How Strategic Marketing Fuels Startup Growth Before Market Entry