You’ve put in the hard yards – built a great product, found your first customers, and started to see real momentum. But as your startup grows, so do the challenges.
Suddenly, the marketing strategies that got you here aren’t enough. You’re fielding more enquiries, juggling new channels, and struggling to reach fresh audiences. Maybe customer preferences have evolved, or some new technology has disrupted your sector.
In a field as vast and complex as marketing, the lack of a clear roadmap can lead to wasted time, stretched resources, and costly mistakes.
This is where strategic consulting comes in. It can help startups like yours scale smarter, by providing expert insight, tailored strategies, and a clear plan for sustainable growth.
Integrated marketing providers like The Walk specialise in guiding startups through this crucial stage. Helping ensure that your marketing keeps pace with your expansion, so you can focus on your core business operations.
The growing pains of scaling a startup
Without a clear roadmap, many startup founders struggle with common scaling pitfalls, such as:
- Overspending on ineffective marketing channels
- Targeting the wrong audience
- Burning out their marketing team with scattered efforts
AI and machine learning have democratised marketing functions that once required experts – such as graphic design, copywriting, and video creation. This is great news! It lets more people turn their ideas into reality and get their startups off the ground, even without the budget for a full-scale marketing team from day one.
However, it has also resulted in an influx of marketers with little to no experience.
The reality is, effective marketing isn’t just about crafting eye-catching visuals or writing grammatically flawless copy.
It’s about deeply understanding your prospective customer. About identifying their needs and pain points, and communicating how your product or service can solve their particular problems. Clearly, credibly, and without exaggeration.
AI can help you create high-quality content. But only with extensive marketing experience does one gain the kind of insight needed to effectively navigate industry nuances, understand customer psychology, and craft a message that’ll resonate with the target audience.
How strategic consulting bridges the gap
The strategic consulting process begins with understanding your business goals, audience, and market landscape. A consultant from The Walk, for instance, will use data-driven insights to craft a tailored marketing strategy, focusing on audience engagement and sustainable growth.
Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all solution, they will work closely with you and your team, to develop a strategy tailored to your startup’s specific goals. These goals might include:
- Building credibility and trust in a crowded industry
- Generating high-quality leads
- Driving user acquisition for a newly launched app or platform
- Scaling marketing efforts while maintaining a lean budget
- Establishing a strong brand identity to attract investors
- Positioning a disruptive product in a traditional market
- Expanding from a local customer base to a national or global one
Unlike traditional marketing agencies that offer pre-packaged services – like social media management or content production – a strategic consultant fills the gaps in your existing capabilities.
They assess your industry, budget, resources, and objectives to design a roadmap that will maximise the impact of your campaigns, without wasted effort. The result? A focused, efficient strategy to help you achieve your exact goals, nothing more and nothing less. Learn more about how we might approach this at The Walk in our article about the power of discovery.
Example: Project management tool for the creative industry
To illustrate the points mentioned above, imagine a SaaS startup that’s built a powerful project management platform tailored for remote teams in the creative industry. The product offers features like real-time collaboration, feedback tools for visual assets, and automated workflows optimised specifically for designers, content creators, and video editors.
Despite pouring thousands into paid search and social ads, they aren’t getting the traction they’d expected. The conversion rate is low and most leads drop off after the free trial.
The reason?
Their messaging focuses heavily on generic productivity benefits: “Streamline your workflow” and “Boost your team’s efficiency.”
But it isn’t resonating with their target audience because it sounds like every other project management tool out there. Failing to highlight the features that makes their platform uniquely valuable to creatives, such as visual proofing, version control for design files, or integrations with tools like Adobe Creative Cloud.
Bringing in a strategic consultant might help them shift gears. Refine their positioning to highlight their platform as the go-to solution for creative teams struggling with messy feedback loops and scattered assets. And create landing pages tailored to niches like marketing agencies, video production teams, and freelance collectives.
After identifying the issues, a skilled consultant would also help them develop targeted messaging like:
“Finally, a project management tool built for designers!”
Or
“Get fast, clear feedback on every design – without the endless email chains.”
The consultant could also help them re-evaluate their ad spend. Instead of running broad campaigns on Google and Facebook, they might recommend shifting focus to LinkedIn and industry-specific newsletters. Platforms where their audience is more likely to engage.
The result?
More qualified leads, a higher trial-to-paid conversion rate, and a clear message that finally clicks with the right audience.
An in-depth look at some common scaling mistakes
Here are three common scaling mistakes startups often make – and how a strategic consultant can help you better navigate them.
Chasing every new channel
A new social platform launches, and suddenly it seems like everyone is jumping on it. A competitor starts a podcast, so you start thinking maybe you should, too.
Before you know it, your marketing team is stretched thin. Dabbling in half a dozen channels, without a clear sense of which ones are actually driving results.
This scattergun approach might feel like you’re keeping up with the pace of change. But in reality, it often leads to burnout, inconsistent messaging, and wasted marketing budget.
A reliable strategic consultant will provide you with expert guidance, helping you focus on the platforms that best align with your business goals. Rather than pouring money into every new thing that comes along.
For instance, a fintech startup looking to target young professionals might be better off partnering with finance-focused blogs and newsletters or producing thought-leadership content on LinkedIn, rather than spending heavily on TikTok or Instagram. On the flip side, a webnovel startup publishing young adult romance might thrive by building traction in communities like BookTok and Bookstagram, where their target readers are already active.
