Startups and scaleups frequently spend much of their time, talent, and resources on building their product or service. If they’ve got enough time, talent, resources left, they might devote some of them to growth marketing. But in far too many cases, marketing becomes an afterthought.

Marketing should not be an afterthought. For your business, growth marketing (a type of marketing that fuels rapid growth) should be a constant thought. A strong, ongoing commitment to marketing offers marketplace validation, helps lay out a path for achieving business goals, and normally delivers more sales. 

Bottom line: Marketing strategy is a key driver of success at both B2B startups and scaleups.

While there’s no single marketing formula that works for all businesses, laying the marketing groundwork early on can lead to short-term wins and long-term success for your startup or scaleup.

Keep in mind that you might need to tap outside expertise to design your marketing strategy. You must realize what your strengths are, marketing expert Colleen Curtis says. And if one of those strengths isn’t marketing, you might need to seek help from a marketing agency or consultant.

Curtis, head of community experience at social media platform Reddit, says she worked with one founder-led startup where executives “fancied themselves as marketing people, and so they believed they could do anything better than any agency, and they couldn’t. So, ultimately, the marketing strategy fell down.”

When you start crafting your B2B growth marketing strategy, no matter whether you’re selling software or workwear, be sure you’re clear about your business, your products or services, and your target audience.

“Effective B2B marketing is challenging to get right. Between creative demands, budget limits, and channel decisions, marketers have a lot to juggle when developing their marketing strategy,” according to HubSpot.

Identifying Your Market

Pinpointing your target audience, is based on:

• Your product’s or service’s ability to solve a prospect’s problem.
• The willingness or ability of a potential customer to buy your product or service.

Identifying your target guidance is crucial to effective B2B marketing. You must know your audience and how to communicate with them, HubSpot advises.

“If you’re not properly targeting your buyer persona, your [marketing] will likely fall flat,” HubSpot warns. “In fact, you might as well not be marketing at all.”

Selecting Your Marketing Model

For your marketing to attract customers, you must communicate the right message to the right audience at the right time with the right vehicle. The vehicle should include one or more of these elements:

• Easy-to-navigate, informative website.
• Content marketing (such as blog posts on your website or videos on your YouTube channel).
• SEO (search engine optimization).
• Email marketing campaigns.
• Social media campaigns.
• Referral marketing programs, which encourage current or former customers to spread the word about your brand in hopes of gaining sales referrals.

Regardless of which route you take, well-told, clear, concise, consistent storytelling about your business and its products or services pump up your marketing efforts. They lend authenticity to your brand and help your company stand out in your B2B sector.

Engaging Your Target Audience

When you engage your target audience through marketing, you can turn them into buyers and eventually repeat customers. But to do this properly, you can’t simply churn out emails or blog posts. You must build a relationship with prospective buyers and understand their needs — and must share (in a non-salesy manner) how your product or service can solve their problems.

Who your prospects are, what they want, and how they want to be treated are not just essential principles for successful B2B marketing. These principles also happen to be keys to every relationship in our lives.

Fundamentally, successful B2B marketing revolves around understanding and connecting with people, according to Curtis. In making those connections, she advises against adopting a “one touch” marketing mindset — effective marketing requires a multi-touch, long-term approach.

When you’re coming up with brand messaging as part of your marketing strategy, make sure it’s clear and relatable. Most importantly, the messaging should focus on your target customer’s needs. In other words, don’t concentrate solely on your products or services. Rather, tell prospects how your products or services would relieve their pain points.

Aside from addressing your target customer’s needs, your brand messaging should be actionable (“Sign up for a free consultation today”) and be aligned with solving the customer’s real problems — not problems that you imagine they might be encountering. How would your product or service actually help a buyer?

Furthermore, your brand messaging should be consistent and authentic. This is essential to building brand trust and loyalty. You don’t want to make promises that you can’t deliver on.

Conduct a Brand Audit

A brand audit is a snapshot of your branding. It evaluates the customer-facing view of your brand, along with the internal view. But while a brand audit serves as a sort of checkpoint, it alone is not a brand strategy. It is, however, a starting point for defining and elevating your brand.

A typical brand audit examines:

• Internal branding: Brand values, value proposition, market positioning, company culture
• External branding: Brand story, brand identity, media content (paid, earned, and owned)
• Customer point of view: Marketing materials, thought leadership, customer support

Every company, from startup and scaleup to established business, should regularly undergo a brand audit to:

• Better understand the business and its goals at that point in time.
• Set a foundation for sharing information among all stakeholders.
• Recommend ways to polish the brand.

