The summer of scale: Two areas that will make a difference in the second half of the year

Welcome back to Flight School. It’s exciting to see that 16,000+ innovators and leaders have already joined our community.

The usual summer slowdown offers a chance to step back and evaluate what has been working in the first half of the year. Two things we suggest reflecting on? Brand and generative AI. We invited Onsite's marketing experts, Meg Fitzgerald and Gary Survis , to explain why.

How to reinvigorate and refresh your brand at every stage

🔎 How are you thinking about brand in 2024?

Let us know in the comments.

Early < $10M ARR

While your priorities may be constantly changing at this point in your growth journey, your investment in brand should focus on the essential: leverage buyer insights to understand your ideal customer and develop a company story that articulates how you solve buyer pain points in a differentiated way.

1. Harvest insights: Talk to your customers. The insights you derive from running interviews with a diverse set of customers and prospects to understand their pain points will inform your positioning and ensure your messaging resonates with buyers. 
2. Create the building blocks: Leverage insights from step one to define your strategic brand building blocks. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Buyer Personas Mission, Vision & Values (MVV) Point of View (POV) Messaging & Positioning (M&P).
3. Activate in market: Integrate your messaging across your website, sales enablement, and a content/SEO strategy. Test various digital marketing tactics such as paid & organic search and social media to ensure your brand message is authentic to your company values, compelling to your buyers, and differentiated in the market.

Growth $10-100M ARR

As your company scales, maintain a testing mentality and drive hyper-focused campaigns that resonate with your ideal customers. Focus on solidifying a strong brand reputation and loyal customer base.

1. Establish brand foundations: Build a brand book to document brand guidelines and use software like Templafy to ensure consistency as your organization grows. Invest in hiring dedicated resources to own your brand’s success, including brand strategy, strategic communications, thought leadership, and creative/design. 
2. Finetune your brand strategy: Strengthen your product marketing function, as it is a huge driver of brand success. Define your category strategy by understanding the analysts who cover your space and developing a plan to engage analysts proactively.  
3. Engage your audience and drive demand: Be innovative with your events strategy, setting clear demand and brand goals that make your presence known (think beyond the booth!). Invest in public relations (PR) to create an influential presence for your brand in the market. Double down on your software review strategy via sites such as G2 and Capterra to generate trust and social proof, and reap the SEO benefits as these sites rank highly on organic search.

Scale $100M+ ARR

At this crucial inflection point in your growth, you may be starting to reap the “snowball effect” benefits of your brand-building efforts. As the owner of your brand and your company’s business health, strive to balance a focus on demand gen and brand to optimize ROI.

1. Devote resources to insights: Allocate full-time roles to customer and market intelligence to keep a pulse on all things customer, competitor, and market so your brand can evolve with, not against, the market. 
2. Foster strategic partnerships: Partnerships can amplify your brand voice. Co-marketing benefits include reaching a wider audience, boosting social engagement, and strengthening and diversifying your reputation in the market.
3. Plan for mergers and acquisitions (M&A): Assign a dedicated team to ensure the research and preparation are completed before public announcements. Get ahead of the many questions you will need to answer, from “Will you become a ‘branded house’ or a ‘house of brands’?” to “How will you mobilize the internal teams leading up to the external announcements?” 
4. Start exit prep early: Have a plan in place at least six months before an Initial Public Offering (IPO) or sale. Marketing plays a key role in preparing your S1 for an IPO and ensuring everything is ready for sale. Your brand’s market presence directly impacts company valuation.

Read tips for each growth stage here.

Summer is also a good time to take stock of how you’re using AI, specifically generative AI.

🔎 How are you currently using #genAI in your company workflows?

Let us know in the comments.

A genAI report card: How are you navigating the shifts?

Generative AI is revolutionizing the way we work. CEOs and CMOs must prioritize AI initiatives to drive efficiency and align organizational goals. Here are some areas we're discussing with portfolio company leaders.

#1️⃣ Mass personalization

Mass personalization, as seen in consumer experiences on platforms like Amazon, is raising the bar in B2B sectors. Customers increasingly expect personalized engagement. GenAI facilitates this personalization at scale, enabling businesses to tailor their approach to individual needs effectively. 

This technology revolutionizes account-based strategies by providing customized solutions and interactions at a level previously unattainable without significant resources. GenAI’s capability to analyze and respond to customer data in real-time powers this unprecedented level of personalization in B2B marketing and customer support.

#2️⃣ Our zero-click future

Google and Bing will provide AI-generated answers that customers may find sufficient and never click through to your site. The impact is obvious as site volume will tumble — our proprietary research shows that as much as 25% of today’s search traffic could be lost. 

Make sure your new content strategies power answers from these generative tools. It does not mean writing as much content as possible. The search engines will still favor quality and relevance, and your domain authority remains critical.

#3️⃣ Modern word-of-mouth

What we call modern word-of-mouth builds upon the time-honored tactic of word-of-mouth marketing but with a twist. You know that your customers have always trusted their peers — now it is becoming necessary to harness this source’s power digitally in this new world.

Now, genAI can help capture this modern word-of-mouth and amplify it digitally across channels. We will see platforms like Google’s Perspectives unleashing this power in search.

Keep reading about these seismic shifts.

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Tell us below what you're focused on in your business as we approach the half-year point ⬇️⬇️⬇️