---
title: Marketing Strategy Launch — April 2026
type: article
created: '2026-04-05'
updated: '2026-04-05'
source_docs:
- raw/2026-03-11-asymmetric-marketing-call-128951372.md
tags:
- asymmetric
- marketing-strategy
- hubspot
- email-marketing
- abm
- food-and-beverage
- energy-and-environment
- campaign-planning
- lead-nurture
- segmentation
layer: 2
client_source: Asymmetric Marketing
industry_context: b2b-services
transferable: false
---

# Marketing Strategy Launch — April 2026

## Overview

Asymmetric aligned on and launched a new multi-channel marketing engine in this session. Mark walked the team through a fully rebuilt HubSpot database and a tiered outreach architecture, then the group selected the first two industry campaign targets: **Food & Beverage** and **Energy & Environment** (regulated waste). The stated goal is **1–2 new clients per month** — a target Mark framed as both achievable and sufficient to stabilize revenue after recent client losses (e.g., Machine Resource).

**Attendees:** Mark Hope, Karly Oykhman, Isalia Ramirez, Avokerie Onorimuo, Melissa Cusumano

---

## Key Decisions

| Decision | Detail |
|---|---|
| HubSpot = single source of truth | All campaign activity (SES, Orbit, HubSpot) reports back to HubSpot regardless of sending platform |
| Two launch industries | Food & Beverage and Energy & Environment chosen first; retail flagged as a future third |
| Nurture emails via SES | HubSpot's free tier caps at 2k marketable contacts; ~35k contacts will be emailed via SES |
| ABM via Orbit | ABM contacts are excluded from all general marketing sequences |
| $1,000/month ad budget | Covers Google Ads, boosted social posts, Facebook/LinkedIn Ads across all campaigns |
| UTM standardization required | A shared reference doc will govern all UTM parameters to ensure clean analytics |
| iStock image archiving | Purchased images must be tagged and stored by client folder to prevent repurchasing |

---

## The Marketing Architecture

### Database State
- **~37,000 contacts** cleaned, validated, and enriched with industry data
- Consumers and contacts without email addresses removed
- Segmented by:
  - **Lead Quality:** Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 (scored by data completeness, engagement history)
  - **Industry:** Construction, Technology, Healthcare, Food & Beverage, Financial Services, Energy & Environment, and others
  - **ICP:** Mid-market B2B, $10–50M revenue, known decision-maker in a target industry

### Outreach Channels
```
HubSpot (source of truth)
├── SES — General nurture sequences (~35k contacts)
├── Orbit — ABM campaigns (named accounts)
└── HubSpot direct — Industry campaigns (≤2k contacts per campaign)
```

### Nurture Funnel (SES)
Contacts not in an industry campaign, ABM, active deal, or marked as current customer enter a three-stage sequence:

1. **Awareness** (10 weeks) — 1 email/week; introduce Asymmetric, low-pressure, helpful tone
2. **Consideration** (10 weeks) — 1 email/week; stronger CTAs, offers, engagement triggers
3. **Long-Term Nurture** (ongoing) — 1 email/month; stay-in-touch for non-responsive leads; re-engagement trigger fires if contact starts clicking

Contacts who engage during Consideration are converted to **Deals** in HubSpot and enter Mark's personal outreach rotation (email + LinkedIn).

### Exclusion Logic
The following contact groups are excluded from general nurture:
- Contacts flagged **ABM**
- Contacts with an **active Deal**
- Contacts in the **Food & Beverage** or **Energy & Environment** industry campaigns
- Contacts with lifecycle stage = **Customer**

---

## Initial Campaign Focus

### Food & Beverage
- **Target:** Small and mid-size food and beverage companies
- **Core problem:** Competing against large, well-funded brands for shelf space and market share; high barrier to retail distribution
- **Asymmetric angle:** How does a small organic food brand win against a category giant with 100x the marketing budget?
- **Contact pool:** ~788 contacts in HubSpot (within the 2k HubSpot send limit)

### Energy & Environment (Regulated Waste)
- **Target:** Remediation, hazardous waste handling, hazardous materials transport, compliance/training, and storage companies
- **Core problem:** Highly regulated industry with very low marketing sophistication — most companies wait for the phone to ring
- **Asymmetric angle:** Government regulation creates a durable moat, but the companies inside it still compete; better marketing wins
- **Mark's credential:** Built and sold two E&E companies (PegX, Victory Environmental); served as EVP Sales & Marketing at Safety-Kleen ($1B revenue); helped launch Clean Management
- **Contact pool:** Included in the ~1,300 combined contacts for both initial campaigns

> **Note from Mark:** "Nobody at a Wisconsin MBA program says 'I'm going to start a hazardous waste company.' That's the moat. But the companies inside it are still competing with each other, and the guy with the best marketing is more likely to win."

