Marketing lessons learned leading a startup marketing team

After two and and a half years leading the marketing team at UserIQ, I thought I would slow down and take some time to reflect back on what I've learned over the years. I remember when I first started at the company and we had about 10 full time people in a tiny office space at ATDC, a startup incubator at Georgia Tech, and we were getting ready to finalize our Series A. There was no marketing team in place and honestly, I’m not sure that when our amazing founder, Aaron Aycock, decided to bring me on at the time that he even knew what to expect out of a head of marketing.

Since then I’m so proud of all we’ve accomplished as an organization, like being named one of TAG’s Top 40 Most Innovative Companies for three consecutive years, winning the Best B2B Startup in 2017, and we even acquired a company.

I thought it would be fitting to take some time to share some marketing lessons learned over the years that I hope will be helpful to anyone leading marketing in a startup and wondering where to start:

• Talk to your customers: I wish I had done more of this from day one at the company, but it is something I learned over time: make an effort to get on calls the customer success team is having or do in-person visits if possible and learn why your customers are using your product. This helps inform messaging and how you position your product. Plus, building those relationships makes it easier to ask for case studies and testimonials later on.
• Box outside your weight class: When you’re a startup and you're trying to gain brand recognition, figure out how you can work (at no to low-cost) with leaders in the industry in some capacity. One tactic that worked great for us was hosting monthly webinars on topics relevant to our audience and inviting industry leaders in the SaaS space from different companies that we wanted to work with like, Salesforce, Drift, Mailchimp and more to join us as panelists. We would make it super easy for the panelist and give them pre-written emails, social media posts and images to share to encourage them to invite their network and promote not only themselves as thought leaders, but help drive new leads for UserIQ as well.

People would often ask me how we would get some of the speakers we did for our webinars and eventually our roadshows and if we knew them in advance and the answer was usually no. 90% of the time it was just cold outreach via LinkedIn with a really personalized message. I actually really loved the challenge of seeking out amazing people and seeing how I could send a message that would resonate with them!

•  Invest in your brand: First, invest in your own keyword terms, or someone else (hint: your competitors) will and it becomes an expensive bidding war to get them back. If you’re a new company or just starting your marketing efforts, set aside some budget to invest here.  Second, protect your brand and be conscious of how internal employees are presenting it and talking about it. When we realized everyone at the organization was presenting our elevator pitch differently we held a contest on Halloween and made EVERY person (not just sales) present their pitch dressed in their Halloween costume and do it in character.

• Be aware of your competitors, but don’t obsess: With tools like SpyFu or NachoAnalytics it’s easier than ever to fixate on what your competitors are doing and it’s tempting to make quick reactions based on data you may see or not see. Of course, you want to be aware of the competitive landscape, but don’t spend too much time overanalyzing who is spending what or make big decisions based on something you think you see. Instead, use your own data, your customer’s input and market insights to inform your strategy.
• Spend your time (and money) on the content that's going to tell your story and can be repurposed: While you should spend time writing blog posts and small content pieces, focus on a big rock content piece that will position you in the industry to tell your story and give you something you can utilize for longer than a week. Some of our most successful pieces have been reports that we've done where we've surveyed our audience and developed a report a findings. One of these reports that we did in December of 2017 that started the conversation on Customer Success + Product Management alignment in the SaaS industry is still one of our top downloads more than a year later. From this report we developed multiple blog posts, an infographic, a slideshare, a few articles, a webinar, and tons of email and social content.
•  Don’t be afraid to fail: I think half of the fun of a startup is being able to move fast and pivot if something doesn’t work. For example, we had talked to a lot of companies in our space that had great results with content syndication, so we decided to try it out. After a month and a half, our SDRs were reporting that all the leads from it were not a fit and were being moved to do not contact, so we cut the program and invested money in other efforts. Fail quickly, learn from it and move on…and hopefully, you have a supportive leader that encourages this style of learning.
• Put down the megaphone: You may get really excited when you join a startup and think you immediately need to hire that PR firm, a marketing agency or start working with an analyst firm to help you spread the news about how awesome your company is and gain broader brand recognition/thought leadership. I would advise taking a pause and building up the SEO and SEM side of things before doing this. It’s interesting how you will naturally start to gain coverage in publications or be recognized in different vendor reports once you’ve invested and built your brand up enough that there’s content about you online, you are showing up where your competitors are, and you are growing your customer base. Do that first.
•  Build a support system: Get out of the office and find other CMOs and VPs of the marketing that you can lean on for advice when you have questions. You are never going to have all the answers, so don’t be afraid to ask for help. It can be as simple as asking for recommendations on which firm to use for a website redesign or sitting down with a peer and spending an hour deep diving on how they built their ABM program. However, make sure you're always willing to lend a hand when people ask you for help or need a favor.
• Hire people that aren’t you: It’s easy to want to hire people similar to you, but build a team of people that challenge you, that have different skillsets than you and that think differently. Hire first in the area where you are weakest. That leads me to this final thought……

When I think back on the biggest accomplishments over the years at UserIQ, for me, it’s not about the inbound marketing success we’ve had and how we’ve impacted the pipeline, the roadshows we ran across the country, or getting mentioned and recognized alongside competitors, it has been about building and growing an amazing team and everything they’ve taught me.

Ashley, Erika, Kelsey, and Andy (yes, you still count, Bryan) are the scrappiest and best group of people I could have ever imagined working with. You all have endless patience, creative ideas and solutions to solve problems, and a willingness to dig into everything and get your hands really dirty with me. Teamwork really did make the dream work. I hope you all are as proud as I am of the things you’ve built and all you’ve accomplished.