Truth be told, many startups are afraid of marketing. While they have no problem spending money on product development and sales, marketing is regarded as a necessary evil.
Here are six reasons why they think twice about marketing.
1. They don’t understand it. As Stuart and Francis make abundantly clear, most startups don’t understand marketing. It’s not part of their skill-set, experience or DNA. In other words, they don’t know what they don’t know. This makes it difficult to understand the role and value of marketing. It has nothing to do with knowledge or expertise but, rather, a grasp on a different, but important, topic.
2. It costs money. Let’s face it, marketing costs money to make happen – whether you’re doing it in-house, through freelancers or via consultants. When given the choice between hiring a salesperson, who generates revenue, and a marketing person, who eats revenue, it is easy to understand why it’s easier for startups to pick the former. The key thing startups need to understand is marketing works when the amount of new business coming in outweighs the amount being spent on marketing. Of course, it is impossible to see how this would work if you don’t do any marketing.
3. They don’t see it as a priority. To many startups, the most important priorities are product development and sales, followed by hiring talent and raising money. Somewhere down the line, comes marketing. In many cases, the need for marketing only arises after a point of pain emerges such as a Website that doesn’t convert, rivals getting more media/blog coverage, messaging that potential customers don’t understand, or the need for more marketing collateral.
4. It’s hard to measure success. It’s not really, particularly digitally, but there is a perception that marketing campaigns are sent into the ether in the hope they will generate some kind of return such as Website visits, in-bound emails, telephone calls, leads and sales. Again, it goes back to not understanding how marketing works and why it needs to be done.
5. Marketers are strange creatures. Marketers talk differently, they use strange words (KPIs, anyone?), they’re slick, always trying to sell you something or get you to do something, and they’re into creative concepts and brainstorming sessions. In other words, marketers are different, in many ways, from developers or, for that matter, salespeople. Yes, we can be a bit slick and we like to talk fast but we have good intentions and a focus on helping startups succeed.
6. Another challenge for startups is not knowing who they should exactly hire to do marketing. What skills and experience should that person have? How do they measure this person’s performance? How do they decide between different candidates?
The key message here is marketing has a definite role to play within a startup, along with programming, sales, HR, customer service, etc. It needs to be part of the mix for a startup to have a shot at success.