---

## Core Messaging Framework

All content — blogs, social posts, ads, email sequences — must reinforce exactly two themes:

### Theme 1: Asymmetric Competition ("David vs. Goliath")
- Business is inherently unfair and biased toward larger, better-resourced competitors
- Smaller businesses need specific strategies, tools, and tactics to compete — not just harder work
- Asymmetric provides those strategies
- *Illustrative metaphors approved for use:* boxing weight classes, Polish cavalry vs. German tanks, Coke vs. Pepsi (symmetric at the top, asymmetric at the bottom)

### Theme 2: Stagnating Sales
- Growth plateaus are a **strategy failure**, not a people or agency failure
- Companies that plateau typically blame salespeople or their marketing agency and cycle through replacements without fixing the underlying methodology
- Asymmetric provides the methodology to break through plateaus
- CTA: invite the reader to a conversation (DM, meeting link, contact form)

> Mark's framing: "If we get two new clients a month, it's more than we can handle. We don't need to hit it out of the park — we just need two."

---

## Operational Logistics

### Tools & Access
- **Melissa** now has a dedicated HubSpot seat (Chris Ostergaard's former seat reassigned)
- **Raphael** confirmed to have his own HubSpot super-admin seat
- HubSpot API being used by Mark for bulk operations (segmentation, enrichment, sequence setup) — avoids slow UI workflows

### UTM Standardization
Mark's proposed UTM structure for sequences:
```
utm_source=hubspot
utm_medium=sequence
utm_campaign=[awareness|consideration|re-engagement|abm|food-bev|energy-env]
utm_content=email-[1-10]
```
All links — email buttons, social posts, QR codes, documents — should carry UTM parameters. A shared reference doc will be the single source of truth before any new UTM is created.

### ZoomInfo Credits
- 3,000 credits/month currently going unused
- Proposed split: ~2,000 for client contact enrichment, ~1,000 for Asymmetric prospecting
- Karly to set a recurring reminder to ensure credits are consumed monthly

### iStock Credits
- Team is currently out of credits
- Process to reinstate: all purchased images stored in client-specific Google Drive folders, tagged for reuse
- Prevents repurchasing images already in the library

### Pima Leads
- Mark receiving ~2–3 calls/week via Pima (paid lead gen, ~$500/call)
- Workflow: Claude generates a pre-call prep doc → call → Claude processes transcript + prep doc → simple proposal or follow-up → Deal created in HubSpot

---

## Action Items

| Owner | Action | Target |
|---|---|---|
| **Mark** | Complete project briefs for Food & Beverage and Energy & Environment campaigns | ASAP |
| **Mark** | Create HubSpot exclusion lists for F&B and E&E segments | Before nurture sequences launch |
| **Mark** | Schedule website review meeting for Thursday; invite Mikael | This week |
| **Karly & Avoke** | Develop all content (social posts, ads, blog posts) for both initial campaigns | Launch next week |
| **Karly** | Set monthly reminder to use ZoomInfo credits | Recurring |
| **Isalia** | Create and maintain shared UTM parameter reference document | This week |
| **Melissa** | Create "2026 Marketing" folder in Google Drive for all campaign assets | This week |
| **All** | Attend Thursday website review meeting to plan landing pages for new campaigns | Thursday |

---

## Related

- [[clients/current/asymmetric/_index]] — Asymmetric client overview
- [[knowledge/marketing/hubspot-architecture]] — HubSpot as single source of truth pattern
- [[knowledge/marketing/utm-standardization]] — UTM governance best practices
- [[knowledge/marketing/abm-vs-nurture]] — When to use ABM vs. nurture sequences