Startup Branding

If your business is in the startup phase, you might be developing a brand portfolio for the first time. This gives you a clean slate to create branding that accurately reflects your startup.

Here are some questions to ask that’ll inspire the direction of branding as part of your startup marketing program:

• Are you innovating with something different or even evolutionary?
• Are you dramatically improving an existing offering?
• How do you want your core audience to feel when they interact with your brand?
• Which solutions do you want customers to associate with your brand?

Scaleup Branding

For scaling businesses, ask these questions when constructing your brand audit:

• Does the current perception of your brand align with your current or proposed brand strategy?
• Should you re-establish your brand’s position among members of your core audience?
• Do you need to introduce your brand to a new audience as part of your growth plans?
• Can your brand evolve along with your current or projected growth?

“Most industry research is based on data and case studies [centered] on mature, established businesses considering long-term brand building and payback. But scaleup businesses, because of their brand’s growth trajectory, can’t afford to wait that long,” says the United Kingdom’s ScaleUp Institute (a 2022 publication, but still holds true with useful insights).

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Effective B2B marketing starts with deeply understanding the buyer’s problems and conveying empathy. To develop that understanding, it’s vital to create a customer profile for your startup or scaleup.

HubSpot suggests the following ways to develop a customer profile.

Collect Business Information

• To start the process of creating a customer profile, collect business information such as:
• Company size (small, medium, enterprise)
• Company region, such as Southwest or North America
• Industry sector, such as software as a service (SaaS) or health care
• Number of employees
• Annual revenue

Gather Personal Data

After that, identify your target audience. Who’s the person within a company who would be hunting for your product or service?

“Remember, you’re not marketing to other companies. You’re marketing to people who work at that company,” HubSpot advises.

Factors you can use to carve out an identity for your targets include:

• Age
• Location
• Gender
• Level of education
• Job title
• Behaviors
• Habits
• Beliefs

Conduct Market Research

Where do you find all of this business and personal information? Sources might include research about markets, industries and existing customers, along with customer surveys and customer interviews. Research tools that may come in handy include LinkedIn, IBISWorld, ZoomInfo, RocketReach, and D&B Hoovers.

With all of this data in hand, you can put together a buyer persona. A buyer persona helps create messages that resonate with your target audience and move them toward buying your products or services. Each persona is unique, so it’s not uncommon to come up with several buyer personas for your startup or scaleup.

As HubSpot points out, there is a difference between a customer profile and a buyer persona.

“Customer profiles … provide a bird’s-eye view of your target audience,” says HubSpot. “You can think of it as a map of your customer base. You see the major landmarks like demographics, buying habits, and generally all the metrics behind the customer.”

Meanwhile, buyer personas are “laser-focused” looks at your ideal customer within a specific business segment, according to HubSpot. For example, one buyer persona might be “Jim,” the 40-year-old chief technology officer at a company that may be interested in your company’s B2B productivity software.

To help come up with a customer profile, HubSpot offers eight free downloadable templates.

If your startup or scaleup lacks a content plan, you’re missing out on opportunities to engage current potential or current customers. And effective engagement can lead to more sales and, therefore, more revenue.

An estimated 90% of organizations include a content plan in their marketing efforts. Why are so many organizations drawn to content? Content marketing costs much less than less traditional marketing, according to The New York Times. Plus, leads generated through content marketing are six times more likely to convert than leads generated through more conventional marketing.

So, before we dive into how to create and execute a content plan, let’s be clear about what content marketing is. The Content Marketing Institute offers this definition:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Courtesy of HubSpot and others, here are examples of content that a startup or scaleup might produce:

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Social media posts
• Case studies
• Ebooks
• Whitepapers
• How-to guides
• Testimonials and reviews

As identified by the Content Marketing Institute, the most used types of B2B content are short blog posts or articles, videos, and case studies or customer stories.

These and other types of content can pay off handsomely. Regardless of your business model or offering, positioning yourself as an authority in your B2B sector via a solid content strategy can inspire trust among customers and separate your brand from the competition. Of course, it can also contribute to sales and revenue growth.

Thought Leadership

One kind of content that every B2B startup or scaleup should explore is thought leadership content. This content could come in the form of an article published by a B2B news website or a B2B video posted on your company’s YouTube channel, for example.

