Startup marketing is not for the faint of heart, and if you want to know how well it works, you can check out the highlights on LinkedIn, or you can spend time with someone who has started a large-scale marketing start-up and discuss what they’ve learned.
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, Abby Strong, chief market officer and chief customer officer at Cribl, joins us to share her insights into the realities of marketing at scale for early-stage startups.
Abby discusses the critical importance of clarity, earning founders’ trust, and building a technical foundation for sustainable growth.
Key points from this episode include:
- The importance of clarity; If you can’t describe the problem your company solves in one sentence, you’re simply adding to the confusion.
- Earn founders’ trust by demonstrating deep technical knowledge of the product before translating it into value-based outcomes for customers.
- Because success in a growing company requires employees to embrace the current phase of the company and change direction quickly instead of dwelling on how things “used to be.”
Episode guide
00:00 Introduction
00:35 Meet Abby Strong
01:00 What’s missing from common advice for start-up social media marketers?
02:01 What do founders get wrong about startup marketing?
03:13 Tips for talking to founders about marketing their start up
04:53 What are the most common mistakes marketers make when starting up?
07:08 What are the signs that it’s time to scale back your marketing?
08:50 Where and when do you start building your startup marketing team?
11:10 Advice for developing other revenue-related roles, such as sales and customer success
12:53 What is the makeup of a person who excels in start-up culture?
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Mike Pastore is the head of content and media at Third Door Media, the publisher of the Martech and Search Engine Land websites, and the producer of the SMX and MarTech conferences. In nearly three decades in B2B marketing, Mike has worked as an editor, writer, and marketer. He first wrote about marketing in 1998 for internet.com (later Jupitermedia). He then worked with marketers at some of the best-known brands in B2B technology, creating content for marketing campaigns for both Jupitermedia and QuinStreet. Before joining Third Door Media as editorial director of the MarTech website, he led demand generation at B2B media company TechnologyAdvice.
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