How to Include Marketing in your Growth Strategy

Growth strategies can fail without marketing. Build marketing into your growth plan and prove future revenue to buyers.

Most growth strategies understandably give pride of place to financial models and sales plans. They set out company headcount, revenue targets, product roadmaps, and more. In this equation, marketing is often reduced to isolated campaigns that sit on the sidelines. 

That is a mistake. 

If you want to prove growth prospects that hold up under buyer scrutiny, you need to build marketing into the fabric of your company from the start. Buyers want to be able to take confidence that your business is set up to keep generating new revenue without you. They expect to see watertight proof of a system that is primed and ready to scale. That proof comes from a marketing system that is joined up with sales and is fully embedded in your CRM, with full visibility as pipeline. 

Done properly, marketing is not an overhead. It can be the machine that makes your growth strategy work.

Why growth strategies fail without marketing.

When marketing is left out, the same gaps tend to appear:

• An overreliance on the founder or CEO’s personal network to keep the pipeline full
• Disconnected agencies and tools working without a common goal
• Content created that sits on your site but does not actively push buyers towards the next step
• A CRM that logs contacts and deals but does not track the early signals of demand

Each of these gaps builds risk because growth is unpredictable and can be slow. To a buyer, these signals make the story look weak because they mean you cannot prove where future revenue will come from, even less so once you have left the building.

Three pillars that make marketing a core part of any growth strategy.

The companies that manage to exit well, at multiples approach 8, 10, 12x, are those that treat marketing as critical infrastructure, not a “nice-to-have” investment or one-off campaign tool. That infrastructure rests on three core pillars:

• Persona Research. Without actionable insights into who your ideal customers are, what they care about, or how they buy, you cannot expect to be able to sell to them effectively. The most valuable persona profiles are not surface-level. They are tangible, practical guides that allow you, your sales teams and even potential future buyers to conduct fruitful sales conversations, and create high-impact original content. 

• Long-lasting distribution. A search-led, SEO-optimised content strategy designed to build your company’s visibility in high-intent buyers categories is critical, and compounds over time. The end result makes your company hard to ignore in all the right places where your customers are, while email and paid social media channel distribution can add precision, speed and strengthen ROI. 

• Marketing automation. Follow the signs your readers give you, and adapt to their behaviour. Depending on what they read, when, and how often, you can set up automated systems that move them through your sales funnel, educate prospects, and can free up your sales team to focus on closing the highest-value, live deals. 

Setting up your company’s marketing function around these three pillars ensures your growth is visible. Infrastructure of this kind reassures buyers that your company is scalable and your growth prospects are resilient, whether or not you yourself stay along for the ride.

Making growth measurable within your CRM.

A growth strategy without evidence to prove it isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Buyers expect that evidence. Without it, how can they trust that the future revenue you expect actually exists? Turning that promise into real figures that buyers can trust relies on putting measurement at the heart of your CRM. These steps sound simple, but a huge number of companies fail to implement them:

• Track potential Annual Recurring Revenue and Lifetime Value at the Lead stage, before an opportunity is even formally opened. 
• Connect every marketing interaction to a contact and company record to build legitimacy.
• Report pipeline growth by source, so you can directly prove marketing’s power to drive sales value. 

Shining a light on your pipeline within your CRM at these early stages gives potential buyers a live picture of what is coming next for your company, not what might be around the corner. In doing so, it cuts their risk and may even boost your valuation.

A quarterly rhythm that ties strategy to execution and results. 

Building marketing into your growth strategy in these ways may sound complex. The good news? It’s anything but. What matters most of all is rhythm and consistency. A simple way to approach it is to plot out a quarterly cycle, like this:

• Week 1: set quarterly revenue targets and review pipeline coverage required to hit them
• Weeks 1-2: publish content aimed at your ICPs and target accounts
• Every week: run automated marketing sequences to keep warm leads engaged and on the move down your sales funnel
• Every week: Sit down for a pipeline review, making sure to check conversion rates
• Weeks 11-12: Analyse your wins and losses, temperature check overall performance for the quarter, and reset and prepare for the next quarter. 

Cycles like these help teams focus on doing work that provably builds pipeline over time, rather than chasing one-off deals.

A proper preparation checklist for CEOs.

There is no time like the present to start integrating marketing with your growth strategy. Each of the actions below will help you build a documented, measurable system that a buyer can trust to work well without you:

• Establish and agree Ideal Customer Profiles via extensive Persona Research, also including priority market sectors
• Audit any existing marketing content against that ICP’s buyer journey, looking to plug any gaps
• Ensure lead tracking is added to your CRM from the earliest possible stage, by default
• Delegate responsibility for an at-a-glance dashboard showing your pipeline by stage and source

What buyers notice when marketing is a real part of your strategy.

Buyers notice that your sales story is coherent across your website, outreach practices, and content. They notice thorough attribution data set up to prove your company’s growth, not speak about it. They notice early-stage intelligence gathering on leads and a CRM that clearly links closed revenue back to the activity that helped win the deal in the first place. 

This approach is what turns marketing from a cost line into an asset. It is also what allows you to move from a standard EBITDA multiple to a strategic, higher-multiple outcome. 

Build on the three pillars core to any marketing strategy. Prove your pipeline and document your growth in your CRM. Follow a straightforward quarterly rhythm that turns inputs into pipeline, and pipeline into revenue. Taking these steps will let you show buyers that growth is assured, not just promise that it is.

Download the guide below to learn more about setting this system up in your business.