The Essential Marketing Toolkit for Startups

strategy

21 Mar

If you’re a tech startup, you’ll know that marketing is really important - but time and money to do it may be in short supply! Founder Sue Keogh was invited onto The One Group’s podcast to share advice for startups on the essential elements your should include in your marketing toolkit.

In our chat we explain the importance of content pillars in helping you know what to say, how to build a marketing team, and marketing in stealth mode when you can’t talk about the innovation itself.

Watch or listen to the podcast on The One Group’s YouTube channel, and see the key points below.

1. Discover the importance of simplifying complex ideas…

One of the biggest challenges for technical founders is translating complex ideas into simple, compelling messages. When you’ve spent years in a lab or surrounded by academics, when you suddenly find yourself confronted with investors and customers, it’s really hard to find a new, concise way pf phrasing it.

2. Learn the three core elements that early-stage startups should include in their marketing toolkit

A basic website with About, Product, and Contact pages, with info on the team
A good press release that can be forwarded to the press and interested parties
Quality visual assets. With the brilliant cameras in smartphones nowadays there are no excuses!
Trade publications and local newspapers are desperate for content. You'd be surprised at how quickly they publish if you send them something good, but if you don't have those assets, there's nothing for them to use.

3. How content pillars can create a framework for your communication

If you’re a startup who wants to become more visible but don’t know what to post about, content pillars can really help.

These are your core topics, and once you've got those in place, you can refer back to them again and again. So let’s say you're an AI startup, innovation in AI could be a pillar because you want people to look at you and think, “They know about this, they're up to speed with the latest technology.” The founder story could be another pillar, as well as the tool itself and its groundbreaking features.

Having these pillars creates a framework that makes ongoing content creation much easier and ensures consistency in messaging.

4. How to market in stealth mode when you want to make a noise, but not reveal exactly what you’re up to…

For startups that can't reveal details of their innovation, you can still talk around it through thought leadership.

Let's say you're developing a medical device. What you can do is share thought leadership on that subject matter. People see you talking about innovations in medical devices - it doesn't have to be anything to do with what you're actually working on, but you're showing knowledge in this area, and people associate you with it.

Other options include showcasing team expertise, sharing behind-the-scenes content about your processes, or highlighting your visually striking workspace.

5. Gain confidence in effective pitching to investors

When preparing for investor pitches, I share some simple but crucial advice: practice out loud repeatedly.

The people who do public speaking well make it look easy, but they practice a lot. The thing is, as soon as you say it out loud, you say completely different things to what you've written on paper. You start making little jokes and asides that don't work, or you realise the order you've written it isn't how you'd naturally explain it.

As I explain in the podcast, when I was new to public speaking I wanted the feeling of rehearsing in front of an audience, so I got all these teddy bears and put them out in a row on top of the sofa and stood and practiced in the lounge while the baby was asleep. Worked for me!

6. Discover when to scale your marketing team

There are two approaches I’ve seen work when it comes to marketing resources in startups:

Early stage: Combine a junior in-house person with external consultant help. What works well is if a startup has a young, keen, proactive marketing person on the team who’s on the ground – and relatively inexpensive. Then you bring someone like me in - more expensive but for a smaller slice of my time - and I can guide them and help with the strategy.

Scale-up stage: Hire a senior marketing leader and outsource specialised functions, like paid social media campaigns, video, copywriting. If your business is scaling up, you’ll have a head of marketing, so you can go to an agency for the bits you don’t have in-house and get specialists on board when you need them.

7. How to find the ideal marketing hire for startups…

When hiring for a marketing role, I’m always looking for four key qualities:

Can they actually do the job?
Do we like each other – can we sit in the same room as each other all day!
Do they have a hunger for learning?
Do they have entrepreneurial instinct?

You need someone that is genuinely passionate about marketing, hungry to learn, curious, excited by the science, and has commercial nous. In a startup, everyone from admin to the CFO has to be fired up by the mission - you don't want any plodders!