Having worked with many startups, a question I’ve always been asked is what role marketing has to play in a startup given the operational limitations of the business. In this article, we’ll share with you the role marketing can play in early-stage startups, and how marketing can be divided between 3 core pillars: strategy, creative and execution.

Strategy – laying the foundation for long-term success

In the early stages of a startup, not many people are familiar with your brand and its value proposition. Having a well-defined marketing strategy is equivalent to having a roadmap on where to place the best bets on your marketing investments – be it in crafting communication, advertising, partnerships, etc. The strategic framework is to ensure that no matter how the business continues to evolve as they do in startups, potential customers are able to understand the value proposition and put your brand into the consideration set.

To achieve this, it involves conducting comprehensive market research, understanding your target audience, competitive landscape, and channel strategy, and also how to position your brand in a way that is unique, distinctive, and advantageous to the brand. This step typically involves a lot of data curation, insights generation, an understanding of how consumers behave within the category as well as the channels the brand will play in.

While this step would benefit from extensive market research, a proxy method of conducting this analysis is to leverage digital data from sources such as BrandWatch, SEMRush, Statista, Google Trends and similar credible sources. In today’s world, digital data helps us to discover quickly what consumers are motivated to create and share online. This method of analysis can help us identify the different ways potential customers of a brand would behave, and hence build the most effective communication approach.

Creative – Surprise and delight 

If you would ask yourself, what was the last ad you’ve seen? It’d be difficult to get an answer. But if you think about the last content that you remember, you’d have a clear reason why you have that in your memory. Was it a cute cat video? Or a self-help video with quotes that really resonated with you? Maybe it was a friend’s dance video that you shared on your own social.

The role of creativity is to capture attention in a memorable and distinctive manner. This means, creating content that makes people stop. A concept that resonates with the passion and pain points of your consumers, yet visualized in a delightful manner. Creativity can come in the form of a story, visual effects, interactive experiences, and so on – sometimes it breaks the mundane of everyday life and creates a reality that defies physics, and sometimes it illustrates the unspoken sentiment of a parent who is struggling between different responsibilities and their own needs.

In early-stage startups, you have the opportunity to create a brand impression from a clean state. Finding a great creative that can bridge their ideas with the strategic approach would make a powerful recipe for compelling new customers to try your brand.

Execution – Ideas are great, but execution is the last-mile delivery

A well-crafted strategy and creative concepts are only as impactful as their execution. The execution pillar is all about putting your marketing plans into action with precision and finesse. From implementing digital marketing campaigns to managing social media presence and optimizing search engine visibility, execution ensures your marketing efforts reach the right audience at the right time. Effective execution involves measuring the success of campaigns through data analysis and making agile adjustments to maximize results. It’s the engine that drives your startup’s marketing initiatives forward, delivering tangible outcomes and measurable growth.

One thing teams usually forget in execution is that nothing goes as per plan, and there’s a need to make decisions that will pivot the execution. A great project leader is able to completely understand the strategic direction of each marketing activity and is able to take the right judgment calls in these decisions, so that the end output still contributes back to the business objectives, albeit in a different manner.

For startups, with limited resources in terms of time and money, this is where prioritization is important to understand what are the activities that can drive the biggest impact, and how you sequence the series of activities such that they will work holistically to achieve your business goals.