How to Start a Marketing Team from Scratch:

Working with some incredibly sharp founders, I’ve helped some great products grow from zero. As my marketing consultancy is fully booked out, and we shift attention to our own growing products, I thought I’d share some free advice for those technical founders who are ready to make their first marketing hire.

Who Should You Hire First?

Most product teams desperately need someone that writes good content and has a solid understanding of search engine marketing optimization.

I think search ads, analytics, social media, graphic design, event & community management; collateral, video, and podcast production are all lovely to see in a growing medium-sized company ready to make enterprise sales.

But the King Comes First, and Content is King.

Speaking plainly, you really don’t care about marketing, you just want sales.

I know you’re impatient after wasting all that time trying to work with channel partners who promised the world, but you’re still not yet ready to hire a sales team.

Sales teams chew up hundreds of leads a week. To generate those, you’ll need marketing campaigns producing a lot of content to share.

You’re not going to get many clicks on your emails if all you have to offer is a Buy Now! button.

You’ll just get unsubscribes and a spam flag from Google.

Your product is so genius and revolutionary that you’re too proud for marketing? Enjoy being the best-kept secret in a rich history of failed startups!

So, You Need a Content Writer.

Why? Because being findable on Google by people looking for your features will get you more qualified leads with Need and Time than any other activity. 

Most growth strategies will fall apart if you can't dominate the first page of Google. Anyone that hears about your app will search for it in Google or Duck Duck Go, and if they find your competitors’ apps first, you’ve worked hard selling for them!

How to Hire a Content Writer.

Before the Interview.

It's hard for technical people to hire marketers.

As long as they’re willing to learn, don’t overvalue technical product knowledge. No one will know your product as well as you, but your product and industry are easily teachable.

Experience with SEO and social media viral dominance is priceless, and you’re unqualified to teach that, so hire accordingly! Experience with search advertising and analytics is also a massive bonus. You’ll appreciate and learn from the reports made by their activity, and it means your hire will have the hard skills and cold data to ascertain what’s working and what’s not.

These simple hacks will help you filter good candidates during your recruitment process:

• Ask them to share some of their proudest work, and make the time to read it.
• Ask them to show examples of their work on the first page of Google.
• Check out their LinkedIn, are their posts getting many likes?

Be really clear and upfront that you’re a startup and this is all new to you.

That this job represents a great opportunity for growth, future pay rises, and learning together, but it will also mean you have no idea what you’re doing, and will make many mistakes along the way.

And don’t promise your content writer that they’ll be the manager of the team. 

Writers are often introverted and creative types, and those rarely have the commercial nose to keep a diverse team focused on making marketing that sells.

Nor are they likely to have the social flourish to cooperate with and push back against devs, salespeople, management, and Twitter trolls.

After the Hire: 

While your writer is learning about the industry, they can rewrite your technical documentation. Let them translate it so it's not an engineer's handbook. From that, they’ll be ready to repurpose and write some basic 101 introductory blogs about your features and their benefits.

They’re not writing a sales pitch for your future sales team, they’re writing content interesting enough to share and simple enough that even the CTO will understand it. She might even enjoy it enough to forward it to her CEO...

They’re also writing it stuffed full of high volume relevant keywords. They’re writing it for Google, so don’t fixate too much on whether they’ve understood the target persona yet.

Now my main advice for a technical CEO wondering how to manage marketing people is: 

DON'T!

Hire someone talented enough to trust them enough to stay out of their way. If you can’t afford to trust a full-time hire, start with a freelancer on a day rate.

Even if they keep getting the technical details incorrect, and you hate having to be the reviewer and blocker when you’ve got more important stuff to work on, avoid the urge to criticize.

As I’ve said before (link) The problem with marketing is every idiot thinks they have the right to an opinion on it. After all, we’ve all seen adverts and know which ones we like, right?

By that logic, the marketing team has apps on their phones, so they’re qualified to tell Developers how to write code, right?

Have I made myself clear enough?

Don’t let technical CEOs tell content writers how to write blogs.

But What Should They Write?

You should already be able to write about the value and the benefits of your product. After all, you made it with a user’s needs in mind (hopefully).

By the time you’ve hired someone, you should already have plenty of technical writing ready for them to read, reuse, and abuse.

“But our devs don’t like writing documentation.”

Tough.

This job would be much easier if there weren’t any customers, but that’s not why we make software.

Something I’ve seen great development teams do is ensuring the definition of done includes updating the documentation, and making videos to demo the value of the features to the marketing team and even the customers

Now hopefully, your content writer is ready to write good content, or at least encouraged to ask as many questions as they need until they are.

So what is good content? Let’s define it as anything that’s capable of getting on the first page of a search engine, and also likes from your target audience on LinkedIn.

Who’s your target audience? Well if you think it’s one person, you’re lacking an enterprise account manager’s nuanced understanding of all the people involved in a buying cycle. (Link Below for a short summary of Miller-Heiman)

Good content is written by people that understand that no one cares about your app. They can write it interestingly and broadly enough that someone might actually read it. This is frankly a miracle in the B2B space, but as long as CTOs can’t get fired for reading articles on LinkedIn, you’re in with a chance!

So What’s Bad Content?

That’s the stuff written by a committee, or written by a junior employee who's got KPIs looming over him and a CEO that critically reviews things.

That’s how boring content gets made. You can’t offend someone if no one’s reading it!

One last piece of advice (honest). You can't afford someone who’s good at marketing, and business development, and account management, and support, and technical content writing.

So don't try and hire a Jack-of-all-trades.

Start with a content writer, and when you've got more leads than your team can handle the demos for, it's time to start hiring a business team!

How to manage them? Well that's another blog for another time.