Stephanie Kwok is an Executive in Residence at Reforge. Previously, she was VP of Customer Marketing at FanDuel, where she also held VP roles in Strategy & Operations as well as Engagement & Retention.
Natalie Rothfels is an Operator in Residence at Reforge and runs a leadership coaching practice. She has held product leadership roles at Quizlet and Khan Academy and was a classroom teacher before that.
While the tools of the marketing trade may be changing — from direct response mailers to digital-first acquisition loops — the need for an effective marketing strategy has only grown more critical as companies face fiercer competition around the world.
People commonly conflate marketing with the scope of growth marketing because, for many early-stage startups, growth is survival. While growth marketing plays a critical role in any company’s success, it doesn’t capture everything required for an airtight marketing strategy.
Becoming a marketing leader also means moving beyond the traditional definitions of growth and integrating the three domains of marketing: brand marketing, growth marketing, and product marketing. Leaders can then forge stronger strategies by proactively assessing changes in the market, the customer, and the business that necessitate a shift.
In this piece, we’ll help you develop and strengthen your marketing strategy by sharing:
The three domains of marketing
Benefits of an integrated strategy
Strengths of a multi-domain marketing strategy
Signals it’s time to update your strategy
The Three Domains of Marketing
While marketers often start with expertise in one domain, marketing leaders need to develop familiarity and expertise across three different domains that impact how a customer experiences the product: brand marketing, growth marketing, and product marketing.
1. Brand Marketing
Brand marketing shares the story of why your organization exists with meaningful, emotional connection points. It draws in prospective customers who may be less familiar with your product by encapsulating a clear company story, brand identity, and narrative positioning that customers can relate or aspire to. Brand marketing not only increases the awareness and intent that captures new customers, it also continues to be reinforced at every touchpoint in the customer lifecycle (through brand partnerships, drip campaigns, and more).
2. Product Marketing
Product marketing shares what your organization is doing to deliver that brand promise. Excellent product marketing helps customers understand the value behind each product, how it is different from alternatives, and the positive impact it will have on the user. This often takes the form of packaging, pricing, and making features accessible and understandable to users.
3. Growth Marketing
Growth marketing is how you reach customers to acquire and retain them. Growth marketing uses triggers, channels, messaging, and personalization to bring customers into the product to experience its value (acquisition, activation) and keep them there (retention). This work often includes powering existing growth loops (e.g. paid marketing, user generated content, or word of mouth referrals) or retention loops (e.g. triggered lifecycle emails with personalized content recommendations) that help customers realize the value of the product.
These three domains are the inputs to any marketing strategy. Marketers become marketing leaders by understanding how each domain informs and affects the others, and building a strategy where the three work in concert together.
The Impact of an Integrated Marketing Strategy
Let’s use an example from Stephanie’s time at FanDuel to walk through the connection points of these puzzle pieces.
In 2015, FanDuel was a gaming company offering daily fantasy sports tournaments with large, real money cash prizes. When Stephanie joined that year, the company had prioritized new audience expansion after finding an initial market fit with high stakes gamers, including a large cohort of former poker players.
With hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding and increasing competition from DraftKings — the second player in the market — the company heavily focused on growth marketing. The team had success in the past with direct response ads featuring customer testimonials about winning large cash prizes, so they continued this messaging as they poured more investment into paid media. The major investment worked, bringing in large swaths of new customers representing roughly 5x YoY growth.
Initially, it looked like the team had hit their KPIs out of the park. But as customers onboarded and experienced the product, they quickly churned, and FanDuel (along with its competitors) started to see major negative public sentiment.
Turns out, new customers had been drawn in by the brand promise that anyone had a shot to win big money, but the product hadn’t evolved enough to deliver on that promise to this new audience. The product was still built for more sophisticated customers who were spending hours analyzing and building their lineups for each contest; meanwhile, the new recreational customers spending a few minutes a day on their lineups had little chance of winning the seven-figure amounts that were featured in the testimonial ads bombarding the airwaves.
This example teaches us three lessons about why it’s so critical to integrate all of the marketing domains effectively.
