Sometimes I look at early-stage marketing strategies and feel like they’re trying to build a skyscraper out of duct tape and ambition.
They’ve got ads running, a couple landing pages, maybe a nurture flow if someone was feeling generous. But everything still revolves around performance marketing. Just ads. And at some point, someone in the room says, “We need more inbound.” Or, “Let’s try outbound.” Or worse, “Let’s go viral!”
This is the moment where chaos starts to look like strategy.
Let me walk you through how I’ve learned to build a real marketing system for startups. What’s worked. What hasn’t. And how I’ve seen a connected approach to marketing actually drive results for startups without million dollar budgets.
What some people call “allbound marketing” is really just this. It’s the idea that your outbound, inbound, paid, and content efforts should all work together instead of operating in silos.
Make the Channels Work Together
What I’ve learned is that good marketing systems don’t just tack on channels one by one. They make them support each other and feed into the same engine.
In one startup I worked with, I ran paid search and outbound completely separately. Each brought in a few leads, but nothing stuck. Then I tried connecting the dots. I started targeting outbound prospects with ads first. Let them see the name, the offer, the value. Then we followed up with a cold DM or email. That small change boosted our reply rate by 35 percent.
Why did it work? Familiarity. When people feel like they’ve seen your name before, it lowers their guard. That first impression doesn’t have to be deep. It just needs to exist. For small teams, this kind of compounding lift adds up.
Here’s how I think about structuring it:
- Use outbound to target ideal customers
- Use paid ads to warm them up
- Publish thought leadership to build credibility
- Retarget to stay visible
- Promote content to scale visibility without burning out your team
This turns fragmented channels into a system that builds on itself. Instead of juggling campaigns, you’re stacking momentum.
Cold Outreach Is Useless Without Context
I once spent two months testing outbound campaigns for a B2B SaaS company. Personalized DMs. Sharp messaging. No traction. We were targeting the right people, but it wasn’t landing.
Eventually, I realized something simple. Nobody had ever heard of them. The company’s LinkedIn was a total ghost town. They had no blog, no case studies. They were the marketing version of a stranger knocking on your door at night with no ID.
So we slowed down and added content to support the outreach. Short videos. A blog series. I even had a few LinkedIn posts ghostwritten for the CEO. Within a few weeks, replies improved. I was told that one prospect literally said something along the lines of, “I wasn’t sure at first, but I looked you up and liked what I saw.”
Lesson learned. You can’t just show up in someone’s inbox. You need context. Your content gives you that. It’s what makes your message feel credible, not random.
Turn One Hour of Expertise Into a Month of Content
You don’t need a big team to produce a lot of content. You just need a better system.
At one startup, I booked a monthly one-hour Zoom call with a subject matter expert. That’s it. I recorded it, transcribed it, and turned it into:
- A blog post
- 3 to 5 LinkedIn posts
- Social copy across all platforms
And honestly, I should have taken it further. That same session could have become:
- A YouTube video
- 4 vertical short videos
I didn’t do those at the time. But I should have. That was a missed opportunity to get even more mileage from one piece of source material.
Still, even without the video, that one hour became 20 or more pieces of content. Every single month.
That content gave our outbound air cover, gave our ads better conversion rates, and made the team feel like we had a real voice in the market. It took about 6 to 7 hours total to produce. If you don’t have time for that, you don’t have time to grow.
Start with Ugly Creative That Gets Clicks
When I’m testing new audiences, I go out of my way to avoid good-looking creative. Weird headline. Awkward layout. Brutally direct copy. Why? Because I don’t want to test design. I want to test the offer.
One of the worst-performing campaigns I ever ran had beautiful creative and almost zero clicks. But when I replaced it with a plain-text headline that said, “Stop wasting time on tasks your store should automate” clicks shot up. Same product. Same budget. Different packaging.
You can add polish later. But in the beginning, you need signal. A minimum viable sprint isn’t about looking good. It’s about figuring out who cares.
I’ll usually test three types of messaging
- Logical: Save 10 hours a week sourcing better products
- Emotional: Stop feeling behind on every new product trend
- Social proof: Join 5,000 sellers already using this tool
I run each version against a different audience segment. It’s fast, cheap, and gives me clarity on what to lean into.
Pretty can come later. Signal comes first.
Test First Then Build Landing Pages
It’s easy to fall into the trap of designing beautiful landing pages for every idea. I’ve done it. Spent hours on layout, copy, and tracking setup. Only to learn nobody cared about the offer.
So I created a rule. No landing page until I get 10 early conversions.
I’ll start with on-platform forms, cold outreach, or even Typeform. Once people actually convert, I invest in a proper page.
