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You just closed, or you are about to. Somewhere in the data room is a marketing line that eats real cash every month, and nobody in the deal team can tell you whether it is buying enterprise value or burning it. That is the decision in front of you, and the marketing approach a company runs is not a branding question. It is a question of whether spend converts into revenue growth, EBITDA expansion, and a cleaner exit, or whether it quietly funds activity that no buyer will pay a multiple for.
Aside from the traditional metrics around traffic, conversion rate optimization, and loyalty programs, the market engagement model a portfolio company picks determines whether that spend is defensible in diligence. There are numerous market engagement models depending on the thesis you are underwriting. Some are far more capital-intensive and slower to pay back than others, especially for expensive goods in a B2B environment, and that difference lands directly in your cash-flow forecast.
And more importantly, these business challenges fluctuate across the hold period. When PPC is affordable and everyone plays the paid media game, the market becomes oversaturated and expensive, compressing the very unit economics your model assumed, prompting a shift toward demand generation, social media, SEO, PR, influencer marketing, affiliate relationships, and more. It is a balancing act that a good operating partner watches like a covenant.
Dive into a video breakdown instead? I recorded a special overview outlining the 2025 marketing goals for hundreds of businesses I work with weekly.
Otherwise, in this article, we will review the most common marketing categories and the tactical strategies behind each, framed for the person who has to decide what to keep, what to kill, and what to fund next.
But first: understanding product-market fit (PMF) is crucial before diving into these strategies, because no marketing approach fixes a broken thesis. Rob Snyder articulates PMF as a practical framework that can guide startups toward success. He identifies three essential components of PMF:
- One Kind of Customer (Demand): Define a specific target audience whose needs are unmet.
- One Thing You Sell (Supply): Offer a product that directly addresses the identified needs of that customer segment.
- One Way to Connect Demand and Supply (Distribution): Establish a clear channel to deliver the product to the customer.
Snyder elaborates that achieving PMF means replicating a “customer case study” that captures the entire journey from recognizing a need to achieving success with the product. This journey is vital, as the ultimate measure of PMF is customer retention, indicating that the startup can consistently help customers achieve their desired outcomes. For an owner, retention is not a soft metric. It is the difference between forecast revenue you can bank and forecast revenue that evaporates before exit.
Now, here is a question:
Why the right marketing approach is context-dependent
Growth specialization or demand generation discipline is too broad to underwrite as one line item. Consider IT as an example.
- IT entails many software engineering disciplines: data management and analytics, using and deploying information systems, cybersecurity, technical support, along with dozens of other areas, each of those niching down further.
- Specialties are implemented separately within different organizations. What works for a SaaS startup does not for an enterprise hardware manufacturer.
- Which is precisely why we do not see job titles like “Internet Professional” out there, it is pointless and far too vague.
Marketing is not universal, and neither are the different marketing approaches you inherit at close. Below is a definitive set of terms and market engagement models that impact the strategy running through demand activation initiatives. Read them as a diligence checklist, not a glossary. Each one changes what you should expect the spend to return.
What to do: before you approve another budget, ask which of these models the company is actually running. If nobody can name it, you are funding activity blind, and that is the first thing to fix.
Key strategic marketing models explained for owners
Marketing often obeys the rule of “couples”, semantically splitting business niches into a small subset, usually of two. Treat each pairing as a fork in your value-creation plan. Here are the marketing approach types worth underwriting, with marketing approach examples for each.
1. Enterprise vs consumer market engagement models
Enterprise organizations sell to other businesses (B2B) or consumer buyers (B2C) directly. The two carry different sales-cycle risk, and that risk shows up in your forecast reliability.
- Consumer buyers can be addressed directly while enterprise organizations cannot.
- Marketing to an organization may go through a chain of interactions.
- Enterprise organizations often loop different stakeholders in.
- Different acquisition channels are employed based on the target audience.
- B2C purchase cycles may take minutes while B2B ones often take months.
- B2C products tend to target the consumer directly. The sale is executed faster. The cost is lower and more affordable.