1. Changes in one domain will impact the others.
While the growth marketing efforts worked to bring in new customers, those people ultimately churned because the value promised was not delivered. Marketing teams can operate in a more integrated fashion by interrogating the impact that changes in one domain will have on others. Growth marketing channels distribute your brand to potential or existing customers, which means the growth marketing strategy and brand marketing strategy need to be in lockstep.
Similarly, if the value props of the product don’t align with the new audiences you’re acquiring through your growth strategy, those customers ultimately won’t retain and any positive growth impact will be diminished.
2. Sequence the changes in each domain to have compounding impact.
Before pouring in millions to acquire new users via paid media, FanDuel likely would have had better return on investment by first focusing on product marketing and brand marketing.
FanDuel could then have identified that delivering on the brand promise of winning large cash prizes would be very difficult for this large, new audience. Before ramping up growth marketing efforts for this audience, they needed to either revisit product marketing strategy — or even revisit and revise their brand strategy.
Marketing teams that are too siloed by domain often have a hard time pulling these seemingly disparate pieces together. Those that successfully integrate will have less brittle strategies.
3. Proactivity is essential because changes in each domain happen over different time horizons.
While growth marketing performance can be measured quickly, product and brand marketing can take months to develop — and the impact can unfold over years.
FanDuel had lost trust with customers and had to work uphill to regain it. Even though the FanDuel team shifted the brand towards promises they could deliver against (like making sports more fun rather than guaranteeing winning money), it took a while to rebuild trust with alienated customers. This is why it’s so critical for marketing leaders to be proactively looking ahead and seeing what changes will be required across the three domains in order to drive impact towards the company strategy.
The Strengths of a Multi-Domain Marketing Strategy
The FanDuel case is an extreme example. The disconnect between brand strategy, product, and growth marketing — in combination with backlash to blitzing the airwaves with ads and a negative PR scandal — drove significant customer churn and spurred regulations that constricted the company and overall industry.
Most cases are less extreme, and the disconnect between domains simply represents a massive opportunity to deliver more impact.
For example, strong brand marketing has a halo effect on what you can do in paid channels. MasterClass is brilliant at this: with high-quality video teasers of the classes taught by famous experts, they reinforce their brand positioning as the go-to place to learn from — and be entertained by — experts.
Similarly, your product marketing will be more effective if your growth marketing aligns the right audience on the right channels. This is even more important for complex business models such as marketplaces, which cater to multiple audiences at once. For example, Udemy serves individuals through à la carte course purchases, but also serves course creators (who offer supply on platform and are looking for revenue) and businesses (who buy subscriptions as benefits for their employees). The product is positioned differently for each of these audiences because each has different needs: consumers are there to learn skills quickly, creators are there to monetize their expertise, and businesses are there to grow and retain employees in a cost-effective manner. Acquiring these different audiences also requires different marketing channels, from word-of-mouth and paid media for consumers, to direct sales for businesses.
Whether you’re a marketing leader overseeing all three domains, a leader overseeing one domain, or an individual contributor focused within one domain, you can amplify your impact by looking at the intersections of each of your puzzle pieces and align who, where, what, how, and why for even more impact.
Signals It’s Time to Update Your Strategy
Annual company or quarterly planning cycles are natural moments to zoom out and re-evaluate your marketing strategy as a whole (or the efficacy of a single marketing domain). These touchpoints help to ensure alignment between company and marketing strategies, identify any major shifts for the next year (or 3 to 5 year vision), and indicate what needs to change now (or soon) to support those shifts.
But that’s wishful thinking for many fast-moving organizations. Maybe you are too slammed with the day-to-day to step back and reflect. Maybe the company strategy is changing with such frequency that your team can never get ahead.
Regardless, marketing leaders have to bring clarity about where and how to invest despite the uncertainty that comes with an ever-changing landscape. We recommend marketing leaders proactively monitor these internal and external factors, as they often signal inflection points that can trigger a need to revisit your strategy.
Internal factors include:
Audience expansion
Business model evolution
Product launches
And external factors include:
Macro trends
Competitive landscape and regulatory trends
Technology or user behavior changes
(P.S. we talk about these in more depth in our Marketing Strategy course.)
Internal: Audience Expansion
Expanding to new customer segments or geographies will require evaluating if your current brand positioning, value props, and channels will resonate with newly acquired customers.
