The first year of a startup company can be a blur — especially in the startup marketing department. In the crazed rush to get things off the ground, the marketing side of any startup organization could get relegated to the back burner.
That can be a fatal mistake. As we’ve covered before, minimizing or relegating the role of marketing in the early startup stages could rob your startup of the visibility, skill, and support it needs to scale at later, more critical junctures.
So, what does a startup marketing department need to consider during its first year? To answer that question, we sat down with Amber Picotte, a startup marketing veteran and the founder of AP Fractional Marketing Service, to talk about the must-dos (and the don’ts) for the first year of a startup’s marketing efforts.
Amber, thank you so much for being with us today. Can you give us some background on your career and your current work?
I've worked in tech startups my entire career. I got my start at a tech startup called Ardent; I joined as a sales administrator, basically entering orders into the system. It was the first job I could get out of college, but I was hopeful I could get my foot in the door and just go from there. About a month after I started, they opened up an entry role in marketing, and I put my name in the ring. From there, as they say, the rest is history.
We were a small company that did really well. We partnered with Dell, which catapulted us into some hypergrowth; from there, we were acquired by Citrix, so we joined a gigantic company. So, early on, I got to see both sides of the coin and realized that the big corporate life wasn't for me. I enjoyed the dynamic of working in a startup and being able to do — quite frankly — things that I had no business doing from an experience perspective.
But it helped me grow and kept me engaged and excited. I saw the beginning of digital marketing and how people thought about websites and merging online and offline. The following job that I took was at a company called Unica. It was early marketing automation, but we sold into B2C. Just to intentionally date myself, one of our flow steps in Unica was “send to fax.”
I've worked across every stage of a startup, from stealth to bootstrapped to pre-IPO, and had the opportunity at a company called Eloqua to be part of the super hypergrowth of the marketing automation industry at the forefront of creating that industry. Then, I watched Marketo and HubSpot come onto the scene. It was a really fun time. At Eloqua, we were preparing for an IPO and then got acquired by Oracle.
That really gave me the hypergrowth bug. I've worked across different stages of growth, from stealth to IPO. And now, I've realized that I really enjoy the earlier stage. So, just about a year ago, I decided to go into business for myself and do fractional growth marketing.
Now, I work with early-stage startups to help them develop their go-to-market strategies, determine who they're selling to, develop their messaging and positioning, and identify the channels and tactics that will help them grow efficiently.
I also help them determine the shape of their team—helping them build their in-house team so that they've got the right skills and staff for whatever growth strategy they're going to implement. I've been in business for myself for about a year, but I specialize in stealth to series B, really just getting the engine started.
Can you talk about the fundamental importance of marketing for first-year startups? Why does it need to be top-of-mind?
Most recently, I've seen where early-stage startup founders are starting to recognize the importance of bringing marketing in sooner. It takes a while to build a brand, so the longer you wait, the more activities that provide evergreen value and quite efficient growth in the long term take a while to get established and bear fruit. The longer you wait to begin an SEO or brand-building strategy, the longer it will take for that to start to be able to repeatedly and scalably add to your growth engine. Starting earlier is beneficial to ensure that growth is there when you need it when you're ready to put fuel on the fire, and that you have more than one tactic you know is working and helping you grow.
The second piece is that many people aren't familiar with marketing. When thinking about hiring or building up that marketing function, they think about lead generation. But marketing, especially early on when it's a lean team, is really kind of a cross-functional advisor for sales customer success and growth. And it's really about helping to nail down the ICP, the product market fit, and the use cases that will help the business grow. Marketing is far more scientific than people believe - when you get the right marketer.
So, it's about having a marketing partner that can help you “design the experiments,” ensuring that you've defined the very best target for your business, where there are channels you can affordably use to acquire growth, and that they will be happy customers and not churn—having somebody who is looking at that growth holistically and not just as a lead generation machine. Again, the sooner you've got a partner thinking strategically about how you will grow, the less time you are playing catch up or cursing yourself.
