Marketing For Startups: 5 Strategies to Unlock Your Marketing Team Potential
Marketing For Startups: 5 Strategies to Unlock Your Marketing Team Potential
Early-stage startups ( Pre-seed, Seed, and some series-A) are notorious for prioritizing products, building new features, and obsessing over product design and aesthetics more than any other thing when it comes to building a viable venture.
This is evident in most founding partner combinations. You’re likely to see two or three software engineers or product designers or managers forming a startup than see a combination of marketing, human resources, operation, or finance experts as founders, or co-founders.
In all honesty, there’s no startup without a product or a product plan. And in early-stage startups, building an MVP is more important. However, in building these products, the founding team often make the best product decisions for engineering and design with little or no consideration for operations, customer services and marketing.
As the product grows, it’s easier for startups to integrate customer service tools like Intercom, LiveChat, etc. into the product for easy communication. However, the reverse is the case for Marketers and Marketing Teams.
Since startups’ first marketing hire will eventually turn into a marketing generalist, doing everything from content to social media, email marketing, ads, etc. They’re usually overwhelmed or have little voice to resist some product decisions, even when it affects them.
Many early-stage startups tend to neglect basic marketing fundamentals that should have been executed or at least discussed when building products. Mostly because there’s little to no marketing expert in the founding team.
A weak marketing foundation can spell disaster for any company. Because it is on this foundation you’ll get the necessary traction to raise more capital, and get real-time data that’ll be used to make an informed decision on customer’s expectations & future products.
From my marketing and consulting experience, I have noticed a lot of friction when it comes to engineering or product teams jettisoning marketing team requests for resources.
“There’s always something more important to do. Our engineers are overwhelmed, we have a product roadmap to follow ( we can’t slot this in), can it wait till next year?, etc.
4 Major Fundamentals Startups can do to Empower Marketing Teams
1. Analytics
Making sense of data will make or mar any company. Oftentimes, I’ve seen startups set up analytics in the wrong manner mainly because the engineers who did it aren’t familiar with those tools. While others just jettison marketing analytics for product analytics. Both are as important to have as a foundation
Marketing Analytics
Google Analytics or alternative: Ensure they’re set well and specify metrics to set conversion goals.
Google Search Console
Heatmap ( Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar)
User session recording ( Hotjar, Fullstory or other alternatives)
Google Ads Tracking - (If Applicable)
Facebook Ads & Twitter Pixel Tracking
Email Marketing & Automation tool integration (Intercom or other alternatives)
Product Analytics
Metabase
Hotjar or Fullstory
Mixpanel
UX cam
Amplitude
etc.
There’s nothing like collecting too much data. You might not see the urgency to have these tools recording data, but you will need them in the immediate future. Installing these tools when you need them might be too late, as you’ll have lost historical data to make decisions with.
2. The Website
The website should be absolutely owned by the marketing, growth or communications team as the case may be.
A lot of startup websites are built with non-developer-friendly frameworks. Many marketing teams have to rely on engineering teams to change simple stuff like; typo errors, CTA button colour or text, replicate landing pages for AB testing, etc.
Using a no-code tool or CMS like WordPress is the right choice for almost every early-stage software startup. With this, you’ll have saved everyone a lot of headaches, and wouldn’t have to worry about any scale, but building a successful product.
I know some startups whose content teams have to rely on engineers to publish their blog posts for them. This “bulls**t” is unscalable.
Imagine how much free time your engineers would have saved if they didn’t have to change, test, and deploy every minor change on the website. Imagine how independent you'll have made your marketing team to move fast, and test for what works without having to rely on the engineers.
The back and forth is killing you, it’s draining your teams of useful time to work on other things, and it’ll eventually kill your startup.
3. Marketing is NOT Free
"A great product will market itself" is a mediocre statement, and it's far away from the truth. If the product could market itself, product marketers or marketers will not exist. The statement is often a ploy from product leaders and founders to limit the marketing budget.
Start marketing before you have a viable product. This is where we collect waitlist data. Start pumping more resources into marketing informed by intelligent data.
Do not compensate by building new products, or shipping new features without relying on data. And intelligent real-time data will only come when you have real customers or in some cases, users.
4. Product-led Growth is NOT Marketing
While product-led growth (PLG) is an incredible way to grow your product, it still needs marketing to fuel it.
If one customer can invite three people to use your product, imagine getting a thousand customers to do the same.
For products with incredible PLG initiatives, marketing is even a multiplier. It reduces the time to reach your business goal. Marketing is not a substitute for PLG.
5. FOR MARKETERS
Lack of resources will always be an issue. You must always find a way to communicate requests in terms of need, whether it’ll affect the business in the short or long term.
E.g. Highlighting an Onboarding ProblemIn the last 3 months, we’ve had 5,000 new visitors click on the signup button, but only 200 (4%) have signed up, and 50 (25% of signed-up users) have paid for our product.
From our analytics, we noticed users had a hard time navigating the signup page. Even from the 200 that have signed up so far, we’ve had to manually verify 30 because they reached out to us. …………………….
If we can improve the signup fields and verification process, we can potentially increase our new user visit/signup rate to 30% ( which is the industry standard). And we wouldn’t have to spend more on marketing.
This means, for every 5,000 new visitors, we get 1,500 signups. At 25% signup/paid users conversion, this means we’ll have gotten 375 paying customers instead of 50.
Average Revenue Per User = $35
At 50 paying customers =$1,750
At 375 paying customers = $13,125.
So, we lost $11,375 last quarter because of our onboarding problems. This needs to be fixed fast.
No sane startup leadership will ignore fixing this.
Startup Founders, Investors, and bigwigs in the ecosystem are sharply divided on whether early-stage startups need to have traction or customers before any significant investment.
Most Silicon Valley investors now expect some traction before heavy investments. They’re big fans of the “Lean Startup” ideas. Founders now have to show traction, domain expertise or increased revenue to get funded.
Paul O'Brien, CEO of MediaTech Ventures “bull-sh***ed” the idea of more revenue for capital, in this article titled “Why Startup Investors Expecting Revenue are Wrong”
"Let me let you in on another little secret. Microsoft was built without customers, and so was Google, as was Twitter, Facebook, and more. In their earliest days and in some cases for years, they went without any revenue of note”
“Famed economist Peter Drucker once put, decades ago, I’m paraphrasing, that “only Innovation and Marketing create value in business, everything else is a cost, and Marketing is the distinguishing of the two,” He said.
He further argued that the idea of marketing should be about data or intelligence of data. And innovations are funded without customers.
Regardless of whatever stance you take, we must agree that the present startup climate doesn’t favour investment without traction. Except you’re innovating or no one else has built what you’re building.
Founders have to know that to get traction, marketing or understanding how to market your product should be considered as part of your early-stage plan. It should no longer be an afterthought.
Startup marketing, however, should be heavily reliant on data that’ll inform future customer acquisition practices, and the product itself.
What other ways do you think startup can empower their marketing teams?
Drop us a comment, and let us discuss!