Establishing thought leadership is an ongoing effort that builds credibility among customers and industry peers.

Unlike sharing common knowledge, thought leadership content seeks to disrupt old-school thinking and perceptions. Thought leadership involves starting a conversation or lending a perspective that addresses a B2B issue without necessarily pushing a solution from your company.

To conceive and execute a thought leadership strategy:

• Identify thought leaders on your team who can produce the content or tap someone to create the content on behalf of those thought leaders.
• Create a list of potential topics for thought leadership content. Rely on buyer personas to help choose these topics.
• Put together a calendar for creation and publication of the content.
• Pick the best channel or channels to maximize consumption of the content. This is also where your buyer personas can come into play.

Come Up With Your Content Plan

Just as you shouldn’t run your business without a plan, you shouldn’t run your content program without a plan.

When developing a content plan, don’t worry about being on every content platform. Pick the platforms where you know your audience would consume your content. For example, thought leadership content for a B2B audience generally performs well on LinkedIn but not necessarily on Facebook.

Also, be sure your content plan can be viewed by all of the people in your organization who need access to it. Therefore, you might want to create a shareable Google Doc or Google Sheet to house the plan.

Here are some other tips for successfully carrying out a content marketing strategy:

• Make sure you’re consistent about following your plan, even if it means publishing only one blog post per week. Quality matters much more than quantity. Remember to stick to a regular schedule of producing and distributing content — a flexible schedule that can be adjusted whenever needed.
• When your startup or scaleup lacks monetary or human resources to execute a content plan, look into hiring outside help. For instance, you might turn to low-cost interns or outside-the-country freelancers if your budget is tight.
• Focus on creating content that addresses real issues, rather than content that emphasizes your company’s achievements. In many cases, people are seeking content that helps them solve problems.
• Avoid generic or purely AI-generated content. Instead, ensure the content is high-quality and easily shareable, and provides tangible value.
• Use storytelling and relatable examples to connect with your audience. Story-based, relatable content will engage your audience far more than bland content will.
• Don’t publish content that’s irrelevant to your target audience. If your current and potential customers come across content that doesn’t resonate with them, they might not come back to consume your content. Conduct keyword research to find out which terms your audience is searching for online, and rely on those keywords to help construct your content strategy.
• Include a call to action in (almost) every piece of content. Your call to action (CTA) might be an invitation to download a how-to guide or an offer for a free 15-minute consultation. Don’t pass up the chance to convert content consumers into buyers. However, be cautious about including CTAs in thought leadership content, as that might come off as too sales-y.
• Identify tools needed to execute your content strategy. These tools might include Google Search Console, which monitors your website’s search results; Google Analytics, which tracks how visitors use your website; Semrush, which aids research into search engine optimization (or SEO); Grammarly, which helps detect errors in written content; and Canva, a graphic design platform.

The marketing ecosystem consists of a variety of marketing channels. But which channels should you use? And which channels can you live without?

Successful marketing strategies involve picking channels that closely align with your target audience. By doing so, your messaging is more likely to hit the bull’s-eye. While you should tailor your channel choices to your business’ unique situation, some marketing channels are no-brainers.

Treat Your Website Like a Door to the World

A few decades ago, establishing a business characteristically meant renting space, perhaps investing in signage, developing paper-based marketing materials, and relying on lots of word-of-mouth marketing. Today, the recipe for marketing success at a startup or scaleup contains many more ingredients, with those ingredients usually tied to your digital presence.

Today, so much marketing happens online — on PCs and laptops, mobile devices, and tablets, for example. As a result, your startup or scaleup must invest in an easy-to-use, attractive website to attract potential customers and enable current customers to digitally interact with your business.

Whatever you do with your website, be sure to invest time and money in creating one that looks professional. As they say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

By the way, you might be wondering whether to set up a DIY website. That decision rests on the resources you’re able to tap into. Unless someone on your team excels at web development and web design, leave creation of your website to the pros.

Here are some of the essentials to include when putting together your website:

Calls to action. A call to action (CTA) invites a user to take a certain action, such as downloading a whitepaper or buying a product.

Mobile-friendly design.

Site security and privacy.

Fast-loading pages.

Brand transparency, meaning your company presents itself in an open, honest manner.

Concise messaging. Keep messaging jargon-free and to the point to capture attention in a short-attention-span atmosphere, says Curtis.

Seamless user experience. NapoleonCat defines a seamless user experience as a “smooth, cohesive, and uninterrupted interaction or journey that a customer or user has with a brand, product, or service across various touchpoints and channels.”

