The Four Factors for Marketing Your Business Ecosystem
Guest Author: Connor Pylypa, Peregyr Digital Strategy
Not to be reductive, but it is important to point out that new business owners have far more complex hurdles to jump in 2023 than ever before. It’s very unlikely that a single professional can effectively raise funds, bookkeep, deliver on goods and services, manage payroll, or build an online brand on their own- and those focus areas are just the tip of the iceberg. Whether you’re outsourcing to round out your skillset or you’ve found a partner that compliments your expertise, you will face discomfort as you work to establish, stabilize, and grow your new venture.
So what are your options for sourcing talent? Most people will initially seek help within their personal circle first and then expand outward to fill gaps. Hiring friends, family members, or professional acquaintances will certainly cover a few of your missing skill sets, but likely not all of them. Unsurprisingly, your closest network will contain common talents to your own. When starting my own business, I had plenty of options for graphic designers, musicians, and lawyers. Each are very useful to have in my rolodex, though not necessarily a great pool of people when it came to my struggles with accounting.
There comes a capacity breaking point for every business function, and more entrepreneurs than ever are turning to fractional executives, who can help solve problems by applying market-tested expertise. You can find out more in a recent blog post from the solace team about sourcing the right fractional resource.
My argument is that the most crucial and least understood of these areas is marketing. The trick is to define what is meant by ‘marketing’ for your business. Branding, website development, social media, copywriting, graphic design, tone & messaging, sales - it would take a very rare entrepreneur that can deliver on all of these areas competently enough to take their business from red to black, while also ensuring your brand can capture attention.
In order to engage with your audience or internal team, you need a Platform that allows for engagement, Channels to funnel your audience to the platform, and a Result that is measurable to inform iterations to the cycle.
The diagram above outlines a method for sequencing the activities that drive your digital marketing. Digital marketing is a complex and open-ended area of practice. It’s almost impossible to know where to start - especially given the deluge of third-party solutions offered across the board. So, let’s abstract what we mean by digital marketing for a less dry conversation.
You can think of your business as a specialized ecosystem - a biome with unique factors and conditions that allow certain species to thrive, while others will struggle to find a foothold to survive. Broadly appealing biomes like a boreal forest can address the needs of a wide range of flora and fauna. That said, it takes a significant level of maturity and upkeep to maintain an environment that can support such a variety of species.
Broadly appealing businesses will attract customers with diverse needs, though they will be easily drawn to competitors if you’re unable to keep up.
Conversely, niche ecosystems like a subtropical desert can only appeal to a small selection of organisms that possess highly specialized traits. Though it may contain a fraction of the total diversity you’ll see in the boreal forest, the organisms that find a home here will thrive in significant numbers over long periods of time.
Niche businesses will attract a dedicated audience that can only thrive under the exact right conditions.
Within this context, we can think of your digital marketing as the message calling out to your customers to find solace within the unique ecosystem that your products and services offer. If your marketing outlines your value proposition in a truthful and engaging manner, your ideal client will thrive and wrong-fit customers will be drawn elsewhere.
Using the Business Ecosystem analogy, we can start to sequence marketing activities based on Four Factors that you must appeal to in order to attract your thriving customer base.
1) Defining Characteristics - Appealing to Senses
Is your target customer looking for a safe space? Growth opportunities? Are you targeting a very specific niche that requires highly specified features? Before you build anything, you have to understand who it’s being built for - what they want to see in your product, how it will feel in their hands, how it’s priced. And I’ll say this - you aren’t the target market to build for.
Who to bring in if you’re lacking confidence:
A product specialist within your market who understands yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s competitive and customer landscape. They would have an understanding of the things your target audience wants to see, hear, and experience when they interface with your brand, products and services.
Skills to hire for:
Product design and development, feature prioritization and road mapping, marketing channel identification and pricing strategy.
2) Instinctual Response - Appealing to Emotion
Brand, design, tone, language. Everything about your business’s image is tied to evoking emotion with your audience. Are you giving off an air of trustworthiness? Of prestige? Of community wellbeing? The more emotion you can evoke, the more real estate your organization will take up in your audience's mind. The more generic you are, the less willing people will be to interact with you, let alone recommend you as a good time to their friends and family.
Who to bring in if you’re lacking confidence:
A brand specialist with experience translating the complexity of your product or service to an emotionally resonant concept. I would argue your specialist doesn’t even need expertise in your exact market. It’s better to find a creative who can spend the time understanding the unique needs and wishes of your audience than build something generic along the same lines they’ve done before. Emotions aren’t always rational - more often than not, people will create parasocial connections to products and brands out of a fierce sense of obligation rather than their own preference for taste or fit.
Skills to hire for:
Psychological engagement with customers through tone, messaging, choice of imagery and colors, and presentation of multimedia assets as one contiguous identity.
3) Retaining Attention - Appealing to Memory
Sales is a never-ending, back-and-forth game between your business and market participants. They’ll find you, you’ll reach out to them, they’ll be referred. They’ll make decisions based on their wallet, your competitors, their patience - and you’ll build your business around these evolving needs. Understanding is key, and understanding of your marketing will be driven by data. If you can’t see patterns with how customers interact with your business, you’re missing 70% of potential sales opportunities available to you. This interaction ultimately comes down to memory. Does your audience recall your business when they have a need you can fulfill? Can your marketing improve your chances to be front and centre when that happens?
Who to bring in if you’re lacking confidence:
A Business Development Specialist who has experience managing a portfolio of clients with similar interaction points as your business. Are you targeting customers with long sales cycles that are over 6-12 months? Or are your customers making snap purchase decisions over a few minutes? The way you build your client base and retain them over time will take completely different forms depending on how much attention potential clients need from your business. Your sales methodology must take this into account or you’ll be leaving too much on the table. In short, you can’t expect your potential customers to remember you when they finally arrive at a purchase decisions. You’ll have to put yourself in a position to jog their memory for them.
Skills to hire for:
Search engine optimization, email marketing, retargeting, content creation, referral incentives, testimonials, personal and impersonal engagement.
4) Future Sight - Appealing to the Unexpected
Growth activities for your business must be treated as moving targets. That said, there must be clear articulation points for when and how you enact changes. Are you growing to a certain revenue goal? To hire a certain number of people? To acquire investors? To drive awareness? Don’t underestimate the role that marketing plays with these goals. If your business starts as a profit-generator, but ends up as an investment opportunity for angels, your tone, messaging and identity should evolve to match those changing priorities.
Who to bring in if you’re lacking confidence:
A strategic advisor with financial skillsets. It’s tough to pivot rapidly if you’ve build a team that revolves around one set of skills, then ask them to completely shift gears if your business has the potential to evolve to fit a new niche or meet a new objective. In your first few years of operating, a flexible approach could spell the difference between exponential growth and stagnation. This requires a keen eye for opportunity and the ability to make tough calls when it comes to the future of your business
Skills to hire for:
Market and audience research, engagement with focus groups, identifying growth areas, change management practices, team building and project management experience.
