Becoming the lead marketer at a start-up brings with it an immediacy of large responsibility – more so than the daily grind of many corporate brands. But this also comes at the cost of handling a product that has a badge of uncertainty and a sense of dependency on your success.
We asked those building the basis: how do you create a marketing plan for a new business? And how exactly do you go about building a marketing function without the foundations crumbling?
In a previous role, Danny enjoyed responsibilities that “went beyond what people might traditionally define as marketing.” Having found a new scope to influence business strategy, he was enticed into joining a start-up rather than a fully established business.
He says the biggest benefit of start-up marketing is the opportunity to be intimately involved in business strategy. “I work closely with the CEO and COO, and have provided direct input into the development of an investor memorandum. Being the ‘pioneer’ also means I was able to reshape our brand identity and tone of voice to one that better engages with our customer base and helps us stand out in a very crowded market.”
This concentrated level of responsibility also ensures that any marketer in a leadership position at a start-up has a stronger organisational grip compared to bigger companies. “You have a better overview and more influence, so staying organised should be less of a problem,“ says Danny. “The only other challenge stopping you from being organised is time, so this is where good agencies have a role to play, by working as an extension of your own team.”
Base your strategy on your customers’ opinions, rather than your directors’
Although added responsibility clearly brings benefits, Danny confesses the biggest challenge has been changing the mindset of staff towards what impact marketing can have on an organisation, and alongside that, getting colleagues to understand that they are all responsible for marketing the business.
Danny believes any company wanting to be taken seriously needs to think about implementing some type of marketing. He advises that at implementation stage, the new marketing lead should avoid creating a strategy based on directors’ opinions. “Go and speak to your customers, analyse your market and your competitors and then form a strategy that you can agree with your c-suite,” he says. “That way you can refine it following feedback.”
He also stresses the concept of not choosing tactics over strategy. “It’s great when colleagues have ideas, but they tend to be tactical, so it’s your role to put those into context.”
“Marketing for a start-up is like free running. There are no safety barriers or crash mats or someone to stop you from hurting yourself. You’re pretty much out there on your own working things out. But like free running, you also set your own boundaries”
Danny draws from his own experience as an example of how marketers can establish a strong foundation in a start-up. “When I joined TradeRiver, I focused on fixing some of the stuff that could quickly be improved, reviewing how marketing had been conducted before, and learning how the business works. This included getting to know our customers and our competitors, the wider marketplace and the macro-economic factors that influenced our customers.”
He hastens to add that any plan produced should be reasonably costed through a good amount of research. “Identify the resources that you need and whether you should focus on recruiting in-house expertise or use agencies to help execute your plan.”
In fact, data can be both easier and harder to attain and utilise in a start-up business. “In an age where it’s assumed you can’t be successful unless you’ve collated reams of data on your customers, I’d argue it’s the quality of data that’s important and not the quantity,” says Danny.
Budgetary constraints the main inhibitor to achieving marketing success
“Big data, to me, can fall into the trap of doing no more than confirming what you already know. A small company still has data, but they might not have fully developed the mechanisms to analyse it in a way that makes it useful to inform marketing decisions.” Tagging along with sales staff to meet clients can be a great way to understand first-hand what the challenges are.
Danny explains the approach to start-up marketing is very different to a large corporate, emulating the experience of free running: no safety barriers but then again no boundaries. Such a difference poses the big question of whether start-ups can receive the same success from their marketing in comparison to a fully developed business. But Danny insists they can. “The biggest restriction to achieving successful results is budget. It’s your budget that enables effective execution and the opportunity to follow up and refine.
“The results you achieve might warrant a further piece of activity but you might not have the budget to do it, which can be a limiting factor. However, it also forces you to find more creative ways to achieve your goals, and it’s those moments that provide the most satisfaction.”
Danny’s 10 tips to setting up a marketing function at a start-up:
- Avoid creating a strategy only based on directors’ opinions, speak to your customers.