Intelligent landing pages, which supply AI-driven content that’s personalized for each visitor.

Ways for customers to find answers to questions online or to easily connect with your company to get those answers.

Incorporate Social Media Into Your Marketing Program

Roughly 300 million Americans use social media. That’s close to 90% of the U.S. population. Translation: If your business lacks a presence on social media, it’s missing out on marketing opportunities.

Which social media platforms you fold into your marketing program depends on which platforms attract your target market. Among the most popular social media platforms in the U.S. are:

• YouTube
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• TikTok
• LinkedIn
• Reddit

When you pick social media platforms, pick only those where you will be able to regularly post content, where your target audience consumes content, and that you can easily manage. Refer to your buyer personas to help with this decision.

How to Effectively Use Social Media

It makes no sense to shop for groceries at a home improvement store. Similarly, it makes no sense to post content in the wrong place. So, be selective about the social media content that you post and where you post it.

Imagine your company sells paper clips. Here’s how you might tailor your social media messaging, based on the nature of these social platforms:

• Facebook: Our company makes paper clips, and everyone loves paper clips.
• Instagram: Here’s a photo of our CEO holding some of our paper clips.
• X (Twitter): Did you know that the U.S. produces about 20 billion paper clips each year?
• YouTube: Here’s a tutorial video about how to use our paper clips.
• Reddit: Let’s share hacks and tips for using paper clips.
• LinkedIn: Let’s discuss the skills and engineering that go into the manufacturing paper clips.
• TikTok: Look, there’s Sandy dancing around while organizing her workspace with help from paper clips.

Social media marketing can be organic or paid, human-generated or automated, and promote a person or a brand. It’s not an either/or choice, though. You can mix and match social media tactics to suit your brand and your audience.

In the end, social media enables your business to share relevant content and extend its reach. It also allows your business to engage with existing customers, attract new customers, and perhaps generate more revenue.

Reach vs. Frequency

When you determine which marketing channels to focus on, you should be mindful of return on investment (ROI) and metrics. Reach and frequency contribute to social marketing ROI and metrics. Now, there’s no shortage of advice about whether reach or frequency is more important. You’ll ultimately need to measure and assign value to both, though.

Here are definitions of reach and frequency:

• Reach is the number of people in your audience members that you estimate have been reached with, say, a YouTube video or LinkedIn post.
• Frequency is the number of times an audience member comes across a piece of your social media content.

In general, the “Rule of 7” applies to marketing via social media. This means someone must see or hear your company’s message at least seven times before they’re inclined to make a purchase. In other words, don’t expect one YouTube video to bring in bunches of new customers.

Startup Marketing

Startups face unique challenges that established companies typically have already overcome. For instance, you’ll need to settle on the most effective marketing channels for engaging with your audience, whereas an established company may have all of that figured out. And unlike a company that’s been around a while, your startup might lack a big budget to support a broad-based marketing initiative.

As you’re sorting through your options, consider:

• Social media marketing.
• Email marketing.
• Affiliate marketing, which enables third parties to earn money for marketing your company’s products or services.
• Search engine optimization (SEO), which aims to boost your ranking in online search results.
• Pay-per-click marketing, which means paying for each click on a link that’s included in an online marketing campaign.
• Retargeted marketing, which HubSpot describes as a “dynamic digital marketing strategy designed to potential customers who’ve shown interest in your brand but haven’t converted.”
• Content marketing. Content marketing involves creating and sharing online content like blog posts and videos that avoids boldly promoting a brand but instead generates interest in the brand’s products and services.
• Influencer marketing, which enlists people who boast a robust online presence to endorse your business’ products or services.

Demand Generation

Demand generation is a key element of marketing. Although a marketing strategy doesn’t equate to a sales strategy, marketing does impact demand for your products or services. This demand generation can then lead to sales.

Marketing attracts and engages your target audience, putting them in a better position to welcome and act on your sales pitch.

While demand generation differs from your sales strategy, it also differs from lead generation. Lead generation qualifies prospects and moves them through the sales cycle. By contrast, demand generation is a high-value marketing strategy.

What is Demand Generation?

Demand generation builds brand authority to create awareness and interest in your brand. Once engaged, prospects then depart the customer journey and enter the buyer journey, a path you control. If you can create demand for your offering, prospects ideally will switch to workable leads in your sales funnel, primed for the steps toward conversion.