- B2B solutions often involve multiple stakeholders. You may be marketing a decision influencer who is not the decision-maker. The sales process is longer and complex funnels are often at play.
Marketing candies is often a B2C activity where your audience is kids you can directly blast through Facebook ads and Instagram stories. In some cases, healthy candies are best directed to their parents, who hold the purchasing power.
Selling at large means positioning the brand before supermarkets, a B2B market engagement strategy aiming at other channels. Your business has to determine who is the best point of contact there. The general superstore director probably will not be a good fit but their secretary or delivery/store manager is probably in charge of the selection management and prioritization.
Different marketing approaches and techniques are employed in each of the categories here, and the difference is not cosmetic. It sets your customer acquisition cost and your payback period.
For instance, LinkedIn is the most popular social media platform for B2B marketing, with 94% of B2B marketers using it.
Inversely, influencer marketing is becoming increasingly popular in B2C, with 40% of consumers saying they have purchased a product after seeing it recommended by a social media influencer.
Tip #1: applying the same technique for individuals versus organizations is shooting in the dark, and in a forecast it reads as noise. Inspect whether the company is spending B2C money on a B2B cycle or the reverse. If the motion and the buyer do not match, cut it before you scale it.
2. Localized vs global market expansion strategy
Digital services and solutions often aim for a national or international audience. There is no added tax for shipping an audiobook or an online course from San Francisco to Melbourne or Paris, which is why the marginal economics of scale look so attractive to a buyer.
What about local restaurants and bars, coffee shops, the local post office, logistics services? Location matters, and marketing locally is the only way to promote a local venue.
Incorporating a locator search engine can help boost sales if you have multiple shops or a network of vendors and partners across the country.
The breadth of the area can determine the complexity of the campaign and its cost to run. Marketing a software application internationally could happen solely through social media, content, and email marketing.
But non-English markets will require a content translation of your landing pages and sales copy. Languages like Arabic are right-to-left, and your software has to support this. Let alone all cultural references across the board, different currencies, tax laws, you name it. Each of those is a hidden cost line in an expansion thesis that looked free on the model.
Localized demand activation could bet on offline techniques such as print, local partnerships and cross-selling, local media exposure, local SEO, Yellow Pages, branding park benches, and sponsoring meetups and conferences in your area.
Tip #2: study your market and select high-impact, high-ROI channels for local versus international. Local markets can tap into localized or cultural references highly related to their crowd. These are strategic marketing options with very different capital requirements. Global demand expansion approaches should carefully reflect geographical and economic differences across multiple local markets. If a geographic-expansion thesis has no line for translation, compliance and local demand generation, the forecast is wrong, and that is a number to correct before it hits the plan.
3. Inbound demand creation vs outbound acquisition
Most marketers have a strong preference for inbound demand engine versus outbound acquisition engine approaches. For an owner, the difference is the difference between an asset you build and a tap you rent.
Creating a healthy marketing mix is tricky, and I have written a comprehensive guide on building an effective marketing strategy with both. While both can play together nicely, it is a matter of personal preference, reliance on experience, and time versus budget.
- Inbound demand engine is an investment in the future. It takes a while to kick in, aims to develop a strong brand, and can run on autopilot once it takes off. In enterprise-value terms, it is a durable asset that survives the exit.
- Outbound gets results quickly. You can easily scale up and get traction. But it is expensive and once you stop pouring in, you kill your entire revenue funnel architecture. That fragility is exactly what a QoE process will flag.
It is worth studying both marketing strategies separately. The entire approach to marketing, the required budget, and the roadmap depend on choosing one or allocating a certain ratio. This is where you separate the two marketing models by how they affect the multiple, not just the pipeline.
Unlike the other marketing categories discussed in this guide, inbound and outbound can work together. But investing in both as a smaller business would not be truly sustainable. You need to identify one technique that works best and double down until you max out 80% of its potential. Then diversify and identify the second-best.
I have recorded a quick comparison video with Colin Carlsen discussing Inbound versus Outbound and our preferences:
Tip #3: inbound demand engine and outbound acquisition engine approaches are completely different. If the whole revenue line depends on paid outbound, you own a business whose growth stops the day you stop paying, and a buyer will price that in. Fund the inbound asset early so the pipeline is not renting its future.
