Pound Marketing
be penny wise WITHOUT being pound foolish

Services

Service Offerings

Pound Marketing IS a strategy consulting firm that offers hands-on advice for early stage and fast growth technology companies. Pound Marketing is NOT a full-service marketing, design or PR agency. Knowing what you're good at is important. Knowing what you're not good at is essential.   

VALUE PROPOSITION & BUYER PERSONAS

Most marketing agencies charge a significant fee to do complicated value mapping and detailed buyer personas. If you are a well funded, bleeding-edge technology company, it might make sense to invest that level of effort. However, many companies just need someone to interview key internal and external stakeholders and do some brainstorming to derive insights that can be used to create compelling messaging. Buyer Personas often flow from that exercise and don't need to be over engineered. 

Services include:

  • Market research
  • Stakeholder interviews  
  • Team brainstorming sessions
  • Messaging framework creation
  • Buyer motivations 

TECHNOLOGY & VENDOR Management

The only way to achieve true scale is to have a solid marketing technology strategy that closely integrates with platforms across your organization. Leveraging outside vendors is also a key component to help manage the marketing needs of a fast growing company. Its easy to focus all of your energy on the selection and implementation process, but the real challenge often comes in the day-to-day decisions and on-going management of your technology stack and current vendors.

Services include:

  • Needs analysis
  • Existing technology and vendor analysis
  • RFP creation and review
  • Vendor feedback and conflict resolution
  • Best practices for measuring and improving ROI 

BRAINSTORMING & COACHING 

Marketing is all about coming up with great ideas, implementing them within the constraints of the available resources and ultimately delivering a meaningful return on marketing investment (ROMI). Developing a gut sense for when an idea has the potential to be great (or a disaster) takes practice. It also takes practice and coaching to lead a marketing team to greatness. 

Services include:

  • Executive and cross-department brainstorming sessions
  • Large project brainstorming and feasibility analysis 
  • Management and individual contributor coaching sessions
  • Performance improvement and promotion plan creation 
  • Conflict resolution and internal communication best practices

MULTI-CHANNEL CAMPAIGN STRATEGY

Developing integrated, multi-channel marketing campaigns are hard and need on-going over sight, but the results can generate significant opportunities for your sales team. Aligning the right mix of activities across the right platforms at the right time to get the right results takes trial and error. Working with an experienced demand generation expert can drastically reduce the time it takes to find the right mix and to see improved results. 

Services include:

  • Lead database analysis 
  • Integrated online/offline campaign framework
  • Campaign calendar/touch schedule creation
  • Persona based messaging 
  • Campaign and messaging testing plans 

HIRING & EVALUATING TALENT

The talent needs of early stage and fast growing companies by definition are constantly changing. Finding people with the skills to meet high expectations with limited resources that thrive in a constantly changing environment is challenging. Add budget constraints and it can be easy to under-hire (inexperienced but cheap) or over-hiring (highly experienced but over budget). Making the wrong decision when it comes to people has real consequences for both the business and the individual. 

Services include:

  • Needs and budget analysis
  • Headcount to program spend best practices  
  • Current talent and/or candidate evaluation
  • Job description and interviewing process evaluation
  • Hiring vs contracting recommendations

PARTNER MARKETING

Building a channel or being a part of a channel requires its own marketing expertise, strategy and resources. The sophistication of the partner ecosystem and the maturity of the market can significantly impact the resources needed and expected return on marketing programs. Knowing this can help determine the level of effort and investment needed to create a successful partner marketing plan. 

Services include:

  • Partner ecosystem analysis
  • Partner vetting support 
  • Partner marketing campaign plan creation
  • Co-marketing messaging and collateral development 
  • Partner event strategy