While it sits in its own category, demand generation must be integrated with lead generation and sales. Blog posts, email campaigns, social media marketing, and other kinds of content are part of demand generation. Ultimately, demand generation content should help find and attract potential customers, then guide them along the customer and buyer journeys.here they can connect and engage – to build a customer relationship. By implementing effective branding, ideal personas targeted messaging, and business intelligence with a hub and spoke strategy, online marketing can ignite demand generation and support the sales process to help you reach your goals.

It might be tempting to buy marketing automation tools and then cobble together a marketing automation strategy. But this should happen the other way around. The strategy should come before the technology purchases. Otherwise, you might waste money on marketing automation tools that aren’t the best fit for your company or can’t be integrated with other tools.

After you’ve installed a marketing automation system, you’ll undoubtedly see improved efficiency in your marketing efforts. Marketing automation handles various tasks automatically — and often faster than human marketers.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to employing software to automatically carry out a number of marketing functions. For example, marketing automation can enable a business to automatically schedule email marketing blasts or social media posts.

Aside from increasing efficiency, marketing automation allows for a more personalized approach to communicating with prospects and customers. For example, you may be able to tailor emails to customers who haven’t interacted with your brand recently, enticing them with special discounts on products or services.

Among the benefits of marketing automation are:

• Streamlined workflows
• Personalized outreach
• Improved data collection and analysis
• Freed-up time for marketers to work on more human-dependent tasks

Once your marketing automation toolkit is set up, make sure it’s properly managed and regularly updated, Curtis advises.

Embracing CRM

One automation tool every business should consider is customer relationship management (CRM) software.

With CRM software, you can automate a variety of marketing tasks without compromising the personalization needed to catch customers’ attention. In 2024, an estimated 71% of small businesses include CRM in their tech stacks, according to data cited by business software provider Freshworks. Why? A few statistics offer some reasons:

• Businesses that use a CRM are 86% more likely to surpass their sales goals than business without a CRM.
• Most businesses report their sales grew 21% to 30% after launching a CRM.
• Most businesses with CRM capabilities reduce their average sales cycle by eight to 14 days.
• Employees save about five to 10 hours’ of time per week at most CRM-equipped businesses.

Before purchasing and setting up a CRM, ensure you’ve mapped out your customer journey. By doing so, you’ll extract more value from the CRM — and encounter fewer hassles.

Other CRM Tips

Here are more tips for choosing and setting up a CRM:

• Gain buy-in from company leaders. HubSpot recommends demonstrating the benefits of CRM software to the CEO, chief financial officer, chief technology officer, chief information officer, chief marketing officer, and other executives involved in the decision-making process. Leaders should agree on the need for a CRM and a plan for using it.
• Weigh your options. A number of companies provide CRM software. When evaluating the offerings, look into cost, ease of use, functionality, special features, and customer support. As an example, HubSpot’s free CRM comes with built-in features that let companies boost conversions, track engagement, improve revenue, take advantage of multiple channels, and strengthen customer relationships. 
• Train employees. At some companies, a lack of in-depth training of the people who’ll be using the software stands in the way of CRM success.
• Customize the software. To most effectively use a CRM, the software should be tailored to your company’s unique needs. In other words, don’t need to accept the software as is.
• Look into integrations. Make sure any CRM you’re exploring will integrate with software you’ve already got or software you plan to buy.
• Decide on protocols. Be clear at the outset about how your company will and will not use a CRM. For example, you might say that it’s fine to streamline processes with your CRM. But you might insist that the technology not be used to automate customer conversations or other customer experiences requiring more of a human touch.
• Assemble a CRM team. Organize a team of people, both inside and outside your company, who’ll be deeply involved in installing, maintaining, and using the software.

CRMs for Startups and Scaleups

If your business is a startup or scaleup, it can certainly benefit from a CRM. How? Among other things, the software can track sales leads, automate follow-ups with prospects, and analyze data. All of these tasks are critical when a startup or scaleup is trying to capture customers and revenue.

Now, you may think that a CRM will blow your tech budget (if you even have a tech budget). If so, you’d be wrong. Several vendors, including HubSpot, offer free CRMs. HubSpot even offers a CRM designed for startups.

“As your business grows and its needs evolve, operating in silos becomes a bottleneck for growth. Pre-seed, early-stage, or venture-funded, a CRM can help startups unify business processes, increase operational efficiencies, and make data-driven decisions,” says HubSpot.

