🤔 How to Understand the Truth About Startup Marketing...
5 strategic steps to establish and enhance your startup’s marketing framework: Anchor a founder or co-founder to take charge of marketing; Partner with a startup marketing specialist or agency if available; Outsource specific marketing tasks to domain experts; Begin insourcing by building an internal team as your understanding of the marketing process solidifies; Engage traditional marketing agencies to scale your efforts once your startup reaches a suitable size.
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OK, you’ve got product, a plan and you’re ready to roll. But how do you get the high-performance marketing you know it takes to build something special?
NO, you can’t hire a marketer and hope they’ll just “sort it out for you”...
And NO, you can’t just focus on adding features and hope customers will just magically appear…
We’re going to give it to you straight: You, the founder, are the only person who can establish your marketing and sales framework. Agencies and marketers can only perfect the basic groundwork you’ve already laid, not the other way around.
Establish your sales and marketing like so (in this exact order)...
5 Steps for the startup marketing win
- Anchor in a founder/co-founder
- The only place to start is for a founder to take full control and responsibility for sales and marketing. Proven marketing expertise in your product domain is the second of the two main reasons you partner with a non-technical co-founder. (No. 1 is if they are the investor.) So that’s a good place to start.
Before you can bring anyone else on board with any success, the founder has to nail the positioning, value proposition, target audience, core offer, conversion process/system and start testing and iterating that system. - Bring in a startup marketing specialist/agency
- If you can find one, that is. A founder/builder or startup team who offers their services to help others market is super rare but worth gold. They know the ropes and have the startup-building experience that other marketers lack. Coupled with high-performance marketing experience, you can’t ask for a better assist.
- But, again, extremely rare and hard to come by.
- Outsource to key experts
- If you’ve built a working funnel and just need skilled people to help you execute (because your time is needed elsewhere), you can start bringing in specific domain specialists – SEO, SMM, Ads, copywriters, meme lords etc.
- Purely because they’re more cost-effective to hire and easier to end the working relationship with than a hire (if needs be).
- Now you can start insourcing
- Once you know exactly how your “marketing machine” works, you can start investing long-term in team members.
- Add traditional agencies only if you have scale
- By this time, you should almost start looking like a corporate, so it’s OK to start looking at traditional agencies to help you go big-league.
Got a marketing question? Hit reply and fire away, it’s what we do…
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