Authentic Blog - Marketing Insights for Growing Businesses

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…)

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…)

Dynasty Leadership Podcast Featuring Jennifer Zick

How to Overcome Random Acts of Marketing Our founder and CEO, Jennifer Zick, was recently the featured guest on the Dynasty Leadership Podcast, with host Todd Eberhardt. In this episode, Jennifer shares how a fractional CMO can help revitalize your business when you’re in the middle of the growth stages. She offers a seven-part framework to help break out of any marketing funk you might have. (more…)

Cultivate a culture of trust between marketing, sales, and finance

The process of creating demand and happy customers has never been more of a team sport than it is today. The buyer’s journey is one long continuum that requires marketing’s close alignment and collaboration with sales. And just as important to both marketing and sales is a solid foundational alignment with the finance team. (more…)

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