Startup Marketing Advice from Founders and Icons

It’s a fact that many founders learn the hard way: startup marketing can be a BEAST. Getting the right message in front of the right people is difficult for even the world’s biggest brands. So imagine what it’s like for a startup with an unknown name, a newfangled product or service, and minimal marketing resources. The odds of getting it right go way down—yet successful startup marketing is essential for reaching the growth stage.

Instead of second-guessing, take a smarter approach to startup marketing—start by learning from founders and renowned marketers who have firsthand experience with what works and what doesn’t. We collected some key insights below, then arranged them to help you answer critical early questions about startup marketing.

 

What’s My Message?

 The tricky thing about making your first messaging strategy is that it can be almost anything, yet in crowded and competitive markets, only a very limited range of messages will resonate. So how do you find that one perfect message from the start?

“The most powerful element in advertising is the truth,” according to Bill Bernbach, a legendary creative director. It’s often tempting in startup marketing to exaggerate how beneficial, valuable, or innovative something may be, but you only alienate your audience the further you stray from the truth.

Refine your message by thinking honestly about what your product can (and can’t) deliver. Back your claims up with evidence and stay firmly in the realm of reality. Whatever your message may be, you need to be able to back it up, otherwise your marketing (and by extension your startup) comes across as manipulative.

 

How to Pick Your Tone and Style?

Should your marketing sound buttoned-up and professional or laid-back and conversational? Will you lean more on technical details or anecdotes and jokes? You need a “tone” for your startup that carries through in all marketing messages, but how do create a compelling and authentic voice from scratch?

“If you’re trying to persuade people to do something or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think.” That advice comes from David Ogilvy, one of the greatest copywriters of all time, and it applies to every piece of copy or creative you release.

The best way to attract your audience is to imitate them. So, if you’re selling to highly professional or deeply technical companies, match them with your tone and style to signal you’re on the same page. Familiarity leads to trust, which is often the most important yet difficult thing for startups to earn.

 

Do I Need Killer Creative?

Startup marketing can be paralyzed by the search for a brilliant tag line, genius logo, or some other piece of perfect creative. While it’s important to get the creative right, startup marketing does not live or die by how exciting, innovative, or artistic the creative comes out.

OpenAI founder Sam Altman reminds us what really matters. “There’s at least a hundred times more people with great ideas than people that are willing to put in the effort to execute them well.” Creative ideas are only as good as the marketing campaign behind them. Likewise, a well-executed campaign will always yield better results than bold creative on its own.

Certainly don’t neglect design or copy. But with the limited resources you have for marketing, focus more on planning, executing, evaluating, and improving campaigns than on brainstorming “outside-the-box” ideas.

 

How Do You Scale Startup Marketing?

With marketing as with founding a company, scaling upward can be as hard or harder than launching. Not only do you need to do more, but you must also continue what works while fixing what doesn’t. Many startup marketing campaigns that see early success face struggles and setbacks later on.

The best way to build a brand is to be consistent,” says serial entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s talking about consistency of message and style, of course, but also consistency in quality and strategy. Results come from being focused on building something over time rather than leaping from one approach to another.

 In the dynamic life of a startup, it can feel tempting or necessary to make drastic changes to messages, budgets, or distribution strategies—but it rarely pays off. Marketing must evolve. However, the core must remain consistent, otherwise the brand, product, and company loses its identity.

 

How Does Marketing Relate to Sales?

Sales and marketing have a complicated relationship, especially at startups where policies and practices are still a work in progress. There’s no precedent to follow, but there’s also the freedom to get things right sooner rather than later—which leads to one of our favorite quotes about marketing.

 “Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer’s point of view.”  That comes from management guru Peter Druker.

Marketing creates the point of view. Sales capitalizes on it. They are both important and closely coordinated—but marketing extends much further than sales, having a bigger impact on revenue and reputation while also requiring more internal resources. Plan for startup marketing in that context and do the same for sales to create strong alignment early on.

 

Need some help getting your B2B startup marketing just right? That’s exactly what we do. Explore how we can make your marketing efforts more successful, streamlined, and scalable—visit this page to learn more and contact us if you would like to start the conversation.