4. Product-led vs service-led growth models
Custom products are often about branding and comparison matrices. Product-led market positioning often aims for volume since, statistically speaking, products are cheaper to deliver than service, though not always, and we will get there too.
Selling products at scale comes with a low incremental cost for support, server infrastructure, and the like. Services are sold by the hour or at a quantity that is hardly scalable and has to be gauged and controlled carefully. That distinction drives gross margin, which drives the multiple.
Services are hardly comparable. There are hundreds of thousands of dev, marketing, and creative shops out there. They market based on price, location, a certain niche, unique advantage, key skill, portfolio.
- Products come at a fixed cost. Selling a product is profitable even with the slightest margin. This determines certain KPIs that facilitate marketing through paid ads. In other words, there is no additional cost to selling products on top of the initial development costs, the ongoing feature development process, and a slight uptick in support or hosting fees. Expenses are more predictable and scale is easier to achieve, which is exactly the profile a buyer pays up for.
- Services are unique and thus require a larger margin acting as a safety net. Consulting and service-led demand positioning go through a lengthy discovery process, gathering requirements, preparing custom-tailored offers, and including smaller buffers to minimize the scope creep impact.
You can easily optimize your outbound costs with a product-based business once you gauge the lifetime value of a customer. It is hardly predictable for services. Also, demand generation strategies aiming at a consulting business have to keep staff availability in mind at all times, a finite, limiting resource, although deals are significantly larger and allow for some experiments along the way.
Tip #4: product-led market positioning taps into quantifiable comparison within the sector. Services can be positioned differently, and often bundled with sales initiatives. If you are underwriting a services business as if it scales like software, correct the model. The marketing methods that grow the two are not interchangeable, and neither are their margins.
5. Direct demand activation vs influencer-driven distribution
This can be interpreted in different ways, and each is a distinct route to the buyer.
- You may be marketing to a decision-maker who is not paying, for instance a spouse picking a laundry machine paid for by the family budget.
- Or targeting influencers within the organization picking a technical or business stack for a new product.
- How about building a network of promoters and ambassadors and marketing to them before reaching their own crowd?
While this is not as common, it is often utilized for broader campaigns, political included. Promoting to a community leader or other authority is what authority-driven distribution is about too, but that is a separate topic in itself.
In advertising, direct demand activation is also known as a direct channel between the advertiser and the consumer. Think of strategies that connect with users directly, such as email marketing or SMS, instead of relying on fake stats from Facebook and alternative mediums. Owned channels are an asset you keep. Rented reach through a third party disappears the day the relationship ends, and that is a concentration risk worth naming.
Tip #5: pick a short-term versus long-term strategy focusing on individuals or on partners, vendors, and other influencers in the buying decision. Inspect how much of the pipeline depends on a single influencer or channel you do not own, and reduce that dependency before it becomes a diligence flag.
6. High-volume vs high-value revenue models
Marketing low-price high-volume offers and services is about volumes.
High-value enterprise solutions tend to go through a longer smarketing journey of sales plus marketing, with enterprise revenue cycles up to years at times. That length is directly a matter of forecast reliability, since a handful of large deals slipping a quarter can break the year.
What works for marketing bubble gum does not work for marketing an ERP platform for enterprise organizations.
I have not discussed demographics or context here, though they come into play depending on the price point of a solution or a service, how developed the market category is, whether it is priced higher or lower compared to alternatives, and more.
Tip #6: low-price high-volume offers are sold easily and can convert almost entirely through marketing. Scaling high-value takes longer, requires multiple touches, and may require a personalized approach for each lead. Match the revenue-recognition assumptions in your model to the actual cycle length. A high-value business modeled on high-volume payback will miss, and the miss is yours to explain to the LPs.
7. SMB vs enterprise market engagement strategy
Marketing within and for organizations of different sizes is not the same, either, and the buyer you are selling into changes both the deal size and the risk.