When that time comes, here’s what I do:
- Build a dedicated page for each validated offer
- Use the same copy and tone that worked in the ad
- Strip the fluff and make the CTA painfully clear
- Set up clean attribution through UTMs or unique URLs
A good landing page amplifies what already works. It doesn’t save a weak idea.
Use Paid Promotion to Scale Organic Content
Most startups treat YouTube like a graveyard. They post a few videos, don’t see results, and give up.
But YouTube is full of great videos with 17 views that just never get seen. That used to be one client I worked with.
They had a handful of videos about sourcing profitable products on Amazon. Solid content. Nobody saw them.
So I picked their best clips and put 400 dollars behind them. I targeted relevant YouTube search terms like “FBA product research” and “Amazon sourcing software.” It worked. We started getting 10,000 paid views per month.
Here’s the best part. After a few weeks, YouTube started showing those same videos organically in the search results. Our view count doubled without spending another dime. Why? Because paid views give the algorithm a signal that people are engaging.
We set up a retargeting flow. Anyone who watched two Shorts got served a 12-minute product walkthrough. Watch rate? Over 70 percent.
This is how small budgets stretch far. Paid does the lifting. Organic builds over time.
We also tested different calls to action in the Shorts themselves. Some asked viewers to subscribe. Others pushed directly to the product demo. The demo-focused CTAs consistently led to more trial signups. That feedback loop helped us tweak future content to better fit our funnel.
Build a System That Learns
No matter how good your funnel looks on paper, you won’t get it right the first time. That’s why every part of the system needs to be testable.
I built a funnel for an Amazon product sourcing tool. Our goal was self-serve trials. We tested:
- Three types of headlines (pain, benefit, curiosity)
- Two landing page formats
- Five demo video thumbnails
Some variations did nothing. Others drove huge lifts. One change, adding a specific “Find your next 3 winning products in 20 minutes” line, nearly doubled conversions.
We also tracked which sources were driving higher trial-to-paid conversions. Organic video watchers ended up being twice as likely to become paying customers compared to paid-only viewers. That insight led us to invest more into SEO for our YouTube titles and descriptions.
Later, we tested headline-ad combinations that mirrored the video topics that had the best retention. This closed the loop between creative and performance. We weren’t just testing to test. We were learning what to scale.
The point is. Assume you’re wrong. Then test until something proves you right.
Start with a Minimum Viable System
Early on, I tried to do everything. Paid, organic, outbound, partnerships. It spread me so thin and got my marketing strategies nowhere.
So I scaled back to a minimum viable system:
- One lead magnet built around product sourcing templates
- A video series on our YouTube channel walking through strategies
- Paid ads to drive cold traffic
- Outbound emails to engaged viewers
It was simple. It worked. And once we saw traction, we layered on more.
Over time, we added email automation, lead scoring, and even a partner referral program. But we only added those pieces once the core system was already delivering consistent results. That order mattered.
The more we added, the more we had to tighten the process. We documented workflows, standardized the offer structure, and added a feedback loop between sales and marketing. Scaling the system didn’t just mean adding parts. It meant strengthening the foundation so nothing broke as we grew.
More complexity is not better. Systems win because they’re consistent.
Scale by Repeating What Worked
Once you’ve got one functioning marketing engine, don’t complicate it. Just do it again.
At one point, we built a full funnel around helping professional Amazon FBA sellers find and compare product sourcing software. It worked. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we launched a similar engine targeting Shopify merchants looking for workflow automation plugins. Same tactics. New audience. Faster results.
You can also:
- Go upmarket with a bigger-ticket offer
- Go downmarket with a lighter, self-serve version
- Expand channels (move from Meta to LinkedIn or YouTube)
We also cloned successful onboarding emails and retargeting flows from one audience and applied them to the next. When the format worked, we reused it. When it didn’t, we adjusted just one variable at a time.
But don’t assume more complexity means more results. Repeatable systems beat shiny new things every time.
The Hard Truth About Building a Marketing Engine
Most of the time, people want a quick win. They want to run one campaign, get 500 leads, call it a day.
But building a marketing system takes time. I’ve had sprints that went nowhere. I’ve burned through creative ideas that sounded smart but flopped. I’ve launched campaigns that made sense in the deck but landed with a thud.
What separates the wins from the wasted time is structure
- Find your audience with low-cost tests
- Confirm they care with early conversions
- Support your outreach with content
- Scale what works across more people or more channels
You don’t need to be everywhere. You need to be consistent. And you need to stop changing the strategy every three weeks just because one ad didn’t hit.
If I’ve learned anything working with startups, it’s that simplicity scales. Chaos doesn’t.
Start simple. Prove the engine. Then fuel it.
That’s how you grow.