- Avoid choosing tactics over strategy, keep ideas in context.
- Don’t waste budget on branded merchandise.
- Begin by fixing the issues that can be resolved quickly.
- Review what/how marketing had been conducted before and learn how the business works.
- Get to know your customers and competitors.
- Learn other employees’ roles and their priorities.
- Cost any plan you produce.
- Identify resources needed and whether your focus should be with recruiting in-house expertise or agencies.
- Experiment with marketing and modify your results accordingly (you may need to manage internal expectations).
Having worked for a start-up company that left her with one week’s notice and one week’s pay, Laura is hardened to the realities of start-up prospects, which she says can be really depressing during the first couple of years. Despite this, in an email apologising for saying too much about her passion for start-ups, she admits she’s caught the start-up bug.
“I’ve been on the start-up scene for so long, I’m not sure I could go back to a big corporate company. I like the challenge of a start-up and the lack of red tape and bureaucracy. For me, it was the belief in the product and what the company were trying to achieve rather than wanting to be in a start-up that attracted me.”
Start-up life can be a risky business
Laura adds: “I truly believed they had something that was special and was going to succeed. You have to be 110% convinced in the product and the team behind it, because working in a start-up is make or break – one day you have a job and the next day you’ve run out of money and are out on your ear without a redundancy pay to cushion you.”
Her first piece of advice for anyone looking to move to a start-up is to put aside some money, just in case the worst case scenario becomes a reality. Although this was a tough knock for Laura, she says the biggest challenge is working with the founder of a company that calls for the new marketer to strike a balance between, in her words, a ‘wallflower and a bull in a china shop’.”
“The product you are marketing is ‘their baby’ and chances are that before they hired you they were doing the marketing themselves,” explains Laura. “They can sometimes be a bit protective of what they’ve created and you have to manage that situation and find a balance, initially between pleasing the founder and doing what you think is right until they trust you with their baby.”
“There’s some merit in looking what other companies are doing, but don’t just be a ‘competitor copy-cat’ – you’ll get lost in the noise and your campaign is unlikely to cut through. Don’t be afraid to try something new and a bit off the wall”
It’s not all doom and gloom. According to Laura, marketing in a start-up doesn’t just benefit the company but can be a fast track in professional development. “You aren’t a tiny cog in a big machine anymore – you have influence with other departments and you experience a lot of functions of the business that you just wouldn’t see in a big company.”
As Laura explains, this is exactly what makes start-up marketing different. “Everyone has clear roles and clear KPIs, but they might not necessarily fully understand how their role fits in with what everyone else is doing.”
Admit you can’t do and control everything
She adds: “You just put your head down, get your boxes ticked, pat yourself on the back and hopefully get your performance bonus at the end of the year for hitting your objectives. In a start-up, it’s much looser and you’ve got so much more freedom to change or even drop your plan completely if something happens to influence your business and you need to re-focus attention elsewhere.”
Working in a start-up required Laura to completely change her approach to marketing. “When there is no one else in your team to delegate things to you’re literally choosing between ‘Do I create that resource for sales or do I put together a new email campaign?’ You can’t do everything. You really have to be able to prioritise and also know when to stop or compromise.”
Such a high level of individual input into the business surely seems like a time-consuming matter. However, Laura explains that isn’t always the case, but admits the role is definitely more resource sensitive. “You have less template content to re-use and fewer people doing the work. So yes, if you want to do exactly the same as a fully established business it will take you longer.”
Far more autonomy at a start-up
“That doesn’t necessarily make it more time-consuming,” says Laura. “Actually, you probably have more autonomy and fewer levels of sign-off to obtain, so you can be more reactive and get some things done quicker.”
Laura has a positive outlook on the potential of start-up businesses. Despite approaching a campaign with nothing but a blank canvas, she believes success is just as likely at a well-run start-up as it is with larger brands. But many start-ups may not be able to realise or recognise that success until they’ve drilled further into the industry and accumulated more results.
