Marketing

The Top Ten Do’s and Don’ts of Startup Marketing Management

April 27, 2016

Editor’s Note: This is the last post of a three part series on scaling startup marketing. Read parts one and two or download the complete Startup Marketing eBook here.

Startup marketing management is incredibly challenging. You never have enough money. You never have enough people. And, you must constantly innovate to survive. Moreover, startup marketing challenges evolve alongside revenue as a company scales from A-round to B-round to C-round and beyond.

As a rule, marketing managers spend about 95% of their time thinking about marketing and about 5% of their time thinking about management. In fact, while we have no shortage of tools and technologies for marketing, there are very few for marketing management (something we are trying to change at my own marketing management software startup, Markodojo). This final post in the ABC’s of scaling startup marketing series attempts to give startup marketing managers a leg up on the management side of the equation by providing the Top Ten Do’s and Don’ts of Startup Marketing Management.

The Top Ten Do’s of Startup Marketing Management

Startup Marketing Do #1: Increase Marketing Leverage

In order to make money, you have to spend money. However, it’s very easy to waste a lot of money on marketing. As you scale your startup marketing effort, you should strive to increase both revenue and marketing ROI simultaneously, or more simply increase marketing leverage. Marketing leverage builds through methodical innovation to discover new marketing programs and optimize existing marketing programs, while simultaneously increasing marketing production efficiency to reduce unit costs. Marketing leverage accelerates growth by freeing up spend on existing marketing programs in order to invest in new ones. Without marketing leverage you cannot scale, because revenue stalls as your marketing resources are absorbed simply to maintain the status quo.

Startup Marketing Do #2: Lead from Behind the Customer

Everyone seems to have an opinion about marketing, but there is really only one opinion that counts: the customer’s. A difference of opinion in the A-round can mean life or death for your startup. If your prospective customers don’t agree with your value proposition, then they will not buy your product. As your startup marketing effort scales, you must also scale the customer-marketer relationship, or you will soon find that marketing’s opinion on marketing is no more credible than anyone else’s. Build a customer-centric marketing culture. Put in place marketing processes and feedback mechanisms that stay on top of customer needs and motivations. Look for opportunities to collaborate with customers on marketing programs, such as case studies, events, focus groups, etc. Don’t just measure clicks, connect to real people. Marketing success, value and credibility all derive from the customer. Always lead from behind the customer.

Startup Marketing Do #3: Adapt Quickly and Fail Fast

There are two certainties in every startup marketing department: things always change and you never have enough money. In order to insulate yourself from this reality, you should develop marketing management processes that enable you to adapt quickly and fail fast. It is this startup marketing necessity that has given rise to modern marketing management methodologies like agile marketing and growth hacking. Methodologies aside, you should always favor small, incremental marketing projects and incremental marketing mix improvements over large risky ones. You should put in place strong marketing metrics that provide immediate feedback on your marketing programs. And, you should constantly source and experiment with new marketing ideas. Create a fast, flexible marketing innovation engine that operationalizes continuous improvement and fuels revenue growth.

Startup Marketing Do #4: Invest Heavily In Free

The less a marketing program costs, the higher the leverage. Free marketing programs, such as organic search, guest blogging, earned media, product placement, and word-of-mouth have the highest leverage of all. For an early stage startup with a tiny marketing budget, they may be the only options available. In the later stages, they still offer the most bang for your buck. You should continue to invest heavily in free marketing programs as you scale your startup marketing effort.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that these ostensibly free marketing programs are not really free at all. They all require the creative minds of hard-working marketing managers and marketing managers are actually quite expensive. What they do avoid is direct costs, such as advertising and list fees. Instead, they employ the marketing tactic of leveraging other people’s stuff: someone else’s audience, someone else’s content, someone else’s platform, etc. Generally, to get access to someone else’s stuff, you have to offer something in return (like an expert blog series and ebook in startup marketing management). To be successful in the free marketing barter economy, you should take an inventory of what you have to offer other than money: your expertise, your content, your product, your customers, and so forth. Then, target the other people that have the stuff you need and value the stuff you have. Don’t show up empty handed.