- SMB organizations do not have anyone in charge of marketing, or probably just an assistant, or the founder handling this.
- Enterprise organizations have enormous demand generation teams, often cross-disciplinary, located in different offices across the world, handling internal demand initiatives such as content and video production, marketing strategy, SEO, planning, setting up KPIs, analytics, deploying marketing automation tools.
Needless to say, budgets are different, and so is ROI.
Product-led market positioning that saves 1 hour a week per employee results in 10 hours weekly for the micro-team. Now imagine the corporation with a headcount of 20,000 adopting that.
Enterprise buyers can and will afford the product if you are patient enough and keep hustling. Then again, it may take longer due to complex business processes and especially in the case of a longer learning curve, since onboarding and training thousands of people can take years. That lag delays revenue recognition, which delays the cash the thesis assumed.
Tip #7: smaller teams are more agile and have fewer decision makers and faster processes, though their budgets are lower. Larger corporations take longer and coordinate between departments in-house. Decide which segment your value-creation plan is actually built on, and hold the team to the sales-cycle math that segment implies.
8. Internal demand teams vs external growth partners
Smaller teams scale differently, and the build-versus-buy call here is a direct EBITDA and speed decision.
I have discussed the marketing alternatives for startups eager to boost their strategy:
Bottom line, companies outsource to agencies or freelancers depending on their budget, hire an assistant at first for the housekeeping, or invest upfront in a couple of solid marketers who can quickly generate ROI and take it from there.
Independent growth specialists tend to charge $50 to $100 per hour for generic activities. More experienced ones can comfortably charge hundreds per hour or effectively maximize their rate on fixed-fee campaigns with an added percentage of ROI. Famous marketers like Neil Patel advertise hourly consulting at $5,000, and I am confident they can easily make more in different formats.
Agencies are more expensive thanks to the added overhead and their broader expertise across various verticals. Monthly plans can start at $3,000 to about $50,000 on average, excluding costs for paid ads. Top-tier boutique agencies, especially those producing videos, organizing events, and preparing booths for tradeshows, can charge in the millions. A specialized private equity marketing agency sits at the higher end of that range precisely because it translates spend into the metrics a deal team underwrites rather than into deliverables nobody reads.
Those time and budget constraints, combined with communication limitations, define the workflow and the ongoing market engagement strategy, tackling low-hanging fruit versus compounding benefits, and experimenting accordingly.
Tip #8: in-house activities are coordinated easily but outsourced solutions can provide the added consulting layer for smaller teams, along with expertise across dozens of clients over the years. For a portfolio company that needs results before the next board meeting, an external partner buys speed and avoids the fixed cost of a full team. Decide it as a build-versus-buy call against your hold period, not as a line-item preference.
9. Rational value messaging vs emotional brand narrative
Rational value-based messaging appeals to the rational, analytical side of a consumer’s decision-making process. It emphasizes the practical benefits and features of a product or service. For example, a car manufacturer might highlight the fuel efficiency and safety features of a new model in a rational value-based messaging campaign.
Rational value-based messaging is most effective when the target audience is highly concerned with practical considerations, such as cost and functionality.
Emotional brand narrative, on the other hand, appeals to a consumer’s feelings and desires. It seeks to create a connection between the product or service and the consumer’s emotions.
For example, a jewelry company might use emotional brand narrative to highlight the sentimental value of a wedding ring. Emotional brand narrative can be highly effective when the target audience is motivated by feelings such as love, happiness, and nostalgia.
One advantage of the rational value-based messaging approach is that it can be easily measured and quantified, which is exactly why an owner should favor it where the data allows.
Rational value-based messaging clearly defines product or service benefits and features, measuring success through sales or other tangible outcomes. It is commonly used in B2B marketing, where the target audience prioritizes practical considerations.
In contrast, emotional brand narrative can be more difficult to quantify and measure. The success of an emotional marketing campaign is often assessed based on brand awareness signals and customer loyalty, which are more subjective metrics and harder to defend in a board pack.
