How to build a marketing strategy: the momentum matrix

<p>You are a builder. You like systems. You like input ➝ output. You want marketing to be a function, not a religion. The problem is that most marketing advice is noise. It’s a messy list of tactics disguised as a strategy.</p> <p>You read about seven-stage funnels and complex attribution models. You see venture-backed companies launching TikTok challenges and think, “I don’t have an agency or an unlimited runway.” This feeling is correct. That advice is not for you. It’s for companies that already have momentum. Trying to copy them is like trying to lift a skyscraper with a car jack.</p> <p>If you are pre-revenue, or just starting to see early traction, your marketing strategy cannot be about scale. It must be about stability and momentum. You need a system that minimizes risk and maximizes your very limited resources.</p> <p>We need a simpler strategy. One that acknowledges a brutal truth: your marketing is not failing because you lack budget. It’s failing because you lack clarity and focus. The key to successful early-stage marketing is identifying the single, simplest action that will create a tiny bit of forward movement. Then doing it again.</p> <p>This is the Momentum Matrix. It’s a strategic framework for builders. It’s not about grand plans. It’s about deterministic, small-scale action.</p> <p><em>If you are short on time, scroll to The Strategy Builder section for a copy-paste prompt.</em></p> <h2>How to build a marketing strategy using the momentum matrix framework</h2> <p>The Momentum Matrix simplifies strategy into two axes: Impact (vertical) and Effort (horizontal). Most of the industry tries to live in the high Impact, low Effort quadrant. That’s where the viral "hacks" live. We are going to ignore that quadrant entirely, because for early-stage builders, it is a lie.</p> <p>Instead, we focus on the relationship between clarity and channel. Clarity determines Impact. Channel determines Effort. Strategy is the act of aligning your clearest message to your lowest-friction channel.</p> <p><h3>The Strategy Is What You Ignore</h3></p> <p>Your strategy is not a list of things to do. It’s a list of things you have decided not to do. This is your permission to ignore the listicles. You do not need to launch on every platform. You only need to win in one place, with one message.</p> <p>ACTION: Open a document right now and title it “The Things We Are Not Doing.” List all the marketing channels and activities you are tempted by but have not yet validated (e.g., “Starting a podcast,” “Hiring an SEO agency,” “Paid ads”). Committing to not doing these things frees up cognitive load, which is your most valuable resource.</p> <h2>Identify your gravitational pull (high impact, high effort)</h2> <p>This is where real growth lives. It is hard, but it is necessary. The only way to succeed here is to have absolute clarity on your core value. This clarity is what makes the effort worthwhile, turning hard work into leveraged work.</p> <p>Think about a product like Linear. Their value is speed and refinement for technical teams. Their content, their branding, their feature velocity—it all supports this single, clear truth. That clarity makes every investment in their product and marketing pay dividends. When you have clarity, the gravitational pull toward your product becomes stronger than the friction of switching.</p> <p><h3>The Single Audience Rule</h3></p> <p>If you talk to everyone, you talk to no one. Your high-impact message needs a single target. The more specific, the better. Not “SaaS founders,” but “Pre-revenue technical founders building API products.” You must know exactly who you are translating your product's value for. You can refine this using methods like the Frictionless Wedge, which helps <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/positioning-strategy-for-founders">break into a crowded market</a>.</p> <p>ACTION: Spend 30 minutes reading customer reviews or competitor forums. Extract three direct quotes that express the pain your product solves. That is your high-impact message fuel.</p> <h2>Focus on the lowest friction channel (low effort, low impact)</h2> <p>This quadrant is not glamorous, but it is reliable. It's about small, consistent wins. For a builder, this often means channels that leverage your existing workflow—like GitHub, Hacker News, or a hyper-specific technical newsletter.</p> <p>These channels are low-impact because they won’t deliver 10,000 signups overnight. But they are low-effort because they require less "marketing energy" and more "builder energy." You are already on GitHub. You are already writing documentation. Marketing in this zone is about slightly re-framing what you are already doing.</p> <p><h3>The Documentation Is Marketing</h3></p> <p>If you are building a dev tool, your public documentation is a low-friction channel. Optimizing your docs for simple, copy-paste examples is a marketing move. The builder audience sees competence as value. Good docs are a sign of competence.</p> <p>RE-FRAME: You are not a marketer chasing vanity metrics. You are an engineer building a predictable delivery system for your product’s value. Marketing is translation, not attraction. This reframe makes you competent and capable again.</p> <h2>Bridge the gap: the strategy is constrained (high effort, low impact)</h2> <p>This is where most founders get stuck. They spend huge effort on something that yields tiny results. They launch a beautiful blog, write five posts, see no traffic, and conclude marketing is broken. This zone is a trap. It is where you feel the most chaos.</p> <p>The only way out is to apply the Constraint Filter. You need to diagnose your single biggest constraint: clarity, channel, or capacity. If you don't know what to write, your constraint is clarity. If you write great content but no one sees it, your constraint is channel. Strategy <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/marketing-strategy-for-startups">is the act of removing that single constraint</a>.</p> <p><h3>Permission to Be Ugly</h3></p> <p>Perfectionism is a high-effort, low-impact behavior. You have permission to publish the "ugly" version. Launch the documentation first. Get feedback on your positioning statement before you spend money on a brand designer. Marketing rewards speed and iteration over polish.</p> <p>ACTION: Take your best feature and write a one-paragraph announcement for it on LinkedIn or Twitter. Do not overthink the graphic. Ship it in the next hour. That small win creates momentum.</p> <h2>The single most important decision: strategy vs. plan</h2> <p>Your strategy is <em>why</em> you are doing something (e.g., “We will win by focusing on speed for technical teams”). Your marketing plan is <em>what</em> you are doing (e.g., “Write 3 case studies on speed-up wins”). The mistake is conflating the two. Without a clear strategy, your plan becomes a chaotic checklist.