Thoughts on Marketing in early stage Start Ups.

(or more like observations/rants…)

Most start ups don’t have a marketing department because their founders are all technical-oriented. They’re only faintly aware of the actual purpose of marketing, and (what they get correctly, let’s focus on things we can agree on first,) vaguely know that marketing is a path to their customers. Part of marketing is identifying this path, for sure.

Let’s identify the mindsets they’re in:

• They’re aware that they don’t have a marketing department.
• They decide to hire design agency (and produce a ‘brand’ logo, and website)
• They decide they need to hire a product marketer, for the purpose of selling usability.
• Their top priority is focused on product development, and secondly sales.
• They think they need an in-house ‘person’ to do ‘ad hoc’ marketing tasks.
• They might have heard of brand positioning or brand strategy, and yet they could still be unaware of certain particular needs of their target market. (because they’re still trying identify their target market).
• They think they’ve started marketing because they’re on Medium and Twitter. (They’re not marketing to consumers on Medium/Twitter, these two channels are mostly for networking with potential investors and VCs)

These start ups, if they decide to forego a marketing strategy, they generally depend heavily on a sales pipeline strategy that leverages the existing partnerships or networks of the founding team. That is a really great start. Does that mean if your Founder CEO/CTO does not have established networks, you’re screwed?

At the very least, they’re aware what they lack, and actually need a marketing department, eventually. If they’re not generating revenue, and are still in the early phase of building their prototype, it could be understandable why they wouldn’t want to invest in marketing; they don’t even have an actual product. However, I think most technical founders (or most people really) don’t have an idea of what marketing actually means.

Marketing composes of the following: 1. Branding (brand mission, identity and positioning) 2. Understanding your target consumer journey, and 3. Messaging.

Brand mission, identity, and positioning

At the prototype stage, the challenge start ups have is that they could still be struggling with product usability. Their priority is that they need to find a fit for a market. Their time is spent not in contemplating what their brand positioning is, though I’d still argue that at this stage, they should have an idea of what value-adds and propostitions their product brings (and therefore, can start concept-ing process). Identifying your target consumer and scrutinizing their consumer journey is really important and can help you avoid many issues down the line.

Understanding the Consumer Journey

This usually means creating varying customer persona profiles of key decision makers who are going to buy your product. Entrepreneurs tend to think they should just start selling, and in a way, this is also right. Your product needs feedback after all, right? What you’re doing here in this crucial step is that you’re trying to identify the customers you care about (and those you don’t and should de-prioritize accordingly). Understanding your target consumer in a meaningful way goes a long way.

Messaging

Assuming that your product offers sufficient usability and value add to your customer, you should highlight those relevant value-adds and tailor your messaging to speak to each customer. Start ups can get very wrapped up in their own belief system / philosophy of their product that they can use a lot of technical / academic / science terms that don’t speak to their buyers meaningfully. There is nothing wrong with believing in your brand philosophy. Communicating it to your target consumer in a meaningful way is the difficult part. (The word ‘meaningful’ here usually pertains to your customer paying for your product, or other meaningful action you’d require them to take.) This is when you leverage your in-house marketing ‘help’ or traditionally, your agency partners where you organize many, many meetings (and then get billed many, many hours) to agree on the perfect messaging strategy.

To summarize:

Brand Identity / Positioning is about knowing which value propositions you are offering as a competitive advantage, and also those that you aren’t offering. Knowing your brand position should lead you to identifying your customers better.

Marketing is about identifying your customer’s journey, and you determine which step of their journey you’d like to intercept them to push them further down the marketing purchase funnel. In other words, it should help you build the momentum you need prior to closing a sale.

Knowing and understanding your customer on a deeper level helps. Not only because it ensures that your messaging to them stays relevant, you’re also trying to identify where those critical mission moments are for them, at what point in time are they most incentivized to pay for your product?

If this thought exercise on marketing doesn’t help (or generate the expected ‘concrete’ results), then it should at the very least help uncover issues or find you new opportunities to optimize your product / service / financing strategy, and that should be an ongoing priority for start ups across the board anyway.