If you do purchase a paid version of a CRM, you could easily cover the investment with the extra revenue that the CRM helps pull in. Research cited by CRMSearch.com indicates the average ROI for a CRM is 211%.

But pairing AI and marketing should be done with careful training and oversight, and not in a haphazard manner. This training and oversight can prevent AI from dominating your marketing efforts. You shouldn’t, for example, depend too much on AI to create content. Otherwise, your content might look like all the “AI-generated garbage” that Curtis sees floating around online.

“Marketers are intent on successfully applying AI in their operations with the right data,” Salesforce points out, “but are concerned about security and customer trust as adoption ramps up.” 

But before adding AI to your marketing toolkit, HubSpot suggests:

• Defining your goals. For instance, do you want to save time and money?
• Analyzing your current technology and infrastructure. How are you equipped to blend AI into your marketing mix?
• Assessing your staff’s knowledge. Are they up to speed on AI? Or could they use some AI training?
• Choose the right AI tools. Pick the AI tools that’ll deliver the most value to your organization without busting your budget. Keep in mind that some of your existing technology might feature AI capabilities.
• Test your AI. Once you’ve got the right tools in place, experiment with how well they perform various marketing tasks. For example, you might compare the results of AI-generated, human-generated, and AI-assisted marketing emails. Then, you can tweak your AI approaches to produce marketing emails that’ll satisfy you, your customers, and your prospects.
• Encourage innovation. HubSpot points out that getting your team on board is key with AI or any other new technology. “Ask your team for feedback, bring them along in the process, and assure them that AI is intended to make them better, not replace them,” says HubSpot.

How to Use AI in Marketing

OK, so you’ve finally taken the leap and added AI to your marketing toolbox. But what can you — or should you — do with AI in marketing? Examples supplied by IBM include:

• Content generation. AI tools like ChatGPT can lend a hand in creating all sorts of content. ChatGPT and similar technology “can help marketers draft compelling copy, personalize customer interactions at scale, and generate insights from large datasets,” says Wake Forest University’s School of Professional Education. “This leads to more efficient marketing strategies, better customer engagement, and ultimately, a stronger brand presence.”
• Audience segmentation. “AI helps businesses intelligently and efficiently divide up their customers by various traits, interests and behaviors, leading to enhanced targeting and more effective marketing campaigns that result in stronger customer engagement and improved ROI,” says IBM.
• SEO. AI software can help boost page rankings, optimize the searchability of content, and improve SEO strategies.

To check out solid examples of how AI has been used in marketing, visit the Digital Marketing Institute’s website.

As you craft your AI-in-marketing strategy, keep in mind that it’s not the answer to your marketing challenges. A wise approach to marketing includes both cutting-edge and old-school techniques and tools.

“Marketing teams can scale their operations with AI, and it doesn’t have to break the bank,” HubSpot emphasizes. “However, it’s important to keep in mind the limitations of AI, even as the technology continues to get better over time in the changing marketing landscape. While you might be able to use it to aid several marketing campaigns (and should), it isn’t replacing marketers just yet.”

One of the most important components of running a successful startup or scaleup is measuring your success with the aid of metrics. But which marketing metrics should you monitor and analyze?

Among the marketing metrics you should pay attention to are:

Return on investment (ROI). ROI compares the results of a marketing campaign with the total cost of the campaign., you’ll have a foundation for successfully accelerating the growth of your startup or scaleup.

Website traffic. Semrush and Ahrefs are among the companies that provide free website traffic “checkers.”

Time on page. This metric looks at how much time a visitor spent on a webpage before moving to another page.

Click-through rates. These rates track the frequency of website visitors’ clicks on your links, emails, and ads.

Bounce rates. These rates show how often visitors exit a website after viewing just one page.

Social media shares and engagement.

Backlinks. Also known as inbound links, backlinks are links to a page on your website from a page on another website. Backlinks help improve search rankings.

Churn rate. This rate takes into account how many customers are leaving your business and how that’s affecting sales. Being aware of your churn rate can help dream up marketing ideas aimed at retaining customers.

Customer acquisition cost. How much does it cost to acquire a new customer? This number includes marketing, sales, and advertising expenses.

Cost per lead. This metric looks at the cost effectiveness of a marketing  campaign by dividing the campaign’s cost by the number of leads it produced. “Cost per lead is one of the most straightforward, effective metrics for gauging the efficiency of your marketing efforts,” says HubSpot.