</p> <p>Your goal is to build a strategy that guides action, but a plan that is disposable. The plan is a hypothesis. The strategy is the invariant truth about how you intend to win. When your plan fails (and it will), you can adjust the plan without questioning your strategy.</p> <p>To learn more about <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/marketing-plan-vs-strategy">the difference between a strategy and a plan</a>, check out our guide.</p> <h2>The Strategy Builder Prompt</h2> <p>This prompt uses the principles of the Momentum Matrix to generate actionable clarity by focusing on your known constraints.</p> <h3>Strategy Mapping Builder</h3> <p>Copy and paste the following, replacing the bracketed text with your specifics.</p> <p><code>You are a strategy consultant specializing in pre-revenue, B2B software for builders. Your goal is to simplify a founder's marketing strategy to one core message and one low-friction distribution channel. **FOCUS KEYWORD:** how to build a marketing strategy **PRODUCT:** [A no-code tool for building internal dashboards for e-commerce teams.] **TARGET CUSTOMER:** [E-commerce operations managers at companies doing $5M-$20M ARR who are frustrated by slow, siloed data from Shopify and Klaviyo.] **CORE PAIN:** [They spend 5 hours a week manually pulling data to make simple inventory or campaign decisions, leading to costly errors and delays.] **TASK:**1. Generate the single most painful, friction-based headline for this audience. 2. Identify one "low-friction channel" where the founder is already spending time (e.g., a specific subreddit, a technical forum, an industry newsletter) and suggest one specific post/action for that channel. 3. Rewrite the core pain into a single-sentence value proposition that uses the "un-sell" method (i.e., tells them what they can stop doing).</code></p><p><strong>Example Output:</strong>1. Headline: Stop Manually Stitching Shopify Data: Your Next Inventory Mistake Will Cost You $10k. 2. Low-Friction Channel & Action: Channel: r/ecommerceoperations. Action: Post a short case study titled "I Built a Real-Time Shopify/Klaviyo Dashboard in 15 Minutes (Template + Code)." 3. Value Proposition: Stop wasting 5 hours a week on manual data reconciliation and start focusing only on decisions that grow your revenue.</p> <p>This is one of countless interconnected prompts in the LiftKit system, designed to move you from idea to execution instantly.</p><h2>FAQ</h2> <p>The founder marketing mindset is about translating value, not attracting attention. This is a subtle but powerful difference that prevents a lot of strategic drift.</p> <h3>Q: What if I have multiple target audiences?</h3> <p>A: Your strategy needs to start with one. If you have two distinct audiences, you have two distinct products and two marketing strategies. Early-stage companies do not have the capacity for two. Pick the one that has the clearest pain and the lowest acquisition cost. This is essential for <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/startup-marketing-fundamentals">startup marketing fundamentals</a>: focus creates velocity.</p> <h3>Q: How do I measure success if I’m not chasing vanity metrics?</h3> <p>A: Measure movement. The single best metric is 'Next Action Taken'—the number of users who take the single, most critical action after consuming your content (e.g., trying the template, booking a demo, or using your open-source component). Focus on conversion rate of these small actions, not raw traffic numbers.</p> <h3>Q: I feel like I've failed because my marketing hasn't gone viral. Is that normal?</h3> <p>A: Yes. Viral marketing is often high-impact, high-effort, and almost impossible to engineer from scratch. Most successful marketing is boring and consistent. You haven't failed; you've just been sold a fantasy. Focus on systems that work every time, not ones that might work once. Learn more about <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/why-most-marketing-fails">why most marketing fails</a> when it prioritizes noise over signal.</p> <h3>Q: Should my strategy change as I grow?</h3> <p>A: Yes, but only in its scale and channel mix, not its core clarity. The strategy you build today—the answer to "how do we win?"—should hold true even when you hire a team and scale channels. Your initial strategy must focus on <a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/how-to-define-your-target-audience">defining your target audience</a> precisely, ensuring your foundational marketing is solid.</p> <hr> <h2>Start running operator-grade marketing in under an hour.</h2> <p>LiftKit is the only strategy-first AI marketing system built for founders. It distills the same Fortune-500 frameworks used at Apple, Stripe, and McKinsey into a simple, actionable playbook you can run in under an hour.</p> <p>Stop tinkering with tactics. Start operating with strategy.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://getliftkit.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Get LiftKit</a></strong></p> <h2>Keep learning</h2> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/frameworks" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Frameworks</strong></a>: Learn proven mental models to diagnose, prioritise, and scale marketing outcomes.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/channels" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Channels</strong></a>: Understand which acquisition paths actually work and how to deploy them strategically.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/messaging" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Messaging</strong></a>: Build positioning, angle, and copy that converts without guesswork.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/strategy" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Strategy</strong></a>: Make smarter decisions using operator-grade prompts and structured thinking.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/tools" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Tools</strong></a>: Use AI, automation, and practical templates to move faster.</p> <p><a href="https://learn.getliftkit.com/research" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>Research</strong></a>: Tap into market insights, psychology, and patterns that drive effective marketing.</p> <script type='application/ld+json'> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Article", "headline": "How to build a marketing strategy: the momentum matrix", "description": "How to build a marketing strategy using the momentum matrix framework", "articleSection": "learn", "keywords": "how to build a marketing strategy, strategy, planning, startups, marketing basics", "author": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "LiftKit" }, "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "LiftKit" }, "url": "https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/how-to-build-a-marketing-strategy", "mainEntityOfPage": "https://learn.getliftkit.com/learn/how-to-build-a-marketing-strategy" } </script>