The Pulse by Ortto

In The Pulse's Go-to-market series, startup marketers share their advice and insights on marketing for startups. In this edition of Go-to-market, Stella Startups’ Gemma Clancy shares the importance of starting with customer research, and how early-stage startups should approach community hacking and product-led growth.

We’ve reached a point where the unprecedented is expected. Even the most well-established businesses cannot expect continued growth, they need to be proactively pursuing growth at all times.In this environment, more than ever before, a carefully constructed growth marketing plan is an essential part of achieving business objectives. Whether you have an established plan that simply requires fine-tuning or you’re building a plan from scratch, this updated guide to building a growth marketing plan will help you get clarity on the steps you need to take for real, tangible, business growth. 

Marketers have never been asked to do so much with so little. That pressure only intensifies when you’re a one-person marketing team tasked with making a big impact on a small budget. “That really resonates with me,” says Sophia Firth, Marketing Manager at Rungway. “One of my biggest challenges is that I'm on my own, and having the resources that I need to do my job correctly and do it well,” she says. At Rungway, an employee listening platform, Sophia’s been tasked with building the brand’s awareness and delivering pipeline—a lofty goal for a solo marketer. She shares her advice for maximizing success on a small budget.

Return on investment (ROI) is one of marketing’s more ubiquitous metrics. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s popular. Most modern marketers have a complicated relationship with ROI. On the one hand, it is a simple calculation that gives a rough sense of whether a marketing investment was worthwhile. On the other hand, ROI is a limited metric that has been known to lead to preemptive budget cuts and short-termism.In this episode, we’ll look at calculating ROI, when it is a worthwhile metric to track and optimize towards, and where marketers feel it falls flat. 

Harnessing the power of data can provide businesses with valuable insights, enhance customer experiences, and ultimately drive growth. However, embarking on a data-driven marketing journey requires careful planning and execution. We asked nine experienced marketers to share their top tips for getting started with data-driven marketing. They emphasized the significance of setting clear objectives, focusing on data quality over quantity, selecting the right tools, upskilling yourself and your team, and maintaining a balance between data-driven insights and creative innovation.

Personalization is the number one priority for Tom Mitchell, Senior Lifecycle Operations Manager at Sona. The UK-based SaaS platform is used by industries as diverse as social care to hospitality for frontline scheduling. But creating personalized experiences that cater to completely different audiences, each with their own unique pain points and goals can make building personalized experiences at scale a challenge. The answer, says Tom, is having a complete view of all the data you hold on your customers, so you can segment your audiences and target them with the right message at the right time.