By Brian Hansford, director of client services and marketing technology practice lead for Heinz Marketing
Startup marketing is brutal and invigorating. Quite often a startup has brilliant domain experts, inventors, and engineers who develop the big idea. Often the marketing function is last to ramp, either with full time employees or agencies to support the effort.
Early stage startup marketing typically focuses on business development and finding early adopter customers and investors. At this the point pain from not having a focused marketing resource tends to bubble up, and that’s when startup marketing can go down two paths that either have a sense of panic, or a sense of urgency.
One path leads to a greater chance of success. The other leads to sadness with painful levels of angst and consternation.
Unfortunately, too many startups choose a sense of panic as founders without marketing experience want an immediate and large sales pipeline. Marketing is often viewed as “easy” and once a good press release hits the wire and that first email is sent the perception is that leads will immediately flood in. Compared to writing code, marketing is simple! Right?
Fear, uncertainty and doubt creep in immediately when leads don’t flow from a single marketing tactic. Questions fly on whether the marketing resources know what they are doing. Comments are thrown out like “marketing never works” or “this is why I hate spending money of marketing” or “marketing is easy and I don’t understand why you can’t generate leads ” or “I have a board meeting next week and I need to show them some results on how we are growing by then.”
