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.Similar Posts:

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I wasn’t able to make it to LaunchCamp Boston today, but was still able to virtually participate via the live video and Twitter streams. During a discussion on Twitter with two great marketing folks, Bobbie Carlton and Rachel Levy, I made several remarks:

1. Seasoned marketing pros should realize that “marketing” is becoming a dirty word (right behind PR) and evolve.
2. Marketing pros should stop fighting the fact that branding, PR, communications, content creation, “websites”, etc. are no longer being recognized as part of the marketing silo.
3. Businesses don’t need marketing teams, they need customer listeners/conversationalists who are deeply involved in customer anthropology.

Why is this my opinion?

1. Much has changed over the last decade with how customers interact with brands. A deeper transparency and conversation are now required to engage customers.
2. 2. The marketing silo is gone. Branding, listening, and communicating activities have transformed into something that engages the entire company – customer development. Customers define your branding, help you with content and product development, and provide your company with the publicity.
3. The marketing model of broadcast, analyze, and broadcast again is on its way out. Customers no longer tolerate being talked at – they demand that you listen to them. This new model is a constant loop of indentifying early adopters, developing products with the continuous feedback of the early customers, engaging mainstream customers with the help of those early adopters, and empowering mainstream customers to promote the brand. Rinse and repeat!
4. CUSTOMER ANTHROPOLOGY is the future. Strategies have changed and it’s no longer effective to have a traditional marketing model of yelling/broadcasting through the biggest proverbial bullhorn a company can afford (expensive launch events, advertising, PR, etc.). It is all about getting into your customers’ psyche, anticipating their reactions, and truly satisfying customers’ real needs. School-taught squeezing of customers into demographics, verticals, etc. is no longer adequate.

That all said, I may get a lot of flack for this article from my old-school marketing friends. Sorry, but a bit of constructive criticism is always good.  Please chime in the comments or send me an email. I want this to be start of the conversation, not just a one-sided article.

Photo credit: Carol Browne

About the author:
Apolinaras “Apollo” Sinkevicius is a business operations leader with 12-year track record of building scalable and capital-efficient operations for technology and professional services companies.
He specializes in business operations, corporate culture, human capital, and technology issues.
To learn more about Apolinaras “Apollo” Sinkevicius please visit his site TheOperationsGuy.com

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A problem we’ve all seen too often is when a product or service is dreamed up, and no one wants to buy it. Most of us can list four or five examples of this right away. These duds should have been abandoned before too much time and money was invested.
What are the two major causes of this problem?

1. Family and friends. The people closest to you are actually the worst at helping you develop a product or service customers will pay to use. F&Fs are there to support you in your endeavors and not to act as your product development team.
2. Faux customers. Many of us nod in approval of some idea… until we have to pay for it. The feedback with the highest value is that from someone who will whip out their checkbook to become your first customer.

How do we solve this problem and avoid becoming another failure statistic? The solution is extremely simple: never develop anything by yourself; pick up the phone, get face to face, and go pound the streets.

Here is a quick example about how I approached my personal marketing challenge and how “customer listening” not only led me to a “Eureka moment”, but also saved me tons of time. I was running out of business cards and working on developing my business card 2.0. I did not want to merely tweak what I had, I wanted something new. My big issue with business card 1.0 was that very few people could tell what I did for a living by looking at it. I rushed into designing it and did not bother to ask my customers for their input.
So I got feedback from the general public (via Twitter), close friends in professional circles (via Facebook and e-mail), and perspective customers (face to face) that I knew would tell me their true opinion. People told me how to sell myself to them, what they really valued, and what they really did not like. The “Eureka moment” I mentioned above occurred when I realized that the vast majority of people are much more likely to tell you what you really need (not want) to hear, if you establish trust and enable/reward candor.

I case you are wondering, here is how the finished business card looks like.

Front

Back

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I came across a fantastic post on Justin Levy’s That’s Great PR! blog. Since the most successful startups are in constant mode of evolution, internal communications are crucial. We can’t afford to not have 100% of our team behind us. The subject of internal marketing and communication strategies is important in any economy.

One of the biggest branding/marketing failures I have seen in my career was due to decisions made in a vacuum. The founders were all fired up about the new strategy, but they failed to market it to the staff. They were the only people in the company who were involved in the process. Worse yet, since founders never really sold the service, they had no idea how customers perceived the brand. Staff refused to use new marketing materials and new terminology. It took a while, but founders had to go back to the drawing board after dumping all that money. Unfortunately, money was not the only resource wasted. Morale took a huge hit too.

How do we make sure to stay clear from such a huge landmine?
#1. Involve your staff in crafting the marketing strategy. View from the front lines is much more detailed than the one from the command room. No one lost from extensive brainstorming with the team. WARNING: if your team is not pounding the streets, than everyone needs to get out of the building and get in front of the customers. I don’t believe that there is such thing as interacting too much with a customer. For a great primer on the importance of customer development and what happens if you don’t, please watch
a fantastic lecture Steve Blank has delivered at Stanford.
#2. If you can’t sell the new strategy to the staff, you will not be able to sell it to the customer. It is that simple.

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