Blast Off

Hi everyone! I'm Ari Lewis, the co-founder of Payload. I appreciate you signing up and being part of the first-ever Marketing from Space newsletter. My goal is simple: to help make you smarter about marketing in the space industry.

Before diving in, I set up a Google Form to learn how I can make this newsletter worthwhile for all of you. I'd love to hear from you, and it takes just 30 seconds to fill out.

Ari's view from space...I started the newsletter to make sure industry folks stay up to date on the most effective strategies and tactics to market their space company. Whether it's paid, earned, or owned, I'll work on covering it.

I speak to so many folks who tell me they need help with marketing but don't know where to start. I hope this can be helpful for you. If you have any topic ideas you want me to write about, just let me know. This newsletter will be monthly to start.

Profile of the Month

Name: Jodi SorensenCurrent Job: Vice President, Marketing at Spaceflight Inc.Socials: follow on Twitter & connect on LinkedInWhat is one item you'd take to space? "I’d take an eclectic playlist of songs – I think the combination of sight and sound would be powerful in space."First off, thanks for being my first interviewee. Excited to highlight your work at Spaceflight. You've been doing marketing for 25 years, but Spaceflight is your first space marketing role. What are some of the challenges in space marketing that are unique to the industry?Over the years, Spaceflight has really defined and validated rideshare. When the company was founded 10+ years ago, rideshare was seen as too big a risk, but now it’s commonplace and standard in the industry. Our marketing efforts have focused on defining and explaining the benefits through the eyes of our customers, and then highlighting all the unique and interesting missions we're lucky enough to support. We have a customer-driven marketing strategy that amplifies their success. At the end of the day, that’s what makes this job great. Spaceflight had a very notable crisis a month ago when SpaceX cut ties with your company. I'm sure this isn't the first crisis you've faced as a marketing professional. What is your approach to those situations and is there any specific learnings about that situation you can share with readers?We’re currently working with SpaceX on several upcoming missions and are looking forward to getting our customers’ payloads on orbit. The space industry has always been turbulent, and how you deal with adversity is pivotal in how you grow and thrive. 

In my opinion, crisis comms aren’t difficult if you approach it from the vantage point of being factual, timely, respectful and helpful. People just want you to tell the truth without “spin” – and that’s what we try to do. Also, preparation is key. We have a crisis comms plan for every launch with sample messaging, various scenarios, and approval workflows. When a situation does arise, we’ve already planned our work and only need to work our plan. I’m also lucky to collaborate with an experienced, thoughtful team so these seemingly stressful situations are typically very calm and professional.   

You are a team of one at Spaceflight. With limited resources, how do you prioritize marketing initiatives? 

Oh, I have a LOT of help, trust me. I have a network of world-class professionals who contribute daily, including video producers, writers, PR experts, event specialists, graphic designers, and more. It’s a finely tuned orchestra of marketing experts. And don’t tell my boss (ha!), but having bigger budgets doesn’t automatically mean you have more effective marketing programs. Some of our most successful programs were scrappy, bootstrapped initiatives. Having limited resources forces you to think smarter about how you’re spending, that’s all. I’ve seen a lot of marketing teams get lazy because they have fat budgets that only focus on the top of the sales funnel. (Oh the stories I could tell!) That said, once you figure out what works, scaling the programs and the operations behind them does require investment. 

Prioritizing our marketing initiatives is driven first by our corporate goals and then we build flexibility into the marketing plans to be able to pivot quickly when launch schedules change or new priorities arise. Change is definitely constant in the space industry! Every quarter we re-evaluate our initiatives, messaging, and campaigns to determine if we’re on track or need to tweak a bit to hit our KPIs. That’s what I love about true integrated marketing – I can pull many different levers to hit our goals. 

Spaceflight invests heavily in event sponsorship. How do you make a decision on when is an event is worth investing and measuring its ROI?

I wouldn’t say event sponsorship is a significant part of our marketing mix, but it does play a role and can be very effective. We scrutinize our involvement in events very heavily because of the resources – both time and money – needed to support them. We talk about specific goals for each event – is it sales-oriented networking, press or speaking engagements, recruiting, or product reveals? We question if the right people are available and attending, and what else we could do with that same investment to achieve our goals. Afterwards, we evaluate if our efforts generated the results we expected, and what we could do better. It’s a constant process of refining, testing, and evaluating. For example, after scrutinizing one of our bigger conference spends, we stopped sponsoring a large (and hugely popular) networking party we had thrown for years, and instead opted to host smaller customer/VIP events. These high-touch events have proven to not only be more cost-effective, but they better represent our brand and generate meaningful, measurable results. 

What is one marketing initiative that you have worked on at Spaceflight that has been successful and why? 

When I joined the company over five years ago, Spaceflight’s value proposition was buying capacity from LVs and booking “rides” for smallsats to go to LEO – we were a broker of launches. Today, we offer a full host of launch and mission services across a worldwide LV network, and offer integration services, flight hardware, and on-orbit transportation via our family of Sherpa vehicles which deliver smallsats to LEO to GEO and beyond. In fact, we’re designing and orchestrating a slingshot mission around the Moon next year – a far cry from being a broker! This evolution in our business offerings has meant our marketing efforts have also needed to change as well. In order to take the industry along with us on the journey, we’ve pivoted our marketing plans to focus more on education about our new services and products. This is especially important because so much of what we do at Spaceflight is “behind the scenes” – many don’t get to see first-hand the value we provide. To help us accomplish this, we’ve launched new websites, invested heavily in industry education such as webinars, and created visual assets to illustrate the new offerings. I’m extremely proud of the progress we’ve made and our results have continued to show we’re on the right path, but there’s always more to do!  

I'll be hosting the first-ever Marketing from Space Webinar on May 26 at 2pm Eastern. My guests will be:

🔷 Kim Jennett. Kim serves as Firefly's Director of Corporate Marketing and Communications. Before Firefly, she headed up marketing at Lean Plum and Vector Launch. Kim has over two decades of marketing and brand experience. 🔷 Austin Jordan. Austin is VP of Marketing and Communications at Redwire Space. He brings over six years of experience in space marketing & communications, with previous stints at Made in Space and the ISS US National Lab.🔷 Iain Goodridge. Iain is Spire's Senior Director of Marketing, was their first marketing hire in 2018, and saw them through their IPO in 2021. Before Spire, Iain advised Cuspair and led product marketing at Jive Software.

Register here. 

Final Thoughts

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Much Love, Ari