Here's to the Marketers who work for early-stage startups
It's going to be a rough and interesting ride
La Casa de Papel (popularly known as Money Heist) is one of the most in-demand shows in the world. The show is about an enigmatic character called 'Professor' who recruits people to carry out the biggest robberies in history in the most interesting way possible.
The show begins with Tokyo, the Professor's first recruit, narrating her ill fate after a failed robbery attempt that leads to the death of her boyfriend. She's wanted by the police after barely evading arrest. She made plans to leave the country but decided to see her mother one last time. The police knew this, so they waited by her mother's house to arrest her. The professor intercepted her en route the ambush, informed her of the police's plan and made her an offer that would change her life forever.
The professor's proposal to Tokyo was messianic. He knew her pain point and leveraged it to make a proposition that didn't have an immediate reward. His 20-word pitch to Tokyo was: 'I'm looking for people who don't have much to lose. How does stealing 2.4 billion euros sound to you?'
She agreed.
To get a Yes from her, the professor identified her needs, found out where she'd be and spoke in a language familiar to her — 'How does stealing 2.4 billion euros sound to you?' Notice he didn't say, 'How does making 2.4 billion euros sound to you?'. Because Tokyo is a thief, she didn't care about making money. She wanted to steal. What was interesting about the offer is that he didn't have money to pay Tokyo (or any of his recruits) before the heist. She could die if the plan was unsuccessful. However, he had a pitch so good that she couldn't say no.
He did all of this with zero cash in hand.
This is the life of a marketer working at a bootstrapped startup. You don't have the money to run ads, launch massive campaigns, or create referral programmes. All you have is a small team, a brand, a product, and a dream to sell to your target audience. How do you sell that dream without breaking the bank? That's what this article is all about.
Know the strengths of your team
Building a marketing team is usually not a priority for many bootstrapped startups. Half the time, the marketing team is made up of two to three people and in some cases, just one person. You should conduct a team audit irrespective of the number of people in your department. A team audit will help you identify what each member of your team is good at and the things they need to improve. The audit will also help you set realistic marketing goals that play to the collective strength of your team. Gallup's State of the American Workplace report in 2017 has some interesting statistics on building on the strengths of your team members.
60% of employees say the ability to do what they do best in a role is ‘very important’ to them.
64% of employees in American workplaces believe building on their strengths will make them more successful at work.
Simply learning about their strengths makes employees 7.8% more productive, and teams that focus on strengths every day have 12.5% greater productivity.
Develop a marketing strategy that plays to the collective strength of your team
Before you enter the numerous rabbit holes of marketing strategy templates, document your answers to the following questions:
Question 1: What business objectives does the marketing strategy need to support?
Startups fail. A lot of them do. The importance of marketing to the success of a startup, irrespective of whether it’s Business to business (B2B) or Business to consumer cannot be overlooked. The CB Insights research portal ranks poor marketing in the top 10 reasons why startups fail. You are more important than you know. I didn’t realize the importance of preparing a marketing strategy that supports the business (and sales) objectives of the company until I worked at a startup that made collaboration of the sales and marketing team compulsory.
Startups need to make money, bootstrapped startups need to make money fast or they risk running out of revenue and becoming another failed startup statistic. Your marketing strategy may not be tied to all of the company’s revenue sources but it has to support at least one or two.
For instance, when developing a content plan for a B2B startup, you need to work with the sales team to identify what their sales funnel looks like and how your content can be beneficial at certain stages in their funnel. You may find yourself spending weeks on thought leadership content when the sales team needs video guides to convince clients of how your product can be beneficial to them. For a bootstrapped startup, your CEO or founder may be the sales team you need to work closely with. Here are some examples of business objectives that your marketing strategy can support:
Acquire 1,000 new users
Generate $10,000 per quarter: play an active role in doing this and identify how marketing directly contributes to this goal.
Maintain a healthy customer retention rate of 30%.
Question 2: Where can I find my target audience?
The possibility of having the majority of your target audience on multiple platforms is slim. Don’t aim for success across all platforms because you don’t have the manpower to pull it off. A B2B data analytics startup should invest in platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter, and pay less attention to Instagram. Deciding to invest your time and resources on specific platforms helps you achieve more results and identify what’s working and what isn’t. One of the easy ways to do this is by stalking your competitors.
Ignore the follower count and focus on engagements. What platforms are they getting the most engagements and who are the people engaging with them? Your answer to these questions is how you define your target audience.
Working for an early stage startup means that you have the luxury of making mistakes, but you have to make them fast, and move on. You don’t have the time and resources to make expensive mistakes or take months or years to figure out what’s working for the brand. You may not have everything figured out, no one does —but you need to have some things figured out.
The professor (in Money heist) didn’t have the resources to spread a wide net with the hope of catching something good. He narrowed his search, identified where his target audience would be, invested in research, and sold them his dream. Like the Professor, you are a one man team; use it to your advantage.
Question 3: Is there a marketing budget?
Wordstream suggests that new companies should allocate 10-12% of their gross revenue to marketing and established companies should allocate 6-12%. The logic is pretty simple given that popularity amongst its target audience can be one of the factors to consider when determining whether a company is established or not. An established company will ideally spend less on marketing compared to new companies. But when you calculate the numbers, you’ll see that the established companies are spending more because they generate higher revenue.
Hi there, I split the post into 2 parts to make it easy to digest. You can click on the link below to read the second part