Startup Marketing Do #5: Constantly Seek New Revenue Streams

Startups are all potential. By the time you have 30% market share, you aren’t really a startup anymore. Getting from 0% market share to anything substantial is the fundamental goal of any startup marketing organization. It is so much easier said than done. It is also not a smooth mathematical curve where you simply add another percentage point per quarter. Startup revenue growth comes in many fits and starts as you make improvements to the marketing mix. Each new promotion, each new channel and each new product capability has the potential to tap into new revenue streams. By the same token, every element of your marketing mix has decreasing returns to scale. Email marketing will only generate a fraction of your leads. A particular message will only resonate with a fraction of your prospects. A certain product feature will only appeal to a certain market segment. And, so forth. You must constantly seek new revenue streams to drive sustainable growth.

Startup Marketing Do #6: Improve Continuously to Maximize ROI

Startup Marketing Do #1 claims that you should strive to increase both revenue and marketing ROI simultaneously to increase marketing leverage. Marketing innovation to discover new revenue streams is not enough. When you stumble onto a new successful marketing program, it’s usually pretty rough. To get the most for your marketing dollar, further optimization is required. Maximizing marketing ROI from current marketing programs requires a marketing management process that drives continuous improvement. First, you must benchmark current marketing performance. Then, you must brainstorm and prioritize improvements to the program’s marketing mix. Then, you must test each change to see if there is a positive impact. Wash, rinse, and repeat. You can’t just move from one disconnected marketing project to the next, you must manage the marketing process to discover and codify best practices, so that you improve continuously.

Startup Marketing Do #7: Facilitate the Customer Journey with Automation

As your startup marketing effort scales, you develop a much stronger picture of the journey your customers take as they find, try, buy and use your product. You should understand why they buy, how they go about making a purchase decision, and what they need to get the most out of your product. Ultimately, every single marketing program is directed at facilitating the customer journey by aligning the needs of your customer to the capabilities of your business. In the early days, you will hand-craft every message and campaign, tweaking here and there to find the perfect marketing mix combination. However, as your marketing programs mature, these tasks become routine. It is a complete waste of time to automate marketing programs prematurely or to automate marketing programs that simply don’t work. Alternatively, codifying best practices and automating marketing programs that do work dramatically increases marketing ROI and hence marketing leverage. Deploying new automation takes time and energy. Don’t blindly automate every marketing program; automate the marketing programs that truly facilitate the customer journey.

Startup Marketing Do #8: Upgrade Marketing Management with Automation

Marketing managers tend to pay much more attention to marketing than they do to management. This predisposition can be fatal in the late B-round, C-round and beyond. There are two core business processes that define every marketing organization: 1) the customer journey and 2) the marketing management process. The marketing management process can be thought of as the meta-process of the customer journey in that it creates the customer journey for your business. Put this way, the marketing management process sounds pretty darn important in that the customer journey is entirely dependent on it.

Just as the customer journey becomes clearer and more routine as you discover best practices and scale your startup marketing effort, so it is with your marketing management process. In fact, given that the marketing management process precedes the creation of marketing programs, you should be zeroing in on it even faster. Like the customer journey, your marketing management process may take many paths. For example, your process for global campaign execution will clearly differ from your process for content creation. Regardless, codifying marketing management best practices and automating routine marketing management work has a big an impact on marketing revenue and marketing ROI. The largest investment in almost every marketing organization is its people. Maximize your return.

