March 1, 2015
Marketing advice for young companies
Much of what I get paid for is advising early-stage companies, especially on messaging and marketing. So let’s try to pull some thoughts together.
For early-stage companies, I’d say:
- Even more than for larger companies, the essence of messaging is to achieve the contradictory goals of excitement and credibility.
- If one of those must be sacrificed, sacrifice excitement. It is by far the easier of the two to regain.
- Note: Both your product and your company need to be credible. When your company is new, both parts of that are formidable challenges.
- Notwithstanding how limited your resources are, don’t rely too much on outside PR. You need to control messaging and key influencer relations yourself.
- Notwithstanding how limited your resources are, you need to address multiple audiences, at least:
- Investors.
- Prospective employees.
- Knowledgeable influencers.
- Not-so-knowledgeable influencers.
- Sales prospects (business folks).
- Sales prospects (technical folks).
Of course, these subjects are much discussed in this blog. The top three overview posts for young companies are probably:
- A strategy worksheet (one of my most influential posts ever).
- A survey of young-company marketing communication essentials, with some generalities at the end.
- A guide to stealth-mode marketing.
If you read those three posts and follow the links in them, you’ll see much of what I have to say about early-stage tech company marketing.
Expanding the list of recommended posts:
- Almost everybody makes mistakes in positioning. (April, 2013)
- There are at least five major kinds of PR and three kinds of PR-centric marketing. (February, 2010)
- I catalogued eight of the many kinds of influencer. (February, 2008)
- I offered some concrete tips on messaging to multiple audiences. (February, 2014)
- Early-stage companies often have exercises in naming. (November, 2013)
Above all, if you’re working with me — my core messaging paradigm is the layered messaging model.
Categories: Marketing communications, Public relations, Startups, Technology marketing
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