What’s step #1 for developing your climate tech startup’s marketing strategy?
❌ Conducting market research
❌ Brainstorming marketing campaign ideas
❌ Writing down core brand messaging
❌ Picking out channels, tools, or technology
❌ Testing new marketing tactics
While some of these activities can be helpful along the way of developing your foundational marketing strategy, there’s one step even more fundamental than any of them.
And it’s this:
✨ Aligning your stakeholders. ✨
See, marketing is never an island.
To produce optimal results, marketers at climate tech startups will have to collaborate with a handful of stakeholders from the very beginning and throughout the process of implementing the marketing strategy.
Those stakeholders usually include the founder, other executive leaders, sales team members, product developers, customer support, and many times agency partners.
That’s a lot of moving parts — and potentially a lot of varying opinions about where marketing should put its focus.
So establishing alignment from the outset — and then proactively maintaining that alignment — gives climate tech marketing leaders a much better shot at succeeding than their peers who miss the importance of this crucial step.
Here are some important topics to consider when aligning the company’s stakeholders around the marketing strategy:
🎯 Purpose – What is the perceived reason the company needs marketing?
📊 Measures of Success – How will the stakeholders determine if marketing efforts have been beneficial?
👩💼 Ownership – Who will be responsible for leading the company’s marketing strategy?
📑 Prioritization – Which criteria will be used to determine the priority of marketing projects?
✔ Approvals – What does the approval process look like for major marketing projects?
Ensuring alignment around these topics can be difficult, no doubt. But the results are well worth the effort.
Because climate tech marketing leaders with the full faith, support, and alignment of their stakeholders can go on to execute the marketing strategy in full force.