Marketing to Lead the Way
Empowered Connection
At every stage of your company’s journey, your success is determined by how well you connect with your stakeholders: employees, investors, customers, and even media contacts.
You need data to understand what really matters to each individual group and the analytics to turn data into actionable insights. You need a leader who can build and grow your core team, then direct and mentor them into a lean, powerful, motivated, creative force to move the needle toward your overall vision.
Finally, you need a leader who does more than facilitate your marketing efforts. You need a leader who empowers your team and your vision to grow now and into the future.
Your next most important hire
What does a CMO do for your startup?
In the early phase of your startup, you might not think of marketing as something you need. When you’re working on product development and raising capital, marketing can seem like a costly and pointless waste of resources.
In the early stage of your startup, your CMO can help create marketing material tailored to your pitches, assisting with fundraising. Their market research can also help prevent costly missteps and product development blunders further down the line. By prioritizing marketing early on in your startup development, you can also signal to investors that you’re making market fit and customer acquisition an early priority.
Depending on the makeup of your founder team, a CMO can help close gaps in other areas, too. If your founder team has highly technical skills and strong analytical skills but falls short on people skills, a good CMO may be able to put a friendly face on the company and add some warmth to your branding at the beginning.
At some point in your startup journey, your “baby” will be presented to the cold, calculating eyes of the marketplace. The counsel of an experienced CMO can help ensure that your product receives a warm welcome and a friendly reception.
Fractional CMOs
For very early startups, one option is to use a Fractional CMO. They perform the duties of a CMO, but they usually work part-time hours while filling the same role for other (non-competing) companies. This can be a more affordable way to get a CMO on board when you're just getting started.
Strategic Planning
Your CMO can do more than lead your marketing department. They can define segments of customers, employees, investors, and media contacts to segment messaging. Strategic planning can encompass more than just customer communication, allowing you to speak to everyone you need to reach.
Data & Analytics
Finding the right information (and figuring out how to make sense of it all) is one of the key roles of the CMO. Even in the earliest stages of product development, data can be used to inform and inspire the next stage of dev or funding. The same data that goes into marketing is invaluable for pitches and investor meetings.
Brand Development
As soon as your brand is known, it is judged. Your CMO can help you build a brand that will strengthen your company. Brand development may also include reputation management, community building, and creating a clear and cohesive brand identity and brand guidelines. Early branding leads to brand cohesion.
Corporate Communication
There’s no such thing as a secret, not when it comes to business. Whether you need someone to manage press relations, crisis communications, or build a great employee relations strategy, your CMO can help out. After all, they’re expert communicators, so you can put that expertise to use in areas adjacent to marketing, too.