If you’re a startup founder who’s looking for someone to build your team, what do you look for in your first marketing hire? It’s a tough question. Before you start holding interviews for your first marketing hire, ask yourself this: what is the purpose marketing in the first place?
What does every (good) marketer do to develop a new brand? They spend time (and lots of it) trying to come up with a brilliant and unforgettable name. But despite all that hard work, great brands often die. Meanwhile, some brands that eschewed the traditional naming process manage to last decades. Is that fair? Not
I originally wrote this as a piece for Huffington Post, which you can find here. Startups face no shortage of uncertainty, and nothing creates more uncertainty than going through a pivot. A pivot can be a soul-wrenching, sleepless, and hair-pulling ordeal that can leave you feeling like the whole startup thing was never worth it.
This post is Part III in series called “How To Pick a Target Market for a B2B Startup.” To start at the beginning, click here. Marketing guru Regis McKenna once wrote, “marketing people should be on the road half the time–meeting customers, talking to people, building relationships, and seeing where the next product is going.” You
This is Part II in a three-part series about finding your ideal target market. Click here if you’d like to start from the beginning. In part I of this series, I showed you how to use brainstorming and a bit of research to build a short list of potential target markets for your B2B startup.
In a B2B startup, there are two questions that you must answer before your company gets very far: what is the product, and who are you going to sell it to? In today’s post, I’m going to focus on the second question, and show you a 3-part process you can use to find the exact market
As a marketer, it’s not uncommon to feel tempted to emulate the marketing strategy of another company you admire. While there’s nothing wrong with drawing some inspiration from great companies, there’s a big risk involved with following someone else’s footsteps: they may be at a different point on the path, or might be on a different
You’re about to go on the fifteenth date with that “perfect” girl. Everything’s been great. She thinks your corny jokes are funny, she loves watching The Profit with you, and heck, she doesn’t even seem to have any annoying friends. She might be the one. But then one day, things… just… stall. Not only is she suddenly “too busy” to
One of the defining characteristics of a startup is that you never seem to have enough people to get everything done. Marketing is no exception. The desire for extra marketing help is always going to be there, whether you’re a team of one or one hundred. While recognizing that you need to add manpower is simple, deciding whether
“Come on,” my dad quipped, pretending not to notice the look of sheer horror pasted on my face. “It’ll be fun. I promise.” I was just a 9-year old kid, getting ready to ride a roller coaster called the Loch Ness Monster: 3,240 feet of bright yellow steel tubing wrapped around itself like a two contortionists playing a
We don’t send emails very often, but when we do, we make sure they contain great conent. Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss out.