audience or does not reflect the perceived value.

• Efficient: If your sales are down, the problem is not pricing. Test your campaign settings, the messages on the landing pages, the initial user experience with the product. In products just meeting the market, consider A/B testing prices and packaging. It's also legitimate to celebrate a specific annual event with a symbolic discount, but think it through very well with your CFO to understand its impact on your churn ARR and LTV.

It's just a small change on the landing page, no need to test it

• Inefficient: Many assumptions fall apart because we said, "Are we really going to create different models to follow a change in a letter/ button/ navigation/ section/ number on this page? And then wait 2 weeks for a significant result" And ultimately, go live without testing and realizing we have no idea why something worked or didn’t work.

• Efficient: Just do the f***ing test. Get addicted to testing. It might feel strange, but anything you can’t measure in a marketing funnel is not worth your time. Marketing leaders without sufficient data and rigid attribution models will quickly spiral into the clueless marketer cliche - spending money and making excuses. Add events in Google Analytics for every change you make on a page or in a specific campaign, create a report on that change, and in very significant cases, even dedicate time daily or weekly to review it with the CEO or your team.

So, there's no point in investing in influencers/PR/brand, it's not measurable

• Inefficient: Treating every non-measurable marketing expenditure as superfluous. Fear of spending a dollar without seeing it come back. Fear of the term Brand Awareness. Jealous of a launch campaign or LinkedIn post you read somewhere about a product that went viral with $0 investment in branding, PR, or distribution and reached $1M ARR in 2 weeks.

• Efficient: Choose tactics and a mix that match the state of your finances, the period, and the goals. Take a deep breath and understand that some money will return immediately, some within three months, and some you will never see returning. Set a target budget and Success Indicators, don’t be tempted by big names or follower counts, conduct due diligence on the demographics and characteristics of the followers so they match your ideal audience, run SEMRush on every blog that wants to promote you. In the not-too-long term, investment in "rhetorical" and unmeasurable channels should manifest in direct, brand searches, mentions on networks - in other words, in all those scalable and free channels that will eventually reduce your CAC.

Being addicted to “hard ads”

• Inefficient: A marketing strategy that relies on paid media over the long term as a central channel will be challenged to transition to organic or to a healthier mix, your CPC will always increase, and the impact on your CAC is significant.

• Efficient: Start with places of higher Intent such as Google Ads and go for less competitive keywords. Gradually, based on success, open it up to more words. You can start by targeting a narrowed geographical area and expand over time. Remember, leads coming from paid sources will generally be colder with lower conversion rates. Invest in product marketing - in the onboarding experience into the product, in user communication, in messaging, and in exposing features and capabilities at all stages, especially during the first few days of usage.

The CFO as a BFF

• Inefficient: Many marketing leaders avoid incorporating the CFO as an integral part of their setup, their planning, and their reports. CFOs ask tough questions, and rightly so. Just as marketing is the Gatekeeper of the brand, finance is the Gatekeeper of the company's expenses.

• Efficient: Start by understanding the challenges of the CFO's role and what's important to them. Include the CFO in planning the strategy, the roadmap, and certainly in budgeting. Learn basic financial concepts - EBITDA, Gross Margin, COGS, Cash Flow, Burn Rate, Runway, and the difference between Revenues and Profits.

To summarize, understand that costly mistakes are caused by hasty decisions. It's also worth reconciling with the fact that this is reality and there's no way to grow without experiencing it. Don't be tempted by obvious solutions (increase the budget, change the landing page, issue a coupon) as part of the breathing process, dissect your data in every possible way, challenge every result that emerges from them. Share with colleagues, managers, friends you trust, and never stop measuring every effort you lead.