Marketing for Startups – 2 Buckets That Matter

Updated 8/3/2022 / Startup Marketing

Startup Marketing Perspectives

Lean Marketing and the Power of Insights

We must look at startup marketing in two very important buckets — insight and acquisition. Insight is the most important. To me, at least. The reason is because it informs everything else. It all goes back to Alberto. It’s about preparation at every stage. It’s not about time spent on preparation. He talks about, quantifiably, it’s 55 minutes to 5, but for us, it is about the perspective of what you’re learning. Can it be turned into an actionable response, actionable knowledge?

And that’s what insight is all about for us, in a start-up marketing environment. Insight is about: What can we do with the data we have to move us forward for growth. And growth can be for anything — growth for traffic, growth for understanding, growth for clients, growth for leads, growth for testimonials.

Whatever the growth you need, it has to have an actionable knowledge component to move forward. One of the things we do in the insight bucket, initially for start-ups, is we look at what we call pre-sights. With insights, you’re looking at data. You’re looking at responses to things.

But for pre-sights, we’re saying just set ourselves up for success. We want to know what a company does. And why do you do it? What is the industry and market pitch again? Do you have any insights? Have you done a SWOT analysis before you jumped into all of this?

Customers! Some stuff around the need to know who to go after and why is important. We can always ask this after we ask what the hell the company does and why. But we really need to know who are your customers and why they should be your customers. And if you have any. Because sometimes people go “Oh, yeah! We’ve already got a few customers onboard.” Well, it’s important to interview those customers and understand, based on the insight they will share, as to why they bought your product. Do you have any demographic assumptions? Is age a factor? Is gender a factor?

Is where you live a factor in people buying your stuff? Do you know any personas? What are you trying to solve in terms of a problem? What are the jobs to be done that are needed to accomplish these things? Again, we’re about your products, and the resources that you have also rolled up into these pre-sights.

Do you have anybody in your marketing department? Are you going to hire somebody? Are you going to use outside resources for this? How are we going to develop content to support the fuel that is needed to drive marketing efforts? For me, where we start on insight is in the pre-sights. It’s getting that background information.

Anecdotally, I’ve shared this with you before, I took a speed-reading course once. I didn’t do all that well. But what I did learn was, from the instructor, he says before you start a book to speed-read, read the prefix. Read the intro. Read the back covers. Build the background knowledge of what this is about, what this book is going to be, before you start trying to zip through it. And you will notice a huge improvement on your retention. And the same thing, I think, applies here. So that’s why pre-sights within the insight category is so important.