In 2019, I started consulting with B2B SaaS companies to reduce churn.

I called it Retainable. I’d just been VP of Marketing at a high growth SaaS company.

And churn was my kryptonite. As it is for all SaaS folks.

Every customer lost was one more that you had to acquire to not lose ground.

It’s like running on a treadmill of quicksand. While sprinting.

Not fun.

Anyway, I bought a domain for my new consulting company: retainable.com

It was $2k. Maybe overpriced, but I justified it that if I wanted to take it seriously, I’d have to make the investment.

I still have the domain, and dusted it off recently as a testing ground for AI content and automation.

I was using AI to create a marketing plan for it, so let’s get into the details!

💡 Strategy

Strategy is just a fancy way of saying ‘priorities’.

Strategy focuses your priorities.

No strategy means unclear priorities.

A good marketing strategy allows you to identify your target audience, understand their needs and pain points, and determine how to best reach them and convert them into customers.

AI is very helpful in outlining the entire universe of possibilities. And then it’s on you, the human, to distill those down into what is actually useful and actionable.

I have a resource to help with that later in the email….

One of the challenges I had with Retainable was focus.

Knowing exactly what to work on, and what the intended result would be.

With a clear marketing strategy, I would have specific goals to help work towards instead of dabbling in a bunch of stuff that may waste time, money, and energy.

Here are the ingredients to create your strategy 👇️ 

🔍 Use Case

A comprehensive marketing strategy requires as many details as possible.

This includes at a base level:

• Your core product

• Target audience

• Competitors

• Marketing channels

• Messaging

• Budget

These are helpful to include as context in any prompt related to your business.

It can be a hassle to type out all of this context (plus it burns through your tokens and can increase costs).

One great tool to make this much easier is Text Blaze.

Text Blaze is a text expander: “A text expander is like a time machine for your typing. By turning a few characters into whole sentences, you can drastically cut down on the time you spend typing. Think about how many emails, messages, or reports you write in a day. Now imagine completing them in half the time!”

💪 Prompt

Here’s a prompt that you can use to create your marketing strategy. Make sure you add your specific details in the placeholders. And for best results, go through each of the 10 steps individually:

I would like you to act as my marketing strategist consultant named [name]. You have 20 years of experience developing highly effective marketing strategies for [small businesses, tech startups, ecommerce brands, etc].

Please develop a comprehensive marketing strategy and plan for my [type of company or website]. Ask me any clarifying questions about my business first including target audience, competitive landscape, budget, business objectives, marketing assets, etc.

Then provide a prioritized outline of the strategy explaining the rationale for each element and drawing on your expertise in marketing strategy.

Include the following sections in your detailed response:

1. Executive Summary

2. Situation & Market Analysis

3. Target Audience Personas

4. Business & Marketing Objectives

5. Strategic Framework: Brand Positioning Statement, Messaging Strategy, Competitive Differentiation

6. Tactics & Channels Recommendation

7. Content Strategy & Calendar

8. Marketing Budget Allocation

9. Performance Tracking Plan

10. Conclusions & Next Steps

For each section, provide specific, personalized recommendations and data-driven insights tailored to my business and goals. Provide examples and best practices where applicable. Write your explanation in a conversational tone for a marketing professional audience. Please make this as comprehensive and actionable as possible based on your experience as a top marketing consultant.

🔬 Experiment

You will get better outputs with more details. Here few ideas to experiment with:

1. Pull actual examples from high growth companies. Reforge, a tech education platform, recently launched Artifacts to share real world examples. Here’s an example of a Content Strategy Template:

   

   A real-world example of a marketing template from Reforge’s Artifacts

2. You can also create your marketing strategy around some classic marketing frameworks.

You can simply add “Use the STP framework to evaluate the marketing strategy” or whatever you may choose.

• STP (segmentation, targeting, and positioning): This framework helps you to segment your target audience, identify your target market, and position your product or service in the market.

• 4Ps (product, price, place, promotion): This framework helps you to develop a marketing mix that includes the right product, price, place, and promotion for your target market.

• 7Ps (product, price, place, promotion, people, process, and physical evidence): This framework is an extension of the 4Ps that includes additional factors that can affect the success of a marketing campaign, such as the people involved in the marketing process and the physical evidence that customers see and interact with.

📖 Resource

Creating or re-evaluating a marketing strategy can be helpful as thought exercise.

But ideally you have a documented marketing strategy that you reference often.

So this resource simplifies it:

The one page marketing plan.

9 sections to the marketing plan, broken up into the three phases of the customer’s marketing journey:

Before: At this awareness stage, prospects don't know you exist. Strategies like ads and content help attract their attention.

During: Now leads, they've shown interest in your offers. Nurture leads further with free trials, demos, etc.

After: As customers, they've purchased from you. Focus on retention, repeat sales, referrals.

To grow your business:

• Attract new prospects with targeted ads and valuable content.

• Convert prospects to leads with limited-time offers.

• Close leads as new customers with free trials or discounts.

• Retain customers with excellent service and new offers.

• Turn happy clients into raving fans who refer others.

The one page marketing plan can help you map out your customer journey and optimize strategies for each stage.

Sounds so easy, doesn’t it?

We’ll keep building in the next issue.

Until next time, stay Super, Marketers!

Gen