When you first start off marketing your company and idea as a founding team, it is the ultimate exercise in cost-benefit analysis. There are so many things you can do, and many of them are both valuable and hard to measure. Additionally, many of these efforts will be less effective before you’ve thought about your early messaging, which we’ve written about in the past here. Once you’re settled on that though, there are some marketing hacks for founders that we’ve learned and you can employ to make you early efforts go a bit further and de-risk the process of starting out.
1. Design scalable marketing materials that can be repurposed. Think about the lifecycle of your marketing assets, and how one asset can be repurposed across a variety of marketing needs. You can design a single content marketing piece that sits behind a gated content wall on your site for inbound, is sent directly (and thoughtfully!) to your buyers to support sales, and which is extrapolated, when the time is right to a whitepaper or a blog you want to publish, or presentation your founder wants to give. Also, create your deck (if you choose to use one!) in such a way that you can pull out individual slides of that deck that can be standalone collateral. These slides can be specific use-cases, visuals of the product, competitive landscape slides, etc. In order for this asset to fulfill all these purposes, it needs to be consistent with your early marketing messaging, which we mentioned previously.
2. Speaking of design, don’t hire a full time designer. Outsource here til it hurts. Don’t hire a full time designer until you absolutely need it and they have a consistent workflow. You could hire a marketing generalist with some design chops. Alternatively though, you can use services like Upwork to find a designer or Konsus which employs a great team of designers for this very purpose. Also be sure to get an editable copy of your collateral from them so you can tweak and repurpose it as your messaging and needs inevitably evolve. It is important not to overlook these editable copies as they are some of the best marketing hacks for founders as they allow them to make small adjustments without any additional costs.
3. Construct a consolidated, multipurpose marketing techstack. Design a tech stack that you can use to market to prospective or current customers across their lifecycle too. Intercom and Drift can serve as the very first touchpoint when someone enters your website, and as in-product marketing tools, as well as analytics that might be used to rank leads or customers to tailor messaging further for them. Zapier can stitch together an inbound form on your site, to Slack and your CRM too to consolidate communications with customers you’re marketing to. Google Analytics or Mixpanel are cheaper products that can serve as site analytics to optimize first touch points, in-product analytics for user research, and SEO/social tools to understand channels that engaged consumers use to reach your site, so you can double down on marketing spend there.
4. Start an informal content exchange with complimentary partners in the space. You can double your content output and create a solid foundation for your SEO at the same time by linking up with a complementary brand to publish or republish blogs together on each other’s site. This is beneficial for multiple reasons: 1.) you get twice the content output for the same effort, 2.) by backlining to your site from another site, you boost your SEO ratings, 3.) this is a great way to de-risk linking up with another entity to trade leads and start a referral program, which we’ve written much on here.
We hope these marketing hacks for founders help you spend less and produce more as you weigh the cost-benefit analysis of starting up your marketing engine and head off to growing confidently!
If you liked “Marketing Hacks For Founders” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog.
