Guest blogger Greg Strosaker
Guest blog post by Greg Strosaker As the Lean Startups blog grows, I want to start bringing in other subject matter experts to help better serve my readers. Therefore, I am very excited to introduce Greg Strosaker as my first guest contributor. Greg, who previously worked for 13 years with General Electric as an engineer, has spent the past four years heading up marketing at several small- to mid-size material and industrial equipment firms. Greg also runs the Constant Cogitation blog, where he discusses marketing, strategy, and leadership topics.
Since my last post drew some attention from the marketing folks (and struck a nerve of those who refuse to grow and evolve), I wanted to bring in the perspective of someone in a different industry who makes a living from marketing.
An often-overlooked function for many start-ups and small businesses is Marketing. Sure, you have a website, maybe some brochures, maybe a Google AdWords campaign. But I’m talking about “capital M” Marketing – who are you, what are you all about, and how are you communicating that to your prospective customers? Or, as Apollo pointed out in a previous post, how are you allowing your customers to shape who you become (while still maintaining your core mission)? Maybe you can stumble into some early successes while hacking your way through, but at some point you hit a wall, and you need to get serious to be able to scale. Here are some basics to help you establish a brand and marketing strategy that you can build upon. This post is about establishing and living your identity. If Apollo allows me back again for a future post, I’ll hit on more tactics, particularly in regards to inbound marketing.
One comment I frequently hear is that “anyone can do marketing”. Sure, and anyone can do finance too, if it involves balancing a checkbook (OK, maybe there are some that can’t do even that). And it is true that everyone in the organization should be involved in marketing, as your brand is more than your tagline – it’s the sum of your daily behaviors and decisions in the face of the customer. I’m not saying you need to go out and hire someone “classically” educated in marketing. In fact, you may want to avoid that (said as someone not “classically” educated). But you do need someone who at least pays attention to the topic, and has some basic sense of branding, listening to customers, and adopting strategies in response to market conditions and customer needs. This may not be a dedicated role early on, but like any major initiative, you need a champion.
Just like raising a child, the marketing habits you establish early set the tone for later in your company’s life. Here are the key elements to get right, to help establish good behaviors for when you need them most.
Establish your identity. More than just your “brand”, you need to establish the values that your company offers, and how they differentiate you from alternatives. You can’t build the rest of your marketing elements until you have a clear vision of who you are and what unique value you bring to customers.
Get consistent. Once you develop your branding elements (and there are many low-cost, even crowd-sourced, ways to do this on the web), you need to implement guidelines to make sure that all your communications incorporate these elements in a consistent manner. I’m not just talking about logos, colors, and fonts. I’m talking about the tone of your communications, the message you offer, and the means by which you do it. This is the only way you can establish the necessary framework to maintain a genuine brand identity as your company grows, allowing each team member to “make the brand their own,” weaving it into their daily behaviors and decision-making.
Develop a framework for everything. To help enforce the consistency and avoid going out for expensive help every time you need a new publication, invest in templates and guidelines that you can then use to create your own material. A little bit of upfront investment here will save you time and cost later, and speed your ability to put out new content.
Focus on testimonials. The proof of your value is best offered by the customers you have satisfied, so spend your time on building stories around your successes. This type of content is flexible for use in a range of forms and media, from web pages to full articles, and carries far more credibility than internally generated “me too” type literature or web content. One potential low-cost use of such content is through application success profiles.
Be agile, but focused. Early on in your business ventures, you’ll find that you have to make “tweaks” to your message based on what you learn from your customers. Don’t just “allow” for this – relish it. But don’t let it take you too far from your core vision or message, unless you find that you were completely wrong in your initial business plan. If that’s the case, you have more problems than what smart marketing can solve.
This isn’t rocket science, but it takes discipline and focus. So stop yielding to the temptation to view marketing as just “glossing up” your website, and start thinking more strategically. While seemingly mundane at first, only by getting things right initially can you possibly hope to continue growing your company into the future, without breaking the bank today.
Apolinaras is a business operations leader with 12-year track record of building scalable and capital-efficient operations for technology and professional services companies.