Why is marketing a last resort for most climate tech startups? 😤
First, they make a few early sales to the founder’s connections and think the momentum will last forever. The market wants this!
When that well runs dry, they focus on building up a sales team. (Don’t mind the fact that they still haven’t identified target customers to go after.)
Even then, they still don’t turn to marketing. They tweak other areas that seem to have “a more direct impact” on revenue.
Finally, when they’re in dire straits, they give in and run a few “marketing experiments” (Yes, this is the exact way they put it.) or hire one mid-level marketer to pump out content.
When that doesn’t really impact leads and sales, it validates their belief all along that they don’t need marketing.
Climate tech, your marketing strategy isn’t broken. The problem is, you don’t have one.
This frustrates me because I want you to succeed. So let me break it down for you.
Here’s the 10 building blocks for laying a foundational marketing strategy:
1️⃣ Consensus Among Stakeholders – Get your stakeholders aligned around a single direction for marketing. Nothing else can happen until this does.
2️⃣ Current Performance Tracker – Put together one source of truth to track sales and marketing efforts and performance. Without this, you won’t ever actually know if something’s working or not.
3️⃣ Customer Profile – Create a very specific profile that details commonalities of your most profitable customers. This will inform everything else, including messaging and targeting tactics.
4️⃣ Concrete Goals – List out 2-3 short-term goals shared by sales and marketing that support the company’s big-picture goals. “We need more sales” is too vague.
5️⃣ Competitive Differentiators – Identify provable competitive differentiators for your brand. What makes your solution better?
6️⃣ Core Brand Assets – Build a library of assets that define your brand. This is more than just the visual elements (i.e. logo and color palette); it should include your mission, values, UVP, etc.
7️⃣ Customer Journey – Map out a cohesive and frictionless path that leads your prospects from first learning about your company to signing on the dotted line to continuing on as a happy customer.
8️⃣ Content Plan – Next, plan out the what, when, and how for delivering valuable content along the customer journey in a way that builds confidence, instills trust, and answers questions for target customers.
9️⃣ Company Resources – Identify the team, budget, and other resources necessary for the company to execute this marketing strategy. (Hint: One person with a $25K marketing budget won’t do it.)
1️⃣0️⃣ Continuous Improvement – Revisit this strategy, evaluate your progress, and make a clear action plan for improvement on a monthly basis to ensure your marketing efforts continue to drive results.
This is how to win at climate tech marketing.