Authentic®, Author at Authentic

Message: From the founder’s story to an unbeatable story in your market

You know, but do they know? Entrepreneurial businesses usually know what they do really well. But they often struggle to articulate it in clear, compelling, and differentiated ways. Typically, what results are many iterations of brand stories that focus on product or service features rather than on the value delivered to their customers. These many story iterations create confusing and inconsistent messages that can hinder growth. (more…)

Brand: From a company with a name & logo to an unparalleled leader

What, exactly, is a "brand"? Brand is a squishy word that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. When we’re working with entrepreneurial companies, their concept of “brand” is often that it’s the company’s logo, color palette, and font styles. In other words, the general look and feel of the business. But as a company grows, leaders must broaden their understanding of brand if they hope to mature successfully and become an unparalleled leader in their category. (more…)

Does your business need more leads? Balance quick wins with building a demand generation strategy

Every growing business wants more leads. In fact, in new client discussions, it’s what businesses are often thinking about most. But, the reality is that companies need strategic demand generation programs in place to drive sustainable, long-term lead creation. While there’s no quick fix to solving all of your demand generation challenges, there are some opportunities that companies can leverage to generate leads quickly in the short term. (more…)

Go-to-market focus: From hypothesis to category dominance

Focus is essential for scale Regardless of their scale and pace of growth, growing businesses need to define and continually hone their go-to-market focus. This continued refinement enables a business to scale from a hopeful startup with a hypothesis to a category dominator that reinvents its space. (more…)

How marketers can harness the creative power of visionary leaders (and avoid reactivity)

Many growing businesses are led or were started by creative visionaries. The passion of these visionaries is a significant asset to their organizations. But for marketers, it can create challenges. New ideas from visionaries can feel like orders to act, leading to teams committing random acts of marketing that lack clarity and focus. (more…)

What is the Authentic Growth™ Marketing Maturity Matrix?

A powerful tool for understanding your marketing journey Jump to the matrix attributes, which link to in-depth articles about what it takes to build maturity across each attribute. As a community of fractional CMOs, we’ve always rooted our client work in Authentic Growth™ methodology. This methodology is our proven process that helps small and mid-sized businesses build strategic marketing departments and create alignment between sales and marketing. (more…)

Professional development is key to building effective marketing teams

Building an effective marketing team is always top of mind for businesses. And amid a talent shortage, economic downturn, and annual budget planning, it’s even more critical that companies make strategic and thoughtful talent decisions. Professional development is key to all of this and should serve as the crux of any solid talent strategy. (more…)

Authentic Expands Leadership Team; Adds New Vice President of Marketing

Jenna Soule to lead go to market strategy for rapidly growing fractional CMO services firm MINNEAPOLIS, MN — Authentic announces the expansion of its leadership team with the hiring of Jenna Soule as Vice President of Marketing. Jenna will lead the go-to-market strategy for the five-year old, rapidly-growing fractional CMO services firm. As a member of Authentic’s leadership team, Jenna brings more than two decades of marketing leadership experience for companies ranging from entrepreneurial startups to large enterprises, investing the majority of her career in mid-sized high growth organizations. “We are in the business of marketing leadership for growing companies,…

Marketing data: From information to intelligence

Let's talk about Marketing ROI. Every growing business wants to know the ROI of its marketing investments. They want to predict, with certainty, how much they’ll get in return for various marketing activities. But few of these businesses have done the strategic work necessary to mature their data practices. (more…)

How mature is your marketing? Answer this question before setting your budget

Setting a marketing budget is tricky. How much a business allocates to marketing and which channels it invests in depends on various factors, including the growth expectations, industry, business stage, and business model (e.g., B2B vs. B2C). (more…)

Author: Authentic®