There is no authoritative marketing manual. Every company must find its own voice, and as it grows and develops, its marketing also needs to develop.

Relying on proven strategies and measurable indicators is not enough-today, the most effective marketers continue to research and learn innovative methods while exploring new ways.

This is where Unmuted comes in. This is a growth marketing agency headquartered in Amsterdam. The company focuses on LinkedIn and content marketing, marketing automation and advertising. Prior to founding Unmuted, Max van den Ingh was the head of growth and product for electric car rental company MisterGreen. He also served as the head of growth marketing for the chat-based marketing platform ShopPop.

Van den Ingh, who is also a guest lecturer at Nyenrode Business School, was recommended to TechCrunch through the TechCrunch Experts project. We are currently looking for top growth marketers who can be recommended to other startups. If you know one of them, please fill out this quick survey to let us know.

Van den Ingh talked to us about his "modern" marketing methods, setting realistic goals, how startups must transform during the pandemic, and so on.

Editor's note: This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

You call Unmuted a "modern" growth marketing agency. What have you done to make your marketing methods modern?

The way we help customers is fundamentally different from the way most traditional marketing agencies operate. At Unmuted, our customers do not come to us to implement their ideas; they come to us for our process. To some extent, we have productized the growth marketing process to generate ideas for our customers. They found great value in this process.

According to the client's team size and resources, we either guide them during the execution process, or execute independently and give feedback. In our view, this process-based service model is the only way to develop business in a sustainable way.

"The way we help customers is fundamentally different from the way most traditional marketing agencies operate."

In a practical sense, this is the end result of the process: we apply all the knowledge learned from fast-growing companies to our customers’ businesses. Usually, we focus on what we call "innovative companies"-whether it is because they provide SaaS products or because they are innovators in traditional industries, it doesn't matter. The process we designed is suitable for B2B startups, scaling up and SMB. The last category can benefit a lot from the way we work.

Therefore, our role is threefold: Based on our extensive internal knowledge and experience, we develop strategies by experimenting with several proven marketing strategies. This saves our client's marketing team from a narrow vision that can be suffocating.

Our growth plan is usually carried out in three phases, which we call the foundation phase, the acceleration phase, and the transformation phase. In the basic phase, we build a foundation based on extensive audits of the client’s business and start with our preliminary experiments. During the acceleration phase, we expanded the experiments that showed promising early results​​. Finally, in the transformation phase, we teach our customers how to continue to grow their business on their own. If necessary, we will continue to assume a consulting role.

Your work at MisterGreen helped it grow about 10 times. When working with you, how much can customers expect to grow? How do you help clients set realistic goals?

Setting goals is always a challenge, especially in marketing. Why target a certain number? For that matter, why not aim higher or lower? At Unmuted, when we start working with new clients, we will do a series of exercises together. This helps us clearly understand where our customers are now and where they might be when we optimize marketing.

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Next, we focus on growth levers, such as monthly growth in certain conversion or activation areas, rather than fixed numbers, such as a specific number of new customers in a specific period. Focusing on growth levers makes our work more maneuverable.

Then, we construct a framework as part of our growth plan that also leaves room for certain beliefs that the company has. I think this "belief system" is essential for any growth marketing strategy. If you don't allow room for intuitive activity and focus only on data-driven projects, then you will end up working only on things that you can measure. We believe that growth marketing will become more effective when you invest time and energy in channels and spaces that are not necessarily measured.

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When people talk about your solution on WhatsApp or in a podcast, this is surprising and can effectively affect revenue, but sometimes these activities simply cannot be tracked.

Finally, we do not make any guarantees about the growth results. This is not how it works. As part of the process, we will always strive to maximize results. Diligence focuses on continuous improvement and optimization. The results will be automatically followed up later.

For example, we recently helped B2B SaaS platforms increase demo requests by 350%. But this is not the goal at all. The process we follow focuses on optimizing all aspects of the demo request journey, from acquiring visitors to optimizing the demo page and so on. Every experiment we run adds demo request metrics to a certain extent. After six months, you start to see these composite results.

You are also the growth director of ShopPop. How did that experience affect the way you help your customers?

