Enabling Marketers to Scale Startups
The most important team during the startup scaling process often has the least amount of say in how to scale. Here’s how we can shift that mindset.

Scaling is a critical period during a startup’s journey, and one that makes or breaks most startups. Once the founders have gathered the right team, proven product-market fit, released a version to early adopters that have shown an affinity for the product and raised some money — startups enter the scaling phase, a period that can be one of immense pressure.
The product and company’s ability to operate at scale is tested here — where the systems infrastructure, the ability to handle high website traffic, the support team’s ability to respond to queries, ensuring that billing and finance stays operational, making incremental improvements to the product, hiring of new staff and on-boarding new clients and customers all happens concurrently and seamlessly.
During this entire process, a critical component of scaling — is marketing. The marketing team is tasked with ensuring that during this period, they get in the right quality and quantity of consumers, and look beyond just the early adopters.
If the marketing team doesn’t operate properly, word about the company doesn’t spread, customers don’t show up — and a startup doesn’t even enter the “scaling” phase.

As a huge amount of pressure lies on the marketing team, it’s important for marketers to set themselves up for success in a startup. An environment where Founders and the Product Team tend to call all the shots, it can be hard for the marketing team to stand up for themselves, and as a result — end up executing someone else’s strategy and approach without truly believing in it which more often than not results in failure.
Not just for the marketing team, but for the entire company. So what steps should the marketing team take to ensure they’re enabled to help the company scale?
Establish the Right Marketing Mindset with the Team
Far too often you’ll find yourself in an environment where “growing fast” is more important than “growing well”. You’ll be asked to employ all the poor “growth hacking” tricks of the trade — buying databases, scraping user information, mass cold e-mails, with the logic that if you try enough things, one of them will work. When you’re pushed into this corner, the question to throw out there is — when was the last time you purchased a B2B product because someone sent you a link on LinkedIn?
When did anyone in the team last be a year-long customer of a product that was sent to you via an automatic direct message on Twitter? In fact, can anyone even recall the name of the product that was last cold-pitched to them?
The reality is this — smart consumers are immune to poor, scammy marketing.
Marketers have to sit with their team, tell their founders that consumers are not numbers on a Conversion Tracking sheet, because if you think of your consumers that way, they’ll think of your startup as a number on their Expenses sheet.
Focus on a Specific, Small Audience
Don’t immediately go for scale. Widening your marketing funnel at the top hoping that it’ll convert well is a poor, overused and failure-prone strategy. Think about the people that you initially set out to solve the problem for. If you’re launching a tool that allows designers to overlay text in various styles on top of a video, and you start by reaching out to every designer on the planet — you’re going to stretch yourself too thin.
Instead, focus on freelance designers that often get this kind of work from other startups with very short turnaround time. It’s a sub-set of the entire designer population, but it’s an incredibly relevant one.
Hook them in, convert them, build a base, and grow.

So instead of reaching out to 500,000 people and converting 500 of them at a 0.1% conversion rate at a cost of $4,000 — convince your team that the right way to go is to reach out to 5,000 people and convert 1,500 of them at a 30% conversion rate at the cost of maybe $100.
Idealistic figures, but you get the point.
Start small, make sure that group is satisfied, scale will follow. Believe in the product.
Focus Only on the Key Differentiator, and Hammer it Home
Let’s go back to our example of the design tool that helps designers overlay different styles of text onto videos. If you asked someone what it is — they’d tell you it’s a design tool. If you headed out into the market and tried someone to pay attention to a “design tool” that you’re selling, you’re not going to get a lot of attention.
Designers have Illustrator, Photoshop, Canva, PicMonkey, InDesign, CorelDraw and so on and so forth that gets the job done for them. They don’t need another design tool, and when you pitch it to them through e-mail or a Facebook ad, they’ll ignore it.

But what you have, isn’t just a design tool. If you don’t hammer home the key differentiator that you have 100,000 different text templates that can be overlaid onto videos with 500 different types of animations and styles — all in a matter of minutes without working on clunky overcomplicated software, no one is going to pay attention and you’re not doing justice to your product.
Yes, perhaps the tool is eventually going to do more. Perhaps the goal is that in two years you’re going to replace Canva as the go-to-choice for all things image editing and content creation. But you’re not going to do that with 20 users in two weeks by trying to sell them a clone of Canva, because they already have Canva.
Establish a Clear Measurement Framework
One of the key problems in scaling a startup through digital marketing is that people forget to keep track of what’s worked out of the twelve different things they’ve tried on four different platforms. Sure, you have your Adwords data and your CRM data, but they’re often used as daily, weekly and one-off guides.
You try Audience X with Message Y, and you got a 19.5% open rate that resulted in 1,000 visits to the website and 50 eventual conversions. Then you tried Audience Z with Message A, and you got a 21.8% open rate that resulted in 1,500 visits to the website and 100 eventual conversions.
It’s regarded as a success, and for that week — you’ve done a better job that the last week. Come next week, we’ll try something else and see how that works. Since it’s the same marketer who’s going to be doing it, he develops a gut and instinct for it and relies on it in the future.
Cue to six months and 24 tests later, will the marketer really remember what worked in Test 8 and Test 17?

He or she would have to open up both EDMs, look at the audience, look at the conversions and figure out why it worked well. Which is exactly why you need a proper Measurement Framework where you iteratively track all the tests you’ve run, the results you got from them — and use them to inform your future tests.
The Measurement Framework also serves as a handy guide to show to the rest of the team that the Marketing team is aligned in what the goal of the organisation is, that you’re working toward the same goals as them, and the Founders have easy access to look at what’s working and what’s not, which also enables them to fund future tests for you as they know that it’s worked in the past.
Properly maintained Measurement Frameworks win trust and belief from other teams and lend marketers more credibility.
Use Consumer Feedback to Inform Product Changes
One of the key roles that the Marketing and Customer Support teams play is to be the connector between the consumer and the product team. The marketing teams are the first to see feedback via social media or e-mail, and they’re the ones with their ears to their ground listening to what the consumer sentiment around the product is.
The product team is a hard group to break into for the marketing team, as they don’t really play a role in it. The founders and the product team set the roadmap, set where the product is going to go and what and when the next version will ship. The keys to the this kingdom for marketers, is consumer feedback.

By representing the voice of the consumer, marketing teams can play a critical role in also defining what the next version should ship, whether the product roadmap actually needs a revision and if the product can actually begin to fulfil a need that the team did not think about fulfilling, but can easy play a role in now.
By being involved in discussions around the product with actionable input and feedback that comes from the real world, the marketing team becomes an indispensable part of the product team and plays a far more critical role in the organisation than simply selling what they’re asked to sell, and trying to form a connection with consumers knowing that there is still a gap in what the consumer needs.
Of course — by implementing consumer feedback, then tracking the uptake in subscriptions or sales you’ve helped the team achieve something they would otherwise never have. And you’ve scaled in the right manner.
By following these five steps, you’re able to make a strong case for marketing, ingrain the right thinking around marketing with the team and established marketing as a key driver of the growth of the startup.