“There’s an element of gut instinct and learning as you go,” says Laura. “But lack of data isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it allows you to try out or test new things that you might not be so inclined to do if you just relied on previous data on something that went well before and regurgitated the same old staid campaigns.”
Laura’s eight tips for setting up a marketing function in a start-up:
- Don’t focus on ROI too heavily in the early stages of experimentation (within reason).
- Cast a wide net in your search for a new marketer – you want someone with a bit of spark and ambition to join your team.
- Talk to the CEO and find out why they hired you and exactly what they envision you doing.
- Complete an audit of all the tasks you need to achieve.
- Communicate marketing’s role and value to the wider company.
- Don’t be afraid to try something a bit ‘off the wall’ – failure can hurt a lot less in the early stages.
- Accomplish the art of brainstorming on your own.
- Join marketing network groups so you can stay abreast of what’s going on in the wider marketing world.
Having grown the marketing function at three separate start-up tech companies, Vicki explains it’s the exciting challenge and opportunity to make a difference that draws her to such a set-up. “There’s often no precedents and no real marketing skills in the business, so the level of autonomy and control is huge. It’s immensely satisfying looking back after a couple of years at a marketing function running well and delivering results and knowing that I made that happen.”
Despite the benefits, Vicki admits that marketing in a start-up can be a challenge as there’s always a hefty number of tasks on the to-do list. “It’s a constant balance between the 1000 things you know need doing and the few that are going to have a real impact,” she admits. “Success and sanity for me have revolved around clear prioritisation. I appraise everything on an impact: effort ratio to work out what’s going to have the biggest impact with the least amount of effort. When resources are constrained it’s important to realise that best practice isn’t always going to be practical.”
“It’s an exciting opportunity to really make a difference. There’s often no precedents and no real marketing skills in the business so the level of autonomy and control is huge”
Vicki explains the support functions for handling heavy workloads in an established business are very different from that of a start-up. “There are lots of support functions and processes in an established business that often get taken for granted. In a younger company, there’s often none of that – no agency structure, no design resources, HR, IT, indication, no CRM processes. You have to be much more of a self-starter and accept that if you need something or want it changed you often have to just do it yourself.”
Vicki also stresses that marketing in a smaller business covers a broader remit, as larger companies rely on teams of PRs and various departments to work alongside marketers and disperse workload. In contrast, start-ups rely fully on marketers because they don’t have such a resource. This difference requires the start-up marketer to also alter their approach.“Change is constant and you need to be very adaptable,” explains Vicki. “Agile marketing is a way of life whether you adopt the formal practices or not.”
It’s far too easy to lose focus working in small companies
Vicki argues the abundance of department resources in established business doesn’t necessarily mean start-up marketing campaigns are less likely to see success. “Big brands obviously have an advantage in the awareness stakes but small companies can be more nimble and creative. It just requires slightly different tactics to add value to a prospect, more persistence, and more relevant insight. The difficulty in a small company is that there are so many things to do that it’s easy to lose the focus required to have an impact.”
Coming from a tech industry, Vicki knows too well that a start-up doesn’t necessarily have less data due to its size. “Most start-up companies are built on more digital foundations than some more established businesses so data and analysis are more ingrained in behaviour.”
She also insists that marketing should be considered by a business the moment the company is born. “Any business needs to think about how it’s going to market itself from inception. Understanding the customer and knowing what makes you unique are fundamentals of the business plan.”
Vicki’s five tips to establishing a marketing function in a start-up:
- Work out the most important objectives and outline how you’re going to achieve the biggest impact.
- Stay focused, and as the business grows, start to scale and grow marketing activities.
- Stay organised by planning, communicating and focusing on a goal.
- Remain aware of what’s going on in the world of marketing.
- Network with other experienced start-up marketers and go with your gut feeling when working out what will have the highest impact.