Working in a fast-growing B2B SaaS company and providing self-service products taught me a lot. First, truly understand the importance of sustainable growth. Especially in growth marketing, you can do many things to get short-term results. But this is not necessarily helpful, because in the long run, you may gain lost customers.

For example, in an area where you know you will not get significant benefits from your product, develop an aggressive advertising campaign in the early stages to acquire new users. This kind of superficial growth will return in the form of loss sooner or later, and it is unsustainable.

At Unmuted, when we start working with new customers, we invest a lot of time and energy to understand their best types of customers, what their problems are and why they are. Only in this way, we will begin to consider how to solve these problems of customers' products or services.

You are a guest lecturer at the Nyenrode Business University and also give lectures. What do you want people to get from your speech?

When I stand in front of a crowd in a speech, I always share stories about me taking a pragmatic approach and doing things differently. Growth can take different forms and forms. Although it may seem simple, it is never easy. People, especially management, must understand that it takes time to grow, and you need to learn through failure.

You need to have a conversation to learn and iterate. It is better to have the wrong type of dialogue than no dialogue. Without feedback, you can't grow. Although the desire to learn is natural for most marketers, it is not necessarily the case for ordinary business people. If I can use my method of learning and growth to inspire the audience, I think this is a good harvest.

How do you see the changes in startups during the pandemic?

During the pandemic, many startups were forced to change their methods. Some people have successfully adapted, while others are now in trouble. When I was still working at ShopPop, I experienced it firsthand, and when the pandemic came, we focused on the music industry.

For obvious reasons, customers in the music industry did not buy, so we had to adjust in some way. We finally entered e-commerce, and e-commerce has been booming.

As the pandemic continues, what trends have you seen in growth marketing?

The biggest trend I see so far is the role played by the marketing department. These have never been so important. Especially digital marketers usually come up with new ideas about how the company develops online. No one knows how the COVID-19 pandemic will develop, but at the same time, every company is trying to adapt and find new ways to connect with customers in unique and meaningful ways.

Logically, we are seeing a surge in demand for online events such as webinars and virtual summits. But everyone is doing this. So, where can you build your brand awareness? Discover these new channels and methods-I think this should be the role of marketing.

How do you see the development of the entrepreneurial market in the process of growth?

The development of the start-up market is most noticeable in how to develop new standards. For example, startups have always been considered fast-movers, but the rise of remote work and highly collaborative tools has further increased the speed of startups' operations. The entire industry has changed from speedboats to rocket ships. Talent becomes more accessible, so the internal culture becomes more diverse and flexible.

You can always rely on startups to adopt new ways of working as early as possible. They need to be differentiated to survive, and novel methods may be the one thing that makes them stand out.

You have to understand that working in a startup usually feels like you are standing on the edge of a cliff. This is also your most creative moment. I think this is how the entire growth marketing is generated. In a highly competitive market, people must fight for their right to survive. Marketing is usually a fundamental way to achieve differentiation. When people are really good at it, setting new standards and raising them, the market will develop as a whole.

What mistakes will startups continue to make?

It has been said many times before, but even today, most startups are not learning fast enough or deep enough. The founders usually have amazing ideas and visions of how things will develop. But how much practical experience does this person have? Is it enough to foresee the future?

Generally, for startups, short-term growth is going well—they get some initial traction from their network, but then move on to the next stage. Especially when it comes to investment, putting more pressure on the commercial side of things, the next stage will mean encountering many obstacles.

If a company does not find a strong enough product market fit, and does not apply the knowledge learned earlier, things will become very difficult. At this stage, a lot of research and experiments are necessary. If the founding team is not prepared for this, they will bury their heads in the sand, and the startup will quickly deteriorate.

On the other hand: Are startups doing better now than ever before?

The best thing startups can do, and I see it happening more and more, is to invest in the community as soon as possible. When I was leading growth at MisterGreen, we created a community for the top 1,000 Tesla Model 3 owners in the Netherlands. Everyone wants to be a member of this founding tribe, learn from each other, gain insights, etc.

Facts have proved that this group is our most effective marketing tool. Word of mouth spread all over the roof. We let all these people talk about our community at the birthday party, in their office, you say it. This is a good example of investment marketing, you can't really measure it, but you believe it.

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