Startup Marketing Do #9: Enable Marketing Outside of Marketing

In most companies, only about half of marketing actually occurs inside the marketing the department. The classically defined marketing mix of promotion, product, price and channel spans the entire value chain of the business. Sales reps promote. Manufacturing makes product. Purchasing managers affect price. External influencers and factors have an enormous impact on channels. Early stage startup marketers must reach opportunistically outside marketing to leverage other people’s stuff. Later stage startup marketing departments cannot function at all without systematically engaging sales, engineering, finance, vendors, industry influencers and customers. The more you scale, the more each marketing manager should be an enabler of marketing outside of marketing, not just an agent of marketing within marketing.

Startup Marketing Do #10: Present a Unified Front to the Customer

Marketing at scale is a very complex beast: multiple segments, multiple products, multiple messages, multi-channel campaigns, and cross-functional if not cross-divisional marketing management processes. As marketing complexity increases internally, so does the need to re-integrate and simplify it externally to present a unified front to the customer. Frankly, your customers don’t care about your problems. They want what they want, when they want it, and where they want it. How much simpler could it be? Presenting a unified customer experience is so critical that we’ve even given it a name: integrated marketing. However, mastering integrated marketing entails a lot more than presenting a consistent brand image. It requires the coordination of marketing programs and customer touch points both inside and outside the marketing department. In fact, consistently presenting a unified customer experience requires the integration of the marketing teams, marketing management processes, and marketing systems that create and deliver those marketing programs.

Ten Don’ts to Avoid when Scaling Startup Marketing

Startup Marketing Don’t #1: Manage Projects over Process

Marketing is a long game. It goes without question that as a marketer you would like every blog post, email campaign, advertisement and product upgrade to be a revenue generating success. But, they won’t all be; that’s how you improve. The most important marketing wins, such as brand awareness, competitive advantage, brand loyalty and sustainable revenue growth accumulate over time as you pile one successful marketing program on top of the other. While marketing project management is important, the long game is not won by any individual marketing project. It’s won by instilling a superior marketing culture, building a superior marketing organization and developing a superior marketing management process. If you envision every marketing project as an entity unto itself and you don’t actively develop the marketing management process by which you select, plan, execute and assess said project, then your marketing will not scale.

Startup Marketing Don’t #2: Spread Yourself Too Thin

No matter how big your marketing budget, you will always have more marketing projects than marketing resources. There is constant pressure to take on more than you can possibly do. If you spread yourself to thin, the result will be bottlenecks, project delays and poor marketing results. Draw a clean line between what you would like to do and what you are actually going to do. Focus clearly on marketing programs that increase marketing leverage and build sustainable revenue growth. When you allow your eyes to become bigger than your stomach, you choke.

Startup Marketing Don’t #3: Lose Focus on Marketing Strategy

The marketing manager role is unique in that marketing managers must often decide what to do before they can decide how to do it. It is one of the fuzziest responsibilities in any company. As such, it is very easy to get lost. A good test of the scalability of any marketing organization is the degree to which marketing managers make sound business decisions without assistance. Scalability fails when they need to ask the boss or consistently make a poor business decisions. Strong organizational alignment around marketing strategy allows senior marketing managers to delegate with confidence, because marketing strategy provides a framework for making sound business decisions. Don’t lose focus on marketing strategy. Build strategic goals and principles into your marketing management process to connect marketing strategy to everyday work. Keep your marketing organization aligned.

Startup Marketing Don’t #4: Waste Time on Rework

There is no more wasteful drain on your limited marketing resources than rework. Not to be confused with experimentation or adaptation, rework is change without any gain in knowledge or performance. Rework happens when marketing managers miscommunicate, neglect important handoffs, get interrupted, or attempt to implement half-baked ideas. In short, it is a failure of your marketing management process and the result is negative marketing leverage. Don’t make the common mistake of blaming rework on individuals. Take a closer look at your marketing management process, and make improvements that help marketing managers avoid it altogether.

