In 2017, Jennifer Zick founded Authentic Brand to help growing businesses overcome random acts of marketing to achieve next-level growth. 🚀
An experienced revenue builder, Jennifer had held sales and marketing executive roles for a variety of start-up and global enterprise organizations, where she thrived in building strong brands, teams, and customer relationships.
It’s this experience that helped her build the model of Authentic Growth™ that she uses today to help Overcome Random Acts of Marketing™ and confidently take the next right step in growth.
The problem with marketing for scaling businesses
"The fact is that most entrepreneurial businesses start approaching marketing backward, they approach it from a bottom up instead of a top down."
Having learned alot about helping scale businesses, about how to reverse the script and build true strategic marketing focus, we spoke to Jennifer about marketing from a top down approach.
“Most of the clients we work with have been founder led sales driven entrepreneurial companies, who’ve experimented and explored a lot of paths to find a point of traction for growth. And by the time they get to that point in their growth cycle, they will have committed naturally. Many different random acts of marketing surrounding their growth.
Mostly, they’re at the point of frustration where they feel like they’ve invested time, money, and resources in marketing, but aren’t sure they’re moving the needle in the right direction.”
Overcome random acts of marketing
Random acts of marketing are tactics that are not tied to any kind of purpose or strategy.
To help overcome random acts of marketing, Jennifer suggests using a 6 step approach to align marketing to the growth vision of the company.
- Articulate your purpose
- Clarify your business goals
- Identify your ideal buyer
- Choose appropriate channels
- Align your resources (and expectations
) - Make sure you measure what matters
Step 1: to overcome random acts of marketing: Articulate your purpose
I love to challenge business owners and their executive teams with this question. What is your life-changing purpose for existence as a business?
If you’re a leadership team and your owners can’t articulate, how your business changes lives then I don’t know why you’re in business.
We’ve noticed this point come up in every single podcast we’ve hosted, so be sure to check out the episode on “Why purpose is your UBER strategy” with Pepe Marais.
“Know your purpose and articulate it to all stakeholders because when you can connect with people emotionally around purpose, that builds a ton of trust and it’ll bring the right people into your orbit.”
And definitely check out Simon Sinek’s most accoladed video “Start with Why”.
Step 2: to overcome random acts of marketing: Clarify your business goals
You need to be more pragmatic about what your business goals are and how you can prove and build credibility with your whole team that it’s possible to get there.
Making sure that everybody’s clear on how their role contributes to the goal is essential.
Some businesses underestimate the importance of alignment between marketing and business goals. This creates poorly-defined marketing goals that leave teams disempowered and uninspired.
Marketers and business owners should set SMART goals which means that every goal is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound.
Step 3: to overcome random acts of marketing: Identify your ideal buyer
You can’t be everything to everyone.
“If you think of your organization as a baseball team, your outfield is your delivery engine. It’s all the things your solution or services could do. All the problems you could solve for all the possible buyers. And that’s far too wide for you to market effectively. You can’t possibly be all things to all people. Your sales team is the infield. Sales can bring a little more focus to shaping a deal and maneuver left and right but your marketing engine must be your pitcher and you need to be pitching to a very tiny strike zone. You need to put all of your resources into one direction to attract the highest, most profitable, healthiest growth for your business.”
Step 4: to overcome random acts of marketing: Choose appropriate channels
Choosing the right channels is all about how you intersect your ideal buyers’ lives in a way that builds trust and adds value in a natural habitat for those buyers. It’s about having an impact on their lives, not about adverts.
There’s a difference.
“In choosing a channel, it’s not about pitching your product or service. It’s about building trust with your brand, creating engagement, adding value, and bringing them in for the opportunity to have a conversation.”
Step 5: to overcome random acts of marketing: Align your resources (and expectations 🙈)
You can’t aim for the stars if you don’t even have the fuel to get started. Every company has limits on the time and money that can be invested.
“Be very realistic and listen to experienced advisors when they tell you what you’re asking for is not achievable in the time you’re asking for it.
Acceleration requires freeing up more resources, so be realistic about your resources.”
Step 6: to overcome random acts of marketing: Make sure you measure what matters
Measure what matters!
It’s all about measuring the right things incrementally.
Remember that through different stages of business growth data and analytics start by being information before they become insights before they become predictive so that you have a model you can trust and fund based on predictive analytics.
If you need to, get the appropriate expertise in setting up a marketing dashboard.
Ask,
- Do we know what matters right now to move the needle based on our business goals and our resources?
- How do we know that we are aiming our energy and arrows in the right direction to that strike zone and bringing in the right results?
Are you committing random acts of marketing 🆘
Jennifer says that there are telltale signs to see if you’re committing random acts of marketing. She challenges entrepreneurs to answer these questions to see if marketing needs to be aligned more strategically;
- Do you know what healthy growth means for your organization?
- Do you know how much you should budget for marketing?
- Is marketing is reporting to a sales leader or founder who is not a marketing leader?
- Are you trying to market everything to everyone because you think any revenue is good revenue?
- Is your marketing is tactical, activity-driven, and approached with a short-term mindset?
If you answered yes to these, it’s time to overcome random acts of marketing.
Readiness to Scale Assessment
Almost everyone wants to scale their business but where to start? Take our Readiness to Scale Assessment to find out! You’ll be presented with 10 statements that correlate to one of three specific scaling stages in business.
