Six Tenets for Startup Marketing
1. Rent/Buy: Marketing resources for your startup.
High-tech startups, by their very nature, are product or technology driven, with the founders far more comfortable down the hall with Product Management and Engineering than with hiring PR firms and establishing a go-to-market strategy. Marketing, in their mind, is a necessary evil—one that they delay dealing with until it’s often too late. Our role in some accounts is to act as Interim VP of Marketing until a full-time VP is needed; for others, we provide Corporate Marketing expertise to a founding VP who is usually 60% Product Management, 30% Product Marketing and only 10% familiar with Corporate Marketing—what it is, how it works and what it costs.
2. Going to market: First impressions matter.
Your grandmother was right: you only get one shot at making a good first impression. Going to market—aligning the company’s content, timeline and resources with market needs—is perhaps the single greatest marketing challenge facing a startup. To do it right, you need the right positioning and messaging, plus the proof (a working product and customers to reference) to make the market—analysts, press, influencers, channels, as well as prospective customers—sit up and take notice.
More and more, startups are holding back on their initial Corporate Marketing hiring until after launch, maximizing their budget and the one-time opportunity of launch by outsourcing the launch and go-to-market programs to experienced marketing firms who specialize in this area. After a successful launch, startups will find they have the time, resources, and wind in their sails to attract the right marketing talent to take them to the next level.
3. Early growth and traction is critical.
At Crowded Ocean, we start from a basic assumption: the goal of marketing comes down to three words — make sales easier. Whether it’s a “freemium”, download-centric model, or a new software platform, and you need early market traction and sales success, it’s all about achieving early, repeatable success. If it doesn’t initiate new sales opportunities, shorten the sales cycle, or make repeat sales easier, don’t do it. But make the necessary investment to achieve that early success rather than hoping that the technology/solution will sell itself.
4. It all starts with Positioning.
Marketing a tech startup starts with nailing the positioning. Unlike other positioning/messaging efforts led by ad agencies or PR firms, our process brings a pragmatic, business-centric examination of your strategy and goals, the market realities you’ll be confronting, and the obstacles that inhibit market traction and sales growth. A successful and sustainable go-to-market strategy, launch, and sales program depend directly upon a rock-solid definition of your position and unique value proposition.
5. Marketing vs. PR.
We value PR. We love PR. But it’s just one of the tools in your marketing toolbox. PR firms are the most critical part of your go-to-market strategy, so hiring the right firm and equipping them with the right positioning and messaging is critical. But marketing for startups is more than PR—much more. To manage the critical marketing decisions and create the important marketing programs that will determine your early success, you need a marketing firm that can build and implement a full marketing program (with an ecosystem of proven specialists in areas like design, writing and SEO) that focuses not just on shaping opinion, but on generating sales and measureable results.
6. Experience is essential.
Many tech startups are founded and staffed by people who are in their positions of responsibility for the first time. They’ve got a compelling technology and products that could have an impact, but many have never taken a product from idea to market—or built a sales infrastructure to support it. We’ve launched more than 20 scrappy and disruptive tech startups (AdMob, Nimble Storage, Snaptu, Thrutu, Druva, EndPlay and more). Our formula is simple: build from a solid positioning/messaging foundation, hire a great PR firm, build a world-class website and go-to-market strategy, and then bring on people, programs and systems that drive and support early sales success.