At The Walk, strategic consulting is built around tailored, data-driven planning. Our consultants will analyse your audience, market, and performance data to help you prioritise marketing channels based on impact, not hype.
Failing to define (and revisit) your ideal customer
When you first launched your startup, you likely had an idea of who your dream client or customer was.
Maybe it was based on intuition, early feedback, or a handful of successful sales. But as your business begins to scale, relying on that early assumption can lead to missteps.
Markets shift, customer behaviours evolve, and your product offering matures. What worked in the beginning won’t necessarily carry you through the next stage of business growth.
Some startups make the mistake of pushing ahead without revisiting their customer profile. This may lead to:
- Sales teams chasing poor-fit leads
- Advertising decisions based on outdated assumptions
- Campaign messaging that fails to resonate
For an example, take the webnovel platform we mentioned earlier. If they don’t regularly reassess their user profile and ideal customer, they could easily miss a market shift – like their target audience gravitating toward romantic fantasy (or “romantasy”) over contemporary romance. Without updating their marketing to promote that type of content to readers who’re likely interested, they risk losing a major opportunity for growth.
This is where strategic consulting may prove invaluable. A strategic consultant won’t just look at who you think your customer is. They’ll use data, customer insights, and market analysis to clarify and, if needed, redefine your ideal customer profile.
At The Walk, our consultants work closely with startups to identify high-value customer segments, understand their needs and decision-making processes, and create marketing strategies that speak directly to those audiences.
With expert guidance, you gain clarity on who you’re talking to, why they need your product, and how to best reach them. Helping ensure that your scaling efforts are focused and cost-effective.
Treating brand-building as an afterthought
In the early stages of a startup, it’s natural to prioritise short-term wins – bringing in leads, boosting conversions, and getting revenue through the door. But as you begin to scale, sidelining brand-building can quietly undermine your business growth. Without a clear, distinct brand, your product risks becoming interchangeable with the competition.
Many startups treat branding as something to worry about later. Once they’ve grown big enough to afford a rebrand or launch a full-scale campaign. By that point, though, the damage may already be done: poor differentiation, a forgettable identity, and missed opportunities to build trust with your audience.
Bringing in a strategic consultant early can change this trajectory. Instead of hiring a full-scale marketing team, you gain expert guidance to integrate brand-building into your overall marketing strategy. From the start and on a budget.
That means every campaign – from your first landing page to your email onboarding sequence – will reflect a consistent, compelling story that aligns with what your ideal customer actually cares about.
For an example, let’s return to the fintech startup targeting young professionals. The app helps users manage their budgets, build savings, and invest with confidence. It has strong functionality. But so do dozens of other finance apps.
So, their growth might start to plateau if they can’t make users feel an emotional connection to their product in particular.
If the messaging is generic, the tone dry, and the visual identity indistinguishable from every other fintech tool, users won’t think twice about switching to a competitor.
A strategic consultant like The Walk would help them reshape their brand strategy based on audience insights. Shift from feature-heavy messaging to emotionally resonant language that makes users feel a sense of financial empowerment, without judgment or jargon.
A feeling of empowerment that these users will forever associate with their brand. Turning a functional tool into a trusted, approachable ally – in a financial landscape that often feels cold or intimidating.
How The Walk Agency helps startups scale smarter
Scaling a startup isn’t just about doing more. It’s about doing more of what matters, and doing it well. At The Walk, we help our clients do just that – cut through the chaos with focused, data-driven marketing.
Case Study: InstantScripts
When InstantScripts first partnered with The Walk, they were a fast-growing telehealth startup with a powerful product – but they were struggling to cut through the noise in a saturated digital healthcare market. Their marketing efforts weren’t delivering the returns they needed. And they were understandably reluctant to continue investing in strategies that didn’t move the needle.
They approached us looking for a solution, but initially tasked us with outperforming their previous agency, without changing their channels or significantly increasing the budget. Game on!
We began with an in-depth consultation to understand their business goals, target audience, and market position. From this, we built a roadmap that redefined their brand identity and voice to one that conveyed care, professionalism, and trust.
We then put the new strategy into action:
- Redesigned the website and app to improve usability and reinforce the new brand identity
- Launched paid ad campaigns across key digital channels
- Rolled out targeted email marketing, focusing on customer lifecycle and retention
- Created improved feedback loops to gather insights and refine messaging
These initiatives helped us more precisely target distinct customer segments, increase website traffic, and grow a strong repository of positive customer testimonials.
By 2023, InstantScripts had become one of Australia’s most prominent telehealth brands, culminating in a $135 million acquisition by Wesfarmers – a testament to what strategic consulting and execution can achieve when aligned with the right business goals.
Conclusion
At The Walk, our strategic consulting services go beyond campaign execution. We become your partner in growth, working closely with your team to understand your unique challenges. From there, we help you build a marketing strategy that’s not just creative but also commercially intelligent.
Whether you’re trying to sharpen your brand positioning, scale your lead generation, or refine your customer journey, we’re here to help. We bring a clear, focused roadmap that drives growth not just quickly but sustainably.
Ready to scale smarter? Contact us today to book a consultation. You can also learn more about how our strategic consulting services can support your next stage of growth.
