Overcoming Common Issues in Startup Marketing

3 Takeaways on Hiring, Bottlenecks, and Agencies

Marketing tends to sit (virtually) between C-level and Sales. Since marketers position your product and services, their function is core to company success. Yet often that marketing function is underserved or misunderstood.?

However, if you can fix that, you can achieve stronger sales motions, product awareness, and more visible brands. So it’s worth investigating how to overcome some common hurdles.

To do so, we recently gathered marketing leaders from a few of Earlybird Venture Capital early-stage portfolio companies across fintech, e-commerce, SaaS, and more to exchange with each other and spar with a tech ecosystem guest and marketing pro.

Before the session, our VP People Jay Harris-Theis surveyed participants to narrow the focus. The lowest common denominators (LCD) I observed from this session: How to hire when scaling your marketing efforts, remove bottlenecks, and carefully manage agencies.?

Here are my 3 takeaways for you to apply:

??How can you hire well?

1. Keep it lean. If your marketing team is small, consider relying on a steady flow of working students. Determine a great fit for who might be able to stay on and grow in the role. Upside: more hands on deck. Downside: re-training.?
2. Where to look? Look within your wider company team to check for talent and potential on who can be trained in what you need. Upside: they know the company ethos and product. Downside: you might need to fill their former role. In some cases looking to high-performing B2C people can be a wise move. They understand customer needs.
3. What about seniority? It might make sense to hire a more junior role, both from a cost and power-play perspective. You risk altering the team's energy via power struggles if hiring too many inflexible, senior-level people.

? How can you empower marketing teams & remove bottlenecks?

Since marketers play a central role in translating product value to the public, an important value-add is that marketing leads can support the sales funnel to identify and eliminate bottlenecks. For highly technical B2B products, where might the customer need more detailed product insights? What input do marketers need to better explain the product details??

1. Consider your in-company experts as resources and interview them to collect statements and trends and turn them into blog posts, collateral for sales development representatives or SDRs, or other methods of thought leadership pieces.
2. Consider interactive events like product round tables & equip sales teams with material and swag, even paid ads and landing pages.
3. Try online webinars to relay product or service product info via (prepared) Q&A’s.

?? How can you best make agency decisions?

If marketers bring on an agency to scale, check for proper fit (strategic vs operational), and use KPIs to manage expectations. To get the right agency engaged, here’s what to look for:

1. Check references: Ensure trust and reliability: note how you get in touch with them.
2. Communication Mode: Check for good tools/channels that suit your needs. An agency should anticipate your needs and work alongside you in a supportive, integrated way.
3. Consistency of work: Is there high turnover there? Are you working with enough senior-level staff as you expected? Ask what an annual fee an average customer pays.

?? To wrap up, here are two useful links provided: Marketing Training & defining Product Marketing.

Thanks to our startups for sharing and you for reading! I am curious to hear from marketing experts on what’s working well for them. Leave me a comment, please.

Reach out to me via LinkedIn, X, and read more on my Medium.

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