Startup Marketing is a Team Sport | Crowded Ocean

Never before has startup marketing been more specialized, data-driven and, therefore, difficult to staff and challenging to manage.

What was once known as ?outbound marketing? was dominated by push or broadcast-oriented tactics (TV, radio, print, direct mail) to a diverse market of customers. That?s evolved into the pull or ?inbound marketing? principles advocated by the team at Hubspot. Inbound marketing is about leveraging relevant content to ?get found? by the prospects you?re trying to reach.

Inbound marketing is dominated by content marketing, social media (sometimes grouped with PR and called ?earned media?) and search engine marketing. In our work with startups, we rely upon an ecosystem of vendor specialists to deliver the components of inbound marketing. That?s actually a huge range of marketing specialties, including naming/identity, SEO, SEM, social media, video, writing, presentation development, web design and development, PR, demand generation, email, events and tradeshows and more.

The trick is to find and mobilize specialists in their discipline who already speak startup and who can be trained in your product domain. But if you could really get what you want, your young startup would use a handful of people who could each span 3 or 4 of those 10 or 12 disciplines of marketing.? That was possible in the days of outbound marketing, but no more.

Before, you could hire a writer who could handle the writing tasks of brochures, web and direct mail.? Now, it takes a writer with deep experience to create content for web pages, landing pages, presentations, brochures, and more. There are writers with sub-specialties in PR (case studies, contributed articles, news releases) or in technical writing (white papers, technical briefs, applications notes, data sheets.)? Based upon our experience, finding a generalist who can cover several disciplines ? writing for the web and maybe also PR and then for an email marketing campaign ? is really impractical.

That?s why using an ecosystem model of vendors is a fit for many young startups.? In an ecosystem model, we recruit and manage a team of specialty contractors in the appropriate sequence rather than try to find a couple of one-size-fits-all generalists. Managed correctly, a young company can master and leverage inbound marketing for a great ROI on their marketing spend.

Source: http://www.crowdedocean.com/best-practices-2/startup-marketing-is-a-team-sport/

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