How to Build a Scalable Marketing Foundation Before Series A

Is your startup one of the few that is actually likely to make it to Series A funding? Congratulations!

GoEpps has worked with many firms in your position and helped them navigate this critical milestone. Here are our top tips to refine your marketing so your company looks great to potential investors and is positioned for success now and long into the future.

What Is Series A Funding?

Let’s level-set on what Series A funding is and why it is critical.

Series A funding is the first round of institutional venture capital a startup raises after proving its initial business model. It typically amounts to between $5M and $15M. The money helps startups reach the next level by improving their operations, increasing customer acquisition, hiring key leadership, expanding their teams, and entering new markets.

Unlike earlier seed rounds of business fundraising, which typically rely on convertible notes or SAFEs (Simple Agreements for Future Equity) not backed by a fixed company valuation, Series A is a priced round. This means investors place a formal valuation on the startup and purchase preferred stock, usually securing between 10 and 30 percent ownership of the company.

Preparing for Series A Funding

Series A investors are more highly focused on metrics and sustainable profitability than those in earlier rounds. Startup company owners must prepare comprehensive business plans and reports. They must also set up their marketing to position the company as looking professional to investors. If you’re in this position, you must also move from ad-hoc marketing to a data-driven, systematic approach that can deliver dependable results and growth over time.

Steps to Enhance Marketing for Series A

Based on our extensive experience supporting startups, here are things you must do to ensure your marketing program is well-positioned for Series A:

Determine Your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs)

Who are the people most likely to do business with your firm? If you don’t have a clear picture of this, you won’t be able to build a consistent, replicable, and growing marketing and sales process. Determine who your ideal customers are and take time to define them through documented customer profiles. Include vital information like income, education, media preferences, and how they can benefit from doing business with you — anything you need to market and sell to them effectively.

Define Your Brand

The people in your ICPs won’t do business with you if they don’t understand how it will benefit them. And investors won’t invest in your company if they don’t “get it.” Take time to define your unique value proposition. Develop key messages that define what you do and how you do it. Embed them throughout your marketing and sales process. Develop a logo and imagery style that reflects your business. If you can’t do this on your own, get support from a company branding expert.

Develop or Update Your Marketing Plan

At this point, your company should have a marketing plan. If it doesn’t, it’s time to create one. If it does, you likely need to audit and update it. Ensure it includes detailed information about how you plan to promote your company, along with specific marketing and sales benchmarks. Define things like customer acquisition cost (CAC) (how much you can afford to spend to bring in a new customer), lifetime value (LTV) (how much you can expect to earn from each customer over time), and payback period (the amount of time it takes for an investment to generate enough cash flow to break even and recover its initial cost). Knowing these things will help you develop an efficient marketing program.

Once you understand these big-picture metrics, you can determine the more granular ones, such as click-through rate, cost per click, and lead cost, that can help you benchmark and track your entire customer journey. In the end, you should have a robust marketing plan that clearly shows investors how your organization will generate consistent, growing income.

Invest in a Scalable Marketing Technology Stack

You may have been able to handle your marketing manually and on a one-off basis in the past. However, creating individual ads on social media or sending out single emails doesn’t cut it for growing organizations. That’s why it is smart to invest in marketing automation that is right for you now and can grow with your organization in the future. For startups, this typically includes a customer relationship management (CRM) system, such as Salesforce, and marketing software, such as Mailchimp, to support email and social media activities. HubSpot, while more costly, can be a smart investment because it combines many features and offers tiered pricing that suits organizations with varying levels of marketing and sales activity.

Your marketing tech stack should also include tools that monitor your marketing performance and brand value over time. Knowing the competitive landscape is key to identifying gaps in your current marketing and for proper valuation. A leveling tool like AEO by GoEpps can be helpful on both accounts, providing clear, deep, actionable insight on where your brand stands against the competition using more than 40 metrics.

If you are unsure which tool stack is right for you or how to use it effectively, the experts at GoEpps are available to advise you.

Focus Your Marketing Efforts

A common mistake growing startups make is to try to do too many types of marketing at once. What’s critical is to limit your efforts to the most effective ones. Use your customer profiles and previous marketing experience to determine the most effective marketing channels for your business. Focus on these as you build your marketing plan. Staying focused will prove to investors that you are serious, know what you are doing, and are not just tossing money into a promotional void.

Implement Lead Scoring

New businesses can often pursue every lead that comes through the door because there are a limited number of them. As you grow and marketing succeeds, prospective customers become more plentiful. That’s why it is smart to employ lead scoring. This is a system in which you rate leads based on their likelihood of converting into customers. Your focus first on those most likely to convert. You can do this by tracking and rating the steps in individual customer journeys (pages visited, links clicked) or by asking qualifying questions on a lead form or during an initial screening call.

Leveraging lead scoring can demonstrate to investors that you have a plan for converting leads into customers as effectively as possible.

Building a Scalable Marketing Foundation Before Series A: The Bottom Line

If your company has achieved the major milestone of seeking financing through Series A, or you’re planning to get to that point, you probably know a little something about marketing. But now that you are entering the big leagues, it is time to up your game. Leverage the tips in this guide to enhance your efforts and prepare you for what’s next.

If you’re looking for more on this, reach out to the digital marketing experts at GoEpps. We have helped many startups up their marketing game so they are more attractive to customers and investors.

Interested in AEO by GoEpps? Book a free strategy call today!