New year, new marketing plan?

If your startup is like most out there, planning for ‘24 has been a focus lately. And for some of y’all who still haven’t presented your board with a plan or budget for ‘24 (don’t act like I don’t know how y’all do), it’s time to get cracking!

But how should you be adjusting to tackle the new year, preserve runway, and still achieve growth?

Let’s discuss a few practical steps to tune your marketing mix for this year.

Examine the Big Picture

There’s only so much you can digest at once. Avoid overwhelming yourself and instead start with the guidelines below:

• Did our core metrics get where we wanted in the last 3/6/12 months? (Your timeline for how far back you look depends on your sales cycle.)

  • cost per lead or cost per trial (CPA)

  • customer acquisition cost (CAC)

  • conversion rates (such as from lead to customer or free trial to customer)

  • churn

  • month-over-month growth and year-over-year growth

  • average revenue per customer

  • lifetime value to customer acquisition cost (LTV/CAC)

You may have many more business defining performance indicators to look at, but this will get you started.

Now the true test here is if you don’t know these things, can’t find them, or aren’t able to show them to your staff/board/investors, then that’s task number one for 2024—measure what matters!

Redefine Core Performance Metrics

You may or may not need to do this, but be open to redefining your performance metrics. If you’ve been tracking email open rates, but most of your sales close by phone, maybe email open rates aren’t core performance metrics.

Your core metrics are the ones that if they dramatically increased or decreased, your business could change overnight (somebody go ahead and Google if that’s the real definition, but that’s what I’m running with here).

Channel-specific performance indicators are good to track. For instance, tracking your search engine marketing (SEM) efforts, you’ll want to look at impressions, clicks, click-through-rate, conversions, conversions rate (and many more). While those are great to measure to determine if your SEM is working, it’s not a core performance metric.

Talk to Your Customers

I know I’ve talked about this before. Y’all…talk to your customers!

When Cristine Brown, VP of Partnerships at Rhino came on Tech Nest, we talked at length about this. She credited their efforts in talking to customers with helping grow the partner network covering more than 6 million rental units (as of 9/23).

Here’s a few ways you can talk to your customers:

• Email surveys

• Attend mixers and conferences your customers attend

• Call them after a purchase

• Text them before, during, after a transaction

• Call them after they decline to purchase

• Send them a postcard with an incentive to reply

• Connect on LinkedIn (why don’t more people do this!?)

Find ways to talk with your customers. Probably ones of the simplest and most effective ways I’ve seen this executed was a by a mandated customer service shift as part of everyone’s job.

During my time at Avail, every employee outside of customer service was put into a rotation. When was your turn, you’d get to do customer service emails for one hour in the morning, and one hour in the evening for the week. It’s BRILLIANT! Problems with product, marketing, user experience, etc, all get highlighted for those stakeholders to see and feel personally.

However you decide to talk with your customer, you want to find out more about their worries and desires, pains and pleasures, and their needs and wants.

One of the greatest examples of how listening to customers and adjusting marketing drove mega success is the Frebreze brand (the short story is marketing had it all wrong, the product wasn’t selling, and then they talked to customers to reposition the product. From there, it became a mega success. I know it’s not proptech, but let’s learn from this).

Regardless of what you’re doing, if you want to improve this year, you’ve got to talk to your customer.

Cut What Lacks Evidence of Winning

Got a slew of conferences you’re committing to because you went last year? Still sponsoring a podcast or golf tournament because, well, just because?

Stop. Stop spending time and money on things that lack evidence of moving the needle.

It can be small things like just keeping a Facebook page active because you fear someone might not buy from you because you haven’t posted lately. Kill your podcast that isn’t teaching your team anything or finding you new customers. Reduce the frequency of emails if people aren’t opening them.

Money ain’t gonna magically flow into your business this year (whether venture or PE funded or not). You see the news links below? Proptechs have been shutting down and funding was DOWN YOY last year.

Focus your efforts on strategies that show they can win. Go deeper with those strategies. That may mean spending more, adding contractors or new employees, or investing in your tech.

Communicate Cash Flow and Burn with Your Marketing Team

One thing that will always boggle my mind is not communicating cash flow to marketing. I get that everyone has different philosophies on what can be shared broadly.

Some startups have a very open culture where the entire company knows how much cash is burning each month and where the balance is at. Some keep that between executives only.

If you want your marketing team to spend wisely—educate them! I’m going to be blunt for a minute…don’t be stupid. Stupid is doing the wrong thing when you know there’s a better way. You know you need your marketing team to steward your cash wisely, so get them in the loop.

Document and Execute

Document your plan for the year. Use everything above to guide your discovery. Take notes, create dashboards (keep them simple so that anyone can interpret them), outline processes—all the good stuff. But get it all together and organized so you can unite your marketing team, as well as the rest of the company, around your plan of attack for the year.

If you’re unsure how to do this or exactly how to get started, use the list below as a guide. Create a slide for each bullet point below to document your marketing plan for the year.

1. Title slide

2. Market problem

3. Market competing solutions pros / cons

4. Your solution & differentiation

5. Purpose / Mission / Vision

6. Description of marketing’s job / strategy

7. Description of your ideal customer(s)

8. Outline your buyer’s journey

9. Brand archetype / voice / tone

10. Marketing channels to use

11. Top of funnel efforts

12. Middle of funnel efforts

13. Bottom of funnel efforts

14. Target core KPIs / how to measure

15. Budgeting

16. Goals / OKRs / Rocks / Milestones

17. Links to all marketing dashboards

18. Links to important SOPs

19. Links to all important trainings (remember, onboarding?)

20. Team org chart

Have something you want to add? Tweet me @NateSmoyer or reply to this email.

BREAKING NEWS

Short-Term Rental Provider Frontdesk Lays Off Entire Staff, on the Verge of Shutting Down 

“Frontdesk, a startup that managed more than 1,000 furnished apartments across the United States, laid off its entire 200-person workforce Tuesday after attempts to raise more capital failed …”

Short-Term Rental Investment Platform Here.Co Ceases Operations

“The company will list all the properties for sale. Upon the sale of each property, the net proceeds will be distributed to the respective investors after settling selling expenses, wind-down costs, loan repayments, and deferred fees owed to the manager, it said on its website.”

Proptech News

• Proptech Predictions for 2024 from Geek Estate Diamond Members (must be a Diamond member)

• The Fed Will Lower Interest Rates under 3% as a Mild Recession Leads to a 'Soggy 2024,' UBS Chief Economist Says

• Lennar Corp. Acquires Unicorn PropTech Firm Veev in Deal Worth ‘Several Dozen Million’ Dollars

• NAR Lost 26,000 Members in 2023 

• Uplisting Acquired by AirDNA

• Operto to Acquire US-Based Proptech Firm Dack, Bolster Property Management Platform

Weekly Podcast Feature

Breaking Down Walls to Build More ADUs in Canada with Sarah Cipkar, Founder and CEO of Resimate

Sarah Cipkar, shares her experience building her own backyard ADU and how that started her journey to founding Resimate. Resimate is an online tool that allows homeowners to determine if their backyard is suitable for a detached ADU based on zoning bylaws. Sarah also discusses the different construction methods for ADUs, the challenges in the prefab and modular construction industry, and the importance of awareness and education in the ADU market. She shares her vision for the future of Resimate and the ADU market in Canadian cities.

Have a topic you want to see written about next week? Submit your questions here or respond to this email.