What you should know as marketing rookie in a startup

It’s been almost half a year since I started my position as a marketing manager at a promising cyber security startup — my first real marketing job. And like anything in a startup it feels like time is passing in dog years! When I started the job, I already had some experience in social media and offline marketing, mainly focused on positioning, and looking back on 6 months I can honestly say I learned a ton.

With our main marketing KPI being lead generation I was thrown into in an unknown sea of skills, platforms and strategies I had only vaguely heard about before. And on top of that I had to learn a totally new industry — information security, that is — that couldn’t have been further from what I knew.

Most of my newly gained experiences at Luminate were what I expected to encounter — and then there were the pleasant surprises. For me ‘startup’ equaled crappy budgets and constructing your own marketing materials and tactics with “proverbial” duct tape. But when you have a management that strongly believes in the importance of marketing you can count on a reasonable budget to execute (at least most of) your plans. And when everyone is in it for the same reason, with the same goal to make the startup succeed, it is amazing to see how much time and effort everyone puts into helping provide the marketing team with content and background info.

I’m not here to write the book on Startup Marketing, but I did find out a few things along the way that really helped me in my role as marketing manager at a growing startup — starting with very little (relevant) experience:

- Trial and error -

I was the first additional hire to the marketing team, which consisted of our VP Marketing. Luckily, most of the positioning and messaging work had been done when I joined, (although positioning in particular continues to be a work-in-progress) and the main tools and platforms were already in place.

Then the real fun of building a well-oiled marketing machine could start! And that is a process of trial and error. You’re planning and executing certain ideas and strategies based on what you think to be true for your market and product in order to meet your company’s goals. Are these plans yielding good results? Not necessarily. You have to be able to erase your white board and start sketching again. Management might decide on a completely new angle tomorrow and the marketing department is at the helm of that ship so you’d better adjust your sails and get cracking.

And the fact that there’s really no time to waste is the fun part. Drastic changes in tactics or positioning are common and even welcomed. This is not a heavy container ship that will only see the results of a direction adjustment in 6 months. You can experiment with what resonates and throw out quickly what doesn’t seem to work.

Changes are made often and at a rapid pace. On one hand that’s hard because you have to keep up with the pace and be constantly on your toes. Not only are you still learning everything there is to know about lead gen marketing, the newest SEO tools and changes in Google Search algorithms, the company is still inventing itself as well. Heck, you’re lucky if the product is completely validated, ready to go to market and for that market to be ready for your solution. My key takeaway is to not get married to anything, set your ego aside and turn on your learning mindset. Not taking things personally when campaigns don’t work out will allow you to quickly analyze what didn’t work and go back to the drawing board. Accepting that nothing will ever be copy-paste is your biggest advantage in being an agile marketeer.

- Be ready to bring your whole tool box -

Let’s go back to our super efficient marketing team of 2 people. Building the above mentioned marketing machine takes a lot of work. A ton. So you’d better be ready to bring your whole tool box. And whatever skills you don’t possess can most likely be learned through articles and tutorials. In the setup of some of our landing pages, the very very basic HTML I knew from back in the days sure came in handy. And I could put my love for design and basic Photoshop skills to good use whenever we didn’t have time to send an assignment to the designer. Being hungry to gain new skills, raise your hand when you think you can tackle a job and not be afraid to try new things is crucial.

And don’t hesitate to use your network if needed. They are your best source of experts with much needed advice, connections for discounts or useful introductions. There is no need to reinvent the wheel when deciding what conferences to go to, for example. You can simply get connected to startups in your space that are 1–2 years ahead in growth and get their go-to event list from last year. And don’t forget the startup’s investors. They can be a very helpful source to get you in touch with the right people to brainstorm with or learn from.

- Think ahead -

In the beginning you won’t have too many leads going through your funnel and a lot of the syncing between platforms, imports of leads etc. can be done manually. But hopefully in the very near future your efforts will pay off and the leads will be pouring in. Takeaway: start building your marketing system from day one to be ready for the company’s growth in 6 months or a year. Which means: automation, automation, automation. It’s quite a headache to streamline the systems down to the nitty-gritty but it will pay off in the end. You want to set up proper automation and synchronization between your marketing and sales tools — this will save you tons of time, errors and misunderstandings in the future. And the Sales team will thank you for it.

Bonus: once the Board of Directors reports need to be pulled — all the data will be there for you to export!

- It is all about data -

Marketing in a scaling startup is so not about picking colors for the website and writing nice blogs. It is data for breakfast, lunch and dinner. At the end of the day, it’s about showing the numbers and how much of the set targets you’ve reached as a marketing team. Even though experiments are highly encouraged — if the data doesn’t back them up it’s time to move on and go where the inclining graph takes you. We encountered beautiful email open rates for copy or email design we initially thought were not that creative — but when you A/B test enough and thoroughly analyze the numbers you can get to really interesting insights. With better numbers as a result: full circle :).

- Map your stakeholders -

Clearly map who should be involved in which project and who are the ultimate decision makers. If you don’t define this upfront you’ll find yourself with too many cooks in the kitchen who all have something to say. Usually they really have something valuable to add but it doesn’t help you A. get things done fast nor B. get a clearer understanding of the problem you’re trying to tackle. In order to not shut anybody out mid-project, make a conscious decision in advance who to involve in which project.

This is far from a complete overview of what we do as the marketing team at Luminate nor is it a summary of what I’ve learned over the past half year. But I’m so excited about all the experiences I gained in these 6 months and the learning environment that a startup like this provides, that I felt the itch to write it down. I’ll keep you posted on the next 6 months!