Startup Marketing Don’t #5: Scale Up Prematurely

It’s easy to waste a lot of money on startup marketing, so don’t ramp a new marketing program until you are relatively certain of the results. This is particularly true for A-round and B-round startups, because it is not simply a matter of whether or not you are ready to go to market. The market may not be ready for you. Both supply and demand need to be aligned. You should have the right target customer, the right message, the right channel and the right product. And, your customer needs to be in the right state of mind to take the next step along the customer journey. Better to spend tomorrow and get results, than to spend today and have no tomorrow.

Startup Marketing Don’t #6: Forget what You Did Last Quarter

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. These famous words of philosopher George Santayana are as applicable to marketing as they are to political history. Without a marketing memory, you have no foundation on which to build. Your marketing effort will not scale, as you are consumed with rework and re-inventing the wheel. Marketing memory comes in many forms: customer knowledge, competitor intelligence, marketing program best practices, marketing management processes, branding standards, reusable assets, performance benchmarks, historical metrics, customer relationships, influencer relationships, vendor relationships, and so on. Save them. Remember them. Build on them.

Startup Marketing Don’t #7: Neglect to Market Marketing

Half of marketing happens outside the marketing department. By the same token, everyone wants to put their fingers in the proverbial marketing pie. CEOs have their pet marketing programs, CFO’s want to see concrete financial results, sales managers and reps want leads, and HR wants a beautiful website to attract the best candidates. Don’t neglect to market marketing and co-opt your critics. First, they are likely to have lots of great marketing ideas. And last, nothing will bring marketing performance to a halt faster than unproductive, internal politics.

Startup Marketing Don’t #8: Forget that Customers are People

Modern marketers have access to oceans of customer data. Some marketing managers think that marketing success is just a matter of crunching the numbers. If this is the case, then why do we still see so many misguided marketing campaigns? Why do so many new products still fail? And, why is the average tenure of CMO’s so short? Didn’t they do the math? Good marketing metrics will tell you what customers like, but they won’t tell you why they like it. And, they won’t tell you how to improve it. Sometimes click-streams just don’t cut it. Any significant marketing innovation requires real feedback from real customers to understand their needs and motivations. Give numbers, strategy and process their due, but never forget that your customers are people.

Startup Marketing Don’t #9: Become Isolated

As marketing scales, it increasingly becomes an entity unto itself. Organizational hierarchy, functional divisions, automation and simple geography all conspire to separate marketing managers from customers, from other areas of the company, and from the industry at large. It becomes very easy for a marketing manager to focus on the work and relationships that are in closest proximity. Do not let marketing become isolated, or it will become irrelevant. Marketing managers should make it a habit to get out of the marketing department to meet customers, sales reps, industry influencers, vendors and the like. Moreover, marketing management processes and systems should be inclusive by design, helping marketers connect to customers, collaborate on marketing projects with outside parties, and build a network of industry relationships.

Startup Marketing Don’t #10: Stop Innovating

In the early days, marketing innovation is a matter of startup life or death. In the A round, you have to find product-market fit. In the B-round, you have to expand your markets, you channels and your product to create sustainable growth. As you’re your startup marketing effort scales into the C-round and beyond, the focus naturally tilts toward marketing efficiency and ROI. Here it is easy to become inflexible and set in your marketing ways. If you stop innovating, you stop growing. It’s as simple as that. Every market segment, every marketing program, and every product has as natural limit. Sustainable revenue growth requires ongoing innovation to find new markets, new programs and new products. The final limit is your marketing imagination.

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CEO & Founder

Joel York is the CEO and founder of <a href="http://www.markodojo.com/">Markodojo</a> and a respected thought leader in the SaaS community. He shares his knowledge of SaaS marketing strategy on the popular blogs Chaotic Flow and Cloud Ave. Prior to starting Markodojo, Joel was a career CMO and built multiple marketing departments from startups to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Joel got his first exposure to agile at Deloitte Consulting. A lifelong student of agile principles, Joel has applied agile methods in marketing, engineering and manufacturing. Joel holds a BS in Physics from Caltech, an MS in Engineering Physics from Cornell and an MBA from the University of Chicago.