“Shouldn't an early-stage startup spend its limited resources on doers (e.g. social media marketer) rather than a strategist (e.g. CMO)?”
I hear this statement a lot from early-stage founders, arguing growth marketers should be the first hire as the product is built and now they want to dive into fast growth and expansion.
So they end up hiring agencies and multiple contractors, managing all by themselves. Which, in fact, becomes too hard, confusing, costly and ineffective to manage a bunch of marketers.
If you’ve ever worked hard on building a product, you might have seen marketing can get even harder.
Mostly because
So, just hiring a content writer, ad specialist, etc. won’t fill the gap. Rather than the first hire being a growth marketer you need a marketing leader who can hire the right contractors/specialists, execute, strategize, align and bring creative flow to work on campaigns.
In the initial days, cash might be limited or you might be raising funds in a very tight environment.
That’s why directly betting on specialists to help you with a channel or customer acquisition might not work in your favour.
Before you hire them, you need to make sure you have a system and process built in-house. Typically, that looks like testing product-market fit, positioning, messaging, PR and successfully launching the product. You need someone who can predict revenue growth and have some sense of urgency.
This person not only helps you with creating a solid system but develops a basic marketing foundation and strategy which helps you see whom to hire next.
Someone who can run everything under a budget, deliver incredible ROI and find a product-market fit. When you have your foundation in place it becomes easy to provide enough context to contractors or other marketing people in the team to successfully market your product.
Also if you’re raising funds this person will help you deploy the capital (so you don’t burn out fast), drive growth and show a convincing business model to the investors.
I have worked and advised many startups less than two years old suffering with existence as they never thought of marketing in the first place or hired the wrong people at the early stage. They want to solve the problem of who are their customers, and what marketing they should do, all in a very short time and limited budget. Because by the time that had already burned most.
Whether you hire a fractional CMO or consultant they need to have a strong grip on product marketing (understand the customer & business), demand generation (prove value of marketing) and brand awareness (drive enough awareness for the company).
That’s not it, your new product and company need more:
Founders work together with them to build the foundation:
You can’t leave too early inputs on specialists for them to figure out the rest.
“We should hire a content writer/SEO expert as we need to get traffic from search engines to convert into paying users”. That’s what most founders say when they hire the first marketer.
These ideas come out of trends without any strong evidence to back with.
Now, this can be something you need at the moment, but make sure you have your system ready:
Some founders find marketing can be done after some announcement on social media or by starting a blog or paid search ads, but it’s more than that.
The biggest thing that startups miss in marketing is context - which defines your customers, your brand, your positioning, where you are in the market, and why you even exist.
And then understand analytics to produce a better strategy and deliver incredible ROI.