What fostered your passion for growth marketing?

My passion for growth marketing started during my first internship as a link builder. I had the chance to drive the SEO efforts of the company and learn a lot about effective marketing on the internet. I worked with talented search engine optimization experts who helped me connect the dots on really understanding your customer, creating content they want, and how to leverage data to make your content even better. This role got me excited to learn more about content marketing, growth hacking, and general digital marketing.

 

What guidance would you offer the startup marketer that needs to know a little of everything and execute with limited resources?

My first piece of advice, prioritize your goals. It sounds cliche saying it and also something that I believe most startup marketers practice. However, the more you work on prioritizing your tasks, especially when multiple objectives need to be completed by the same deadline, you become better at recognizing what matters.

Prioritizing your efforts can become even more challenging with limited support while learning new skills to complete marketing tasks. When it becomes difficult to determine which tasks to do first, you can rely on goal frameworks to guide you to your objectives. Two popular goal-setting frameworks worth considering are Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS).

These goal-setting frameworks help startup marketers set ambitious goals and define manageable tasks to achieve them. Using these frameworks will also help startup marketers adopt a methodology that enables them to focus on the identified goals and challenge new ideas or fly-in tasks to determine if they align with existing objectives.

Another tip is to schedule time to learn new skills. When planning a project, be sure to account for the time it would take to develop a skill or research information that supports executing a marketing task. If startup marketers are in a situation where time is a significant factor in achieving an objective, you should hire talent. Otherwise, if startup marketers have limited resources and budgets, they should plan out the learning time required to complete marketing tasks. This detail in your planning will help marketers set more realistic deadlines for their projects and give you the time you need to execute tasks with quality.

 

What area of a startup's growth marketing strategy is oftentimes overlooked?

A couple of areas that startup marketers try to skip or rush through are brand messaging and customer engagement. In the early stages, startup marketers and c-level executives are hyper-focused on executing tasks that yield the highest ROI with limited resources. However, if marketers are unclear about their brand messaging, key differentiators, target audiences, and the channels these audiences frequent, marketing efforts can become costly and unsuccessful. Defining your brand messaging is foundational in building successful marketing strategies.

Customer engagement is also crucial in helping marketers develop successful marketing efforts. Through surveys, focus groups, or interviews, marketers can learn a lot about their customer's needs. Listening to customers can help marketers test and validate messaging and determine what channels best reach their customers. These insights are invaluable to startup marketers, especially in the early days. Talking to their first customers or potential customers early and often provides some of the best data a marketer can leverage to build out campaigns and strategies.

 

What’s one trend you’re excited about in your industry?

I think in the next five years, we are going to see a shift in companies focusing on building out their owned and earned media channels instead of spending those same resources and budget on advertising. The updates in privacy regulations are making it so brands have to focus on content and marketing tactics that benefit the consumer versus winning through repetition or spamming.

As a creative, I love the idea of content coming to the front of the main stage again. I believe startups will need to spend more time thinking about developing content that will build their credibility and trust with customers. The best way to do this is to provide customers with a value from the very first interaction. I think this transition to focus on owned and earned media channels will make marketing more consumer-centric and focus more on helping customers find great solutions through meaningful content.

 

Embarc Collective's new growth marketing strategy coaching is available to our member companies. Consider applying for membership to Embarc Collective here.