7 things startup marketers today need to know
Part of what I do at Seedcamp is to work with our portfolio companies on everything that goes into branding, communicating and marketing their businesses to the big, bad world. The Marketing Summit is one of my absolute highlights and provides an opportunity to bring our marketing talent together and help them answer the biggest questions and challenges they’re facing right now, supported by a host of incredible brains from across the industry. This year, we had over 80 people from across the tech ecosystem who joined us for a full day of keynote presentations, lightning talks plus an unconference built off the back of the needs in the room.
Huge thanks to Hannah Craik, VP Marketing at Heist Studios, and Giles Rhys-Jones, CMO at what3words, who shared two of the best keynotes I’ve seen in a long time. To Laura Wales Holliday (Ex-Rent the Runway, Zola, Depop) Freddy Ward (Ex-Marketing Director @ HelloFresh, Founder @ Wild) Andy Young (Ex-Stripe, Facebook, 500 Startups and now EiR Seedcamp) Sam Grant (Ex-CMO @ Samsung) and influencer Diana Curmei for hosting our lightning talks across everything from how to build communities to growth lessons learned from Silicon Valley and how to build your Marketing team. And last, but certainly not least, to Katy Turner, Theo Ohene, Nick Pendle, Max Ottignan, Ella Darlington, John Shewell, Charlotte Birchley, Kim Dewe, Malcolm Bell and Max Tatton-Brown who helped lead our unconference sessions which I had to physically break-up as everyone was so engaged!
With this much content, it was hard to distil everything down into something digestible and actionable but these are the top lessons I’m taking away from the day and which I’d urge early-stage marketers to consider when thinking about how to build their marketing function in the right way.
1. Don’t get blinded by short-term metrics
Hannah Craik, VP Marketing at Heist Studios, shared insight into how to balance your marketing mix. With the constant pressure on startups to grow, fast, how can marketers balance the need to drive sales today while also trying to build a business that can survive long-term? From cognitive biases to the inaccessibility of long-term data, listen in to Hannah’s session here.
2. Build cross-functional teams to drive real growth
The Marketing department is not exclusively responsible for growth. Period. The quicker startups learn this, the better we can make our processes across everything from how we hire to managing expectations and developing a culture that doesn’t set people up to fail.
Andy Young has worked at some of the world’s fastest-growing tech companies including the likes of Stripe and Facebook. He shares how the best companies build growth into their products and how the likes of Facebook, Airbnb, Dropbox among others have achieved exponential, scalable growth through the intersection of product, marketing and engineering. Listen in to Andy’s lightning talk here and why, for companies to truly grow, they need to restructure the shape of their organisation.
3. Marketing to businesses doesn’t have to be boring
When what3words started out, they thought scalability would come from a traditional b2c approach. Fast-forward five years and the BBC has named them ‘the app that can save your life’ and they’ve been adopted by everyone from the emergency services to Tata Motors. What3words CMO, Giles Rhys Jones, shares how they’ve taken a creative approach — specifically targeting ‘ambitious innovators’ — and built a 40-person in-house creative team, using content to remove the barriers between their supporters and decision-makers in large organisations.
Check out Giles’ keynote here.
4. You can’t build a community without proper investment
‘Community’. Right now, every startup claims to have one and it's fast become a buzz word, especially in how challenger brands say they’re taking on incumbents. Building a community is not a cheap fix, nor is it an alternative to digital marketing. Laura Wales Holliday has worked across the likes of Depop and Rent the Runway and argues that if you are serious about building a community, you have to be able to invest properly in it — both with time and resource. Otherwise, it’s likely to fall flat.
One of the best communities I’ve seen, and am grateful to be a part of, is LeanLuxe built with love by Paul Munford. Check it out here along with Hunter Walk’s comments on the need to build communities sustainably here.
5. When creating a category, functionality trumps creativity
When launching a product or service into an established market, creativity is essential to help a brand stand out. However, when creating a category from scratch it’s all about education and functionality argues Freddy Ward, former Marketing Director of HelloFresh. Growing from the first marketing hire, with a budget of £100k a year, to scaling a team and managing marketing spend of £25M+ Freddy shares insight and learnings from how they developed a category around recipe boxes and focussed their marketing messages on education and trust to build credibility in the sector and ensure people felt such a thing could work, before shifting to more creative tactics as other players entered the space.
Listen to the full conversation here.
6. From demographics to psychographics— it’s time to level up how we think about segmentation
Ever felt annoyed when signing up to something and they ask you to tick an age bracket that expands about 15 years? Or when, because you are of a certain age, all of a sudden you’re being followed around by pregnancy tests and nappy ads on social media?
The idea that we can target by demographics is lazy and outdated and also plays into the trap that relying too heavily on the likes of Facebook for your acquisition can have. Rather than go after blanket ‘ABC1, urbanite female aged 30–45’ we have to level up how we think about customers. Smart brands are thinking about how they attract customers who share a mindset and a belief system, rather than an age or a gender.
A great example of this is in how Jenny Gyllander has built ThingTesting. While growth has come predominantly from one channel — Instagram — Jenny has positioned ThingTesting as the platform of choice for discerning consumers to discover emerging brands. If you want run-of-the-mill, mass-consumer products, then this isn’t the place for you. If you see yourself as curious, innovative and conscious about your consumption (although fully aware that you also love consumerism) then you know you’ve found your tribe.
7. Facebook and Google is a dangerous drug
The most addictive drug for early-stage marketers comes in channel form: Facebook and Google. The ease of attribution and seemingly favourable CPAs can make it addictive for early-stage marketers looking for fast-growth. The idea that there is one golden bullet or channel for your marketing spend is a myth and the quicker we can ween ourselves off this addiction, the better. A recurrent theme across our talks was a need for diversification in the marketing mix, lest you fall foul to that painful moment when acquisition costs go up, algorithms change or a better-funded competitor enters the market.
So, for anyone running marketing in a startup, remember for all the chaos, lack of budgets and feeling like you’re constantly putting out fires (I’ve been there, I know what it’s like) remember you’re also in a truly privileged position where you can try things that don’t need to scale. Try to think unconventionally; test, learn, iterate and follow the 80/20 rule — with the buy-in of your CEO — so you’re all aligned around the need to experiment and think outside of the box, at least 20% of the time.
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