445. Sustainable 🌳

The case for "break-even marketing." What if marketing funded itself?

Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’m co-founding a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content, and we’d love to hear from you, anytime. Come say hello.

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Attn podcast lovers! My Bonfire co-founder

Shannon Deep

and I joined the Finding Market Fit podcast to talk all about our approach to brand storytelling and how to make your brand stories come to life in your marketing.

And then on the Bonfire substack this week, I wrote about creative briefs … including a free template you can grab for making creative briefs with your team.

7. Crafting a creative brief that actually encourages creativity

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Sustainable Marketing FTW

I’ve been at companies where profitability was the all-consuming focus. I’ve been at companies where growth-at-all-costs was the mantra (and, often, the eulogy!).

But I like to think there’s a third option: Sustainability.

Now, I’m not talking about environmental sustainability in this case — though wouldn’t it be cool if we measured the climate impact of our marketing work.

Sustainability means that our marketing efforts are reaping results that can be used to fund more of the same marketing efforts.

It’s essentially “break-even marketing.”

When you’re striving for profitability, typically a few things become true:

• You don’t spend any money

• You lose the appetite for investing anything today (money, headcount, tools, time) in strategies that can pay off in months or quarters down the road

• You automatically remove certain marketing channels from your menu

When you’re striving for growth-at-all-costs, you’ll probably find these things are true:

• The only thing that matters is your next growth milestone, typically very short-term

• You don’t care how much it costs or how repeatable it is

• You don’t care how it helps or hurts you in the long-term

As you can tell — as you have probably experienced! — there are downsides to either extreme end of the spectrum, whether you’re focused on profitability or growth-at-all-costs. Sustainability, then, becomes this neat middle ground where you can get the best parts of both.

Sustainable marketing incentivizes you to:

• Have a plan! Unlike profitability, your plan can involve ambitious spend or big bets; unlike growth-at-all-costs, your plan can have any sort of time horizon

• Balance your short-term and long-term investments

• Still keep a close eye on the numbers

So what does this look like in practice …

Well, there are a few different ways you can approach sustainable marketing.

1 - Growth loops

Growth loops are sustainable, by definition. The outputs of your growth loop get reinvested as inputs.

This will likely lead you to a few different types of strategies, like:

• Virality and network effects (these will need to be collaborative strategies along with your product growth team)

• User-generated content

• Affiliates and referrals

2 - Foundational investments like brand strategy and SEO

If you invest in brand, you will reap the benefits of a sustainable, compounding brand advantage by looking at brand’s impact on loyalty (measured with an increase in LTV) and advocacy (measured in WOM) and reach (measured, well, everywhere). Same with SEO — an investment today will build on itself well into the future, allowing you to add to the foundation rather than have to constantly replenish, like with a pay-to-play channel.

Here is a full channel menu that walks through some of these tradeoffs:

3 - LTV:CAC

You can think about sustainable marketing from a pure financial lens, too. Typically marketers want to aim for a 3:1 LTV:CAC ratio. Sustainable marketing practices, however, will hit this number waaaay out of the park. At Buffer, we did a 10:1 ratio!

For sustainable strategies, I like to look at channel CAC rather than all-in CAC (all-in CAC takes into account the salaries of your whole team plus team-wide tooling) to tell me if the channels themselves are sustainable.

4 - Actually making money

There’s “break-even marketing” and then there’s “self-funded marketing.” Extreme! We had a version of this at Buffer when we started doing Skillshare courses that brought in revenue as well as helped our brand reach. If you are making money as a marketing team — perhaps through courses or services or podcast ads or paid marketing tools — this can be another way to balance out the cost of marketing and reach sustainability.

Over to you

How does sustainability factor into your marketing strategy? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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About this newsletter …

Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.

Come say hi!

Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:

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