For example, when ClassPass expanded to serve folks identifying as men, they had to re-evaluate their brand positioning and their growth marketing strategies to move away from being perceived as only serving one gender segment. This is also what we saw in the FanDuel example when FanDuel needed to shift its brand and product marketing strategy to address more recreational users.
Internal: Business Model Evolution
Changes to monetization model or pricing will impact LTV/CAC ratio, payback, and customer perception of value. Similarly, SaaS models versus Enterprise models may require different branding or channel investments, just as a subscription-based model will require different lifecycle touch-points than a transactional model.
For example, though Figma first launched with a bottoms-up growth strategy (designers would bring on additional designers at their companies, who would then organically spread to other functions), they complemented their B2C offering with a clear B2B sales channel for different size enterprises. Doing so required a shift in packaging and pricing structures, and eventually towards products that serve more departments within organizations (e.g, FigJam).
Internal: Product Launches
New product launches shift the portfolio of what a company markets. Good marketers will seek to understand what changed about the overall product experience and audience and form opinions about how that changes their strategy. Great marketing leaders proactively identify how their strategy should shift, and influence product launches accordingly.
At Quizlet, Natalie’s team launched a new product that solved a more defined problem for a subset of existing students on the platform — paid content from credible content authors, focused on high-stakes credentialing exams. Though students were already familiar with the Quizlet product, they were using the product at different moments in their studying journey, so their awareness of the new product offering was less than ideal.
Rather than assuming the existing student base would easily convert to the new offering, the team had to do much heavier lifting to integrate it throughout the product and their lifecycle marketing.
External: Macro Trends
As we’ve learned, a pandemic shifts user behaviors, spending habits, and all sorts of new needs. Marketers need to be aware of what’s happening in the market to know whether their current strategies are going to hold water, or if there’s an opportunity to create an even bigger wave.
Nurx, a healthcare startup focused on at-home healthcare, experienced an unplanned but massive tailwind in early 2020 as the coronavirus took over. Demand for at-home care surged while prices across media channels plummeted. Katelyn Watson, Nurx’s Chief Marketing Officer, saw the trend in real time and re-oriented spend towards channels they had never gone deep into before, like TV.
Overnight it was 100% growth for all of our services, driven from the perfect storm of better conversion, lower media prices, and changed media habits. Services like STI testing, emergency contraception and Herpes treatment started exploding because people had no other options. We were able to get in front of them with new media as they sat in front of their televisions watching the latest COVID news. As a Marketing team, we thought, “Let’s lean into this moment to help more patients. We’ll buy as much media as we can and learn some new channels.” We quickly repurposed creative and now TV is a core part of our mix.”
- Katelyn Watson
External: Competitive Landscape and Regulatory Trends
When the competitive landscape shifts or new market opportunities arise, companies should be able to shift their marketing strategy to gain an advantage.
When sportsbetting was legalized in 2018, early entrants like FanDuel and DraftKings prioritized getting to market quickly, with similar ads that highlighted legality, as well as product features focused on safe and secure payments. As the industry has become more established and crowded with competitors over the last few years, companies have shifted their marketing strategy to set themselves apart, from brand-building investments to developing and marketing differentiated product features (e.g. same-game parlay for FanDuel).
External: Technology or User Behavior Changes
When new technologies are introduced or become widely adopted, companies have new mechanisms and tools to reach their audiences, provide better value props, and more.
GPS and advanced sensors that track heart rate, skin temperature, and more are now commonplace. These technologies have enabled fitness companies to gather and use far more granular activity behavior to provide and improve training plans for individuals. Similarly, technologies that make it easier to incorporate a company, send and receive payments, and set up payroll within a few clicks reduce the hurdles to starting a business, accelerating the growth of entrepreneurship.
Connecting the Pieces
A clear, effective, and evolving marketing strategy is what differentiates great marketing leaders from great marketing contributors. It can be overwhelming to be responsible for so much: delivering campaigns that influence weekly KPIs, developing deep expertise on the product and customer, setting pricing and packaging product offerings, crafting the voice of the brand, and influencing company strategy.
You’re not alone. Our new marketing strategy program was built to help you develop a more integrated strategy and develop a deeper understanding of each of these three domains. It will give you the confidence to handle the inevitable twists and turns that come with being a modern marketing leader.