It's setting yourself up for success and getting started early with the tactics that will help you grow efficiently long term, but it takes a little while to bear fruit. Then, it's vital to have a strategic partner to think about how the product market and ICP pieces come together, not just for the next raise but for long-term customer success and growth within the customer base.
What’s the most common mistake you see early-stage startups making in marketing?
Honestly, the mistake that most early-stage startups make is that they do random acts of marketing – there’s no strategic plan. For example, the CEO sees that TechCrunch wrote about, say, AI for chatbots, and they're like, oh, we have a solution that can help with this. Let's quickly put together a whole campaign on AI chatbots and draft behind this article. Then they'll send everybody off in a flurry, and they'll get distracted from whatever other thing they were already doing, and they'll put together this campaign, and they'll send it out. But nobody thought about who we were selling to and if they would even care.
Foundationally, you need a strategy. In the early stage of a startup, founders don't want to pigeonhole themselves. Typically, they think they've got a product that they could sell to anyone and everyone in the whole wide world.
They want to be able to show investors that they have a huge market that has a huge TAM. However, with a lean team, dollars, and resources all around in the early days, there might be 12 markets or ICPs we could eventually go after. You've got to get strategic on the top two or three that you want to place your early bets on. You must build a cross-functional strategy that helps you strategically test and attack those two or three main segments. We had this hypothesis and experimented with it, and this was the outcome? Did it work, or did it not? And what did we learn?
Avoiding the random acts of marketing is essential. So, if you don't have a dedicated marketer or you don't have a strategy and you aren't thinking about those things, you're going to end up doing a ton of stuff — but not a lot of it will matter. I think it's important now in early-stage startups; you should be looking for a skilled kind of T-shaped marketer.
Again, suppose you have a highly technical product you are selling to a highly technical audience. In that case, your first marketing hire needs some skill in product marketing, like a concentration in product marketing. But generally speaking, in the early stage, you need somebody who can wear a lot of different hats but who has done a lot of different things so that they hopefully aren't just guessing and learning, but they understand the different dynamics at play, marketing different channels, have different targeting capabilities, have different creative formats that you can use.
Early-stage marketers need strategic and tactical skills. What should a marketing professional know before entering a startup environment?
In the first year, if you're the solo marketer, you work directly with the founder; know this is their baby. They eat, sleep, and breathe this company. So, ensure you have an excellent working dynamic with that founder. Do they come from an engineering background? How do they communicate? What are their expectations around how work gets done? Are they comfortable talking about a topic they aren’t expert in? Can I partner effectively with this person? What is their leadership and communication style?
I'll ask those questions directly to the startup founders. I typically try to only work with people where I have a reference or someone who knows someone who can vouch for that founder and what their style is. And if you're working with a first-time founder versus an experienced founder, that experience will be entirely different. So I'd say the first thing is to understand as much as possible about that founder, their background, and their work style because you will be tied at the hip.
It's also important to understand their organic feelings about marketing. Do they think marketing is arts and crafts and easy to do, or do they see it as a strategic growth lever for the business? Do they understand that marketers today think about unit economics and growth efficiency? The best partners I have worked with are those founders who will say, “I don't know,” and “Can you walk me through this?” “Can you explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old?”
If there isn't that head of sales, which often, in my experience, the CEO is playing that first carry in the briefcase role for the first year or two, again, that CEO is your counterpart to everything. So make sure you understand how they tick, if you can work with them, and if they're comfortable communicators.
Also, know your strengths and weaknesses.
Think about what skills will be necessary in this first year from a skill perspective. Do I have those skills, and do I like doing those things? Because you'll work 15-hour days, you had better be doing stuff that you enjoy. And it's not that you have to be good at everything. You can grow your skills and learn, but does 80% of that job fall within my strengths?
It's also about not promising everything. One of the sales reps at my current client said, when will we start doing Google PPC ads? And I said, not for a very long time, and here's why. We have yet to determine who we're selling to or what to say. So, going and putting thousands of dollars into a pay-to-play channel … well, right now, there are better uses for our money. We won't be doing that. The expectation that that is not the sort of thing that we're going to be doing in this first phase, I think, helps with getting that alignment.
Connect with Amber on her LinkedIn page or the TACK website.
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