Even startups on tight budgets can maximize their marketing impact

Search engine optimization, PR, paid marketing, emails, social — marketing and communications is crowded with techniques, channels, solutions and acronyms. It’s little wonder that many startups strapped for time and money find defining and executing a sustainable marketing campaign a daunting prospect.

The sheer number of options makes it difficult to determine an effective approach, and my view is that this complexity often obscures the obvious answer: A startup’s best marketing asset is its story. The knowledge and expertise of its team, together with the why and the how of its offering provides the most compelling content.

Leveraging this material with best practice techniques enables any startup, no matter how limited its budget, to run an effective marketing campaign.

I know this approach works, because this is exactly what I did with my co-founder Alex Feiglstorfer when we set up Storyblok. To be clear, we are developers not marketers. However, our previous experience building CMS systems taught us that the main driver of organic engagement for most businesses was customer conversations around content.

Specifically, sharing experiences, expertise and what we learned. We had committed nearly all of our available cash to developing our product, so we knew that the only way to market Storyblok was to do it all ourselves.

As a result, we focused solely on problem-solving content. This took the form of tutorials on web development and opinion pieces on headless CMS and other topics within our areas of expertise. The trick was that what we published wasn’t made just for marketing, it was based on our own internal documentation of problems we encountered as we developed our product. In essence, we were “learning in public.” Through this approach we were able to acquire thousands of customers in our first year.

Retelling this story isn’t to blow my own trumpet, it’s to make clear that you don’t have to be a marketer by training or commit a huge amount of time and resources to successfully market your startup. So, how do you get started?

Getting your structure and technology right

Although there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to how you organize your startup’s marketing function, there are some basic principles that apply in nearly every situation. A recent survey of 400+ executives from CMS Wire helpfully identified the following factors as the “top digital customer experience challenges” for businesses:

1. Limited budget/resources.
2. Siloed systems and fragmented customer data.
3. Limited cross-department alignment/collaboration.
4. Outdated/limited technology, operations or processes.
5. Lack of in-house expertise/skills.

Challenges two to four are the pitfalls that we can focus on avoiding. They are directly related to how a startup produces, organizes and distributes its content.

With regard to the siloing of systems and fragmentation of customer data, the overriding goal is to ensure all your systems are integrated and speak to one another. In practice, this means that the data gathered in different departments — whether its feedback from sales, engagement on your website, customer service responses or product development information — is collected in a uniform and methodical manner and is readily accessible across the business.

Many startups make the mistake of choosing systems and employing procedures to solve the immediate needs of the department that requires them. They fail to look at how their tech stack is geared to share data and insights and build a picture of the full customer journey. Understanding the entire picture is needed to, among many other things, tailor marketing content and accurately measure its impact.

Hand in hand with this issue is the problem highlighted in point three: limited cross-department alignment/collaboration. To me, this is one of the major changes taking place in the marketing world. A marketing department can no longer be an island separate from the inner workings of a business. It needs to be multidisciplinary and sit across all the functions of a company. In essence, a marketing team needs to incorporate a range of elements such as data science, development and customer service.

For startups, this is actually quite straightforward to execute. It means every team member needs to be part of the marketing effort. This doesn’t mean paying lip service by retweeting the odd company post — instead, it involves basing some of their performance on clear marketing-related deliverables.

One member, ideally with some marketing experience, should be in charge of coordinating, execution and overarching strategy, but generating content and facilitating and managing its distribution across different channels should be the responsibility of the entire company. Not only does this maximize the amount of content that is produced, it also makes it more diverse. For example, developers can run webinars or your product team can blog about customer success stories.

The Klaviyo EC-1

Creating and publishing content

Once you have your tech stack supporting your marketing initiatives and the entire team is contributing to the effort, it’s time to decide how to get the best content to your potential customers.

First, let’s talk about the cardinal sin of content marketing: Using multiple systems for multiple communication channels. Not only is this hugely inefficient, it’s also prone to human error. Your team will need to learn, manage and monitor a host of different systems, which makes it expensive to maintain, laborious to use and often results in a disjointed customer experience.

An all-in-one solution may sound like the obvious answer, but be very cautious about working with a monolithic solution that has been “expanded.” CMS platforms such as WordPress, Adobe and Drupal that are not built to be, for example, headless, will come with a lot of legacy code and workarounds. Look very closely at how the CMS has been built and whether its core offering aligns with your needs. We would strongly recommend considering cloud-native solutions that have an API-first approach, as they provide marketing teams with the most flexibility and can scale alongside your startup.

As we discussed above, marketing is not a solo exercise that falls to the founding team or one or two specialists. For your entire team to be involved, they need to have visibility and, in some cases, access to your CMS system. This lets them see engagement patterns and extract insights that will inform their content initiatives and even influence their “day job.”

In terms of actually coordinating your content campaign, most startups can use a simple rule — more content is better. Naturally, this should not mean sacrificing quality, but the reality is that the more assets you have available — whether that’s tutorials, thought leadership pieces, webinars or videos from your latest meetup — the greater the number of options you have for distributing content via your channels. Consider giving each team or team member a specific topic or flavor of content to create. This will ensure a steady pipeline that can be managed by your marketing lead.

Measuring success is different for startups

Every good startup knows the value of testing and refining. Looking at basic engagement levels to assess the impact of each piece of content is the minimum you should be doing. However, a mistake I often see is that startup founders view the performance of a content campaign through the KPIs of a more mature business.

Startups, especially those on tight budgets, need to focus just as much on “internal” factors such as the time to market of new content, productivity and relevance.

The time-to-market factor is a critical piece of intelligence that can influence your wider business strategy. If, for example, a new feature is developed, but the lead time for generating and distributing content means no news reaches customers until several days or weeks after it goes live, that could be indicative of serious internal communication or project management problems. And if you have low productivity rates in producing content, it could also indicate that your CMS system or general tech stack is hindering your content management setup.

As for relevance, good engagement numbers can obscure the fact that your content is becoming stale and repetitive. New customers may be engaged, but existing ones could be turning off. This is why it’s important to look beyond the basic numbers and consider factors such as customer churn when assessing your content’s performance.

That said, the easiest way to fully judge the relevance and quality of your content is often one that everyone forgets — actually looking at the content itself. Ask yourself if the content still represents where your startup is and what you want people to know. If the answer is no, then chances are, your team is creating content on autopilot. Injecting dynamism back into the campaign is not hard: You simply have to review your content calendar regularly to ensure it is in step with your commercial plans and ambitions.

Don’t lose sight of your goal

What I’ve covered above is naturally just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to building your startup’s marketing function. However, as I cautioned, don’t let the complexity and choice in approach muddle your thinking. The best marketing campaigns I’ve seen executed all had one thing in common: Simple messages that were conveyed authentically.

You and your team will be passionate about what they are doing — make sure that shines through to your customers and a lot of your content will create itself. If you make sure your tech enables your marketing and everyone contributes to the campaign, you will be well on your way.

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