However, emotional brand narrative can be highly effective in building a strong brand and creating a loyal customer base. This type of marketing approach is often used in business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, where the target audience is more likely to be motivated by emotions. These are two different marketing practices, and the mix you choose determines how much of your growth story is measurable.
Tip #9: gauge your product and audience and decide between a logical and emotional approach. A/B test different landing pages. Use the reverse approach for remarketing campaigns to increase possible conversion during return flows. Where you need defensible numbers for the board, weight toward rational messaging you can attribute to revenue.
10. Performance-driven acquisition vs brand authority development
If we zoom out for a moment, it is important to establish the goal of a growth campaign, because that goal is what you will be held to.
When you launch a social media campaign, each network inquires about your target goal. Is it followers? Link clicks? More post engagements?
This represents the difference between goal-oriented campaigns, known as performance-driven acquisition, and brand awareness approaches. It is also the clearest example of a good marketing practice for a portfolio company, which is spending against outcomes rather than against vanity.
Performance-driven acquisition is akin to tactical maneuvers on the battlefield of consumer attention. It is about achieving immediate results, whether boosting conversions, enhancing ROI, or increasing customer engagement.
As Allan Dib suggests in his book “The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd,” a performance-driven marketing approach is all about optimizing every dollar spent to yield tangible outcomes. It is about leveraging data, analytics, and iterative processes to continually refine strategies for maximum impact. This is the marketing methodology that produces a defensible number for the board.
Here are six main goals of performance-driven acquisition:
- Increased conversions. The primary goal of performance-driven acquisition is to drive more conversions, such as sales, sign-ups, or leads.
- Improved ROI. Performance-driven acquisition aims to optimize return on investment by maximizing the impact of acquisition investment.
- Increased customer engagement. Performance-driven acquisition seeks to increase engagement with customers, such as through increased website traffic, email opens, and social media interactions.
- Better targeting. Performance-driven acquisition uses data and analytics to identify and target the most valuable customer segments for the business.
- Improved customer experience. Performance-driven acquisition aims to improve the overall customer experience by delivering relevant and personalized content to the right audience at the right time.
- Continuous optimization. Performance-driven acquisition is an iterative process that continually seeks to improve performance through testing and optimization. This involves regularly analyzing data, making changes to market engagement strategies, and measuring the results to determine the effectiveness of those changes.
Why amplify brand authority strategy
What would be the reason to amplify brand authority strategy instead? Because a strong brand is one of the few marketing assets that lifts the multiple, not just the pipeline.
- Increased brand recognition. A strong brand authority strategy campaign can help increase brand recognition and visibility, making it easier for potential customers to remember and identify your business.
- Differentiation. Brand authority strategy can help a business stand out from its competitors by creating a unique and memorable brand identity. This can help the business appeal to a specific target audience and set it apart from the competition.
- Customer loyalty. Investing in brand authority strategy can help build a strong emotional connection between customers and the business. This can increase customer loyalty, as customers are more likely to return to a brand they trust and feel connected to, which strengthens retention and net revenue retention.
- Long-term growth. A strong brand can help a business grow and expand over the long term. This is because customers are more likely to continue doing business with a brand they trust and recognize, and a strong brand can also make it easier to enter new markets or expand into new product lines. Additionally, a strong brand can increase the value of the business, making it more attractive to potential investors or acquirers.
Tip #10: invest in both performance-driven acquisition and brand authority strategy approaches. Double down on performance to get hard results and gauge the offering early. Supplement with brand marketing for long-term loyalty and advocacy. Fund performance first because it protects near-term cash, and stage the brand investment where it compounds into exit value.
What to inspect before you fund the next marketing plan
Here is the section the deal team actually needs. You have inherited a marketing function, and you have to decide in weeks, not quarters, whether it is a cost centre to trim, a risk to contain, or a value-creation lever to fund. The models above tell you what a company is running. This tells you how to judge it and what the wrong answer costs.
What to inspect. Ask for the numbers, not the narrative. Customer acquisition cost by channel, payback period, contribution margin after fully loaded marketing cost, net revenue retention, and the share of pipeline that comes from owned channels versus rented reach. Then ask what fraction of last year’s growth was paid outbound that stops the day the budget stops. If the team answers in impressions, tickets, campaigns, and traffic instead of revenue and margin, you have found the problem. Those are the vendor’s report card, not yours.
What good looks like. A team that can name its single primary market engagement model, show payback inside a period you would underwrite, attribute a defensible portion of revenue to specific spend, and hold a mix where the durable inbound asset is growing rather than the rented tap. Good also looks like management visibility. The CFO can produce these figures without a two-week fire drill, which itself is a signal about forecast reliability across the whole business.
What it costs when it is wrong. A marketing line modeled as scalable that is actually a rented outbound tap does not just miss its number. It misstates the growth rate the entire thesis rests on, and a QoE process will surface it at the worst possible moment. Overspending on unattributable brand activity ties up cash that covenants may need. Underspending on the inbound asset means you exit with a business whose growth stops the day the new owner stops paying, and buyers discount exactly that fragility.
The decision it drives. If the numbers are clean and the mix is durable, fund the plan and push for scale. If the spend is real but unmeasured, do not cut blind. Install attribution first, then reallocate. If the growth is entirely rented and the margin does not survive fully loaded acquisition cost, that is not a marketing plan, it is a subsidy, and you trim it while you build the owned asset that should have been there. This is also where an external private equity marketing agency earns its fee, by translating spend into the CAC, payback, and retention language the board underwrites rather than into activity reports. Whichever way it breaks, the standard to hold is the same. Every dollar of marketing must be traceable to revenue growth, margin, or enterprise value, or it does not survive the next budget review.
Digital channels as demand amplification infrastructure
First and foremost, all marketing approaches can be employed both offline and online. Digital demand infrastructure boosts reach and visibility across the web, and for an owner it lowers the fixed cost of reaching the same market.
A great example here is Facebook for restaurants or coffee shops. Many local businesses do not need a website due to the limited number of opportunities they can provide their users. This is why Facebook delivers exactly what you would expect for cafes or bistros out there:
- Massive visibility across Facebook’s own search engine
- Strong localized search
- Relevant results based on likes in your friends’ network
- Reviews and rating
- Working hours, address, phone number
- The ability to post promotions or new entries on your menu
Unless you run a loyalty program that justifies a separate online app, Facebook works just fine here, and spares the capital a custom build would consume.
The same goes for luxury items, clothing, and sports equipment, and Instagram. The network amassing over a billion users doubles down on visuals, and if your product is appealing and eye-catching, you may very well supplement your brick-and-mortar sales with online purchases straight through Instagram.
In addition to free traffic sources like Google, YouTube, or Pinterest, and affordable opportunities for paid ads through Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, local businesses thrive when they double down on digital marketing, even if they have not launched an official eCommerce store yet. These are among the more unique marketing approaches available to a small portfolio company precisely because they carry outsized reach for modest cost. Before you approve any custom build, inspect whether an existing channel already does the job, because the cheapest infrastructure is the one you do not have to fund.
The operator takeaway
While marketing may seem like a straightforward specialty at first, a successful marketing campaign bets on thorough research, user testing, defining audiences, creating funnels, measuring activities, and selecting a specific marketing approach for each and every client. For an owner, that selection is a capital allocation decision, not a creative one.
If you run a private equity marketing agency or buy from one, work through this list for every portfolio company, because the best marketing approach is the one whose return you can defend in a board pack.
As for your own portfolio, run this analysis once and stick to an action plan that can scale across the hold period. The comparison of types of marketing approaches above is not academic. It is the shortlist of decisions that separate marketing spend that builds enterprise value from marketing spend that only builds reports.
In addition to the marketing mix alone, every business depends on hundreds of important factors bringing it closer to a strong exit, such as:
- Great product-market fit
- Effective employees
- Reliable management
- Adequate and scalable processes
- Long-term revenue strategy
- Technical tools maximizing efficiency and automation
- Recognizable brand
If you want to keep in touch with the latest marketing opportunities across the portfolio of businesses I operate, subscribe to my newsletter or pick my brain by joining the growth community.
By Mario Peshev, DevriX
