Lottie Unwin’s secrets to marketing success
- Marc Jackson
- Mar 26
- 3 min read
There are so many things we could do as marketers to drive growth. But we don’t have the time or the money to do everything.
The key? Making informed decisions about where to put your focus.
Our very own founder, Lottie, shared her tried-and-tested techniques for marketing success in her latest talk. Read on to discover the secret sauce that’ll take your startup/scaleup marketing to the next level.
Understand the context
What’s the point of marketing? For Lottie, it means you “sell your idea well enough, so the business stays healthy.”
But this will be a bit different for each business. To start making the right choices for yours, you need to understand what the “selling” looks like and what will make the business “healthy”.
For example, for a bootstrapped business (like Up World), healthy means having enough of a profit margin to pay everyone and keep a bit back for a rainy day.
For a VC-backed business, healthy will likely mean hitting the metrics you need to make it easy to raise money again.
When it comes to selling your idea, it might not be directly to customers — this is about whoever your stakeholders are in getting to the healthy state. It could be selling your idea to potential investors, for example.
Every business is different, so you need to work out what it is you need to achieve with your marketing to be successful.
Make considered choices
Once you understand the context, start making decisions that will help you work towards that success.
We don’t have time to do everything. We need to narrow our focus and do some things really well (instead of falling into the trap of trying to do everything).
Have the confidence to choose what not to do. There are four key areas where Lottie recommends looking at your choices:
Channels
Don’t randomly throw content onto channels because you think you have to. Consider your strategy.
Who do you want to reach? Where are they? What’s the best format and place to meet them?
Find your people and make considered choices about where and how to reach them.
Five Ps
Make sure you’re working across the five Ps.
It’s easy for us marketers to focus mainly on “promotion”, but we should be having influence across all of them to drive the growth we need. As an example, this could look like:
Product – suggesting a new product line driven by customer insights
Price – testing different price points on hero products to see if customers will tolerate an increase
Promotion – running a TikTok strategy to attract new customers
People – developing your team to make sure you’ve got the resources you need
Place – influencing distribution channels by working with your sales team on proposals
How much are you thinking about each of these? Try and set yourself up with your stakeholders to have influence across all of them.
3. Brand identity
How are you showing up to your customers? How can you stand out?
As part of your identity communicate what you sell, who your monster is, and how you show up (visually, tonally, etc.).
Make your look and feel distinctive and consistent.
4. Messaging
Always be mindful of the commercial problem you’re trying to solve and the job you want to do for your customers.
Tap into a specific pain point (e.g. people not spending more on mixers for drinks) and tie it to a customer insight (e.g. people love the ritual of choosing ingredients for their drinks). Then, take those and build a message.
Fever Tree took this exact problem and insight to create its iconic line:
They took the line and ran with it across all their marketing, both B2B and B2C, making sure they got the message across.
See if you can do the same; find a commercial pain point, tie it to customer insights, and use that to craft a relevant message.
Pull it all together
Making considered choices in all these areas will help narrow your focus. We can go one step further.
Don’t focus too much on your bigger picture, North Star goal at this point. Instead, look at the job you need to do right now.
To start, write out a Who Inspired Business Challenge (WIBC):
For example:
Then, we need to focus even more to get to our actions.
Look at the context and use that to define what success would look like:
Then, rewrite your WIBC to get clarity on the actions you can take right now to drive towards success. And make sure you add a deadline to it:
The result? Your to-do list will be focused and you’ll understand why you’re taking the actions you are.
Want to hear more of Lottie’s secret marketing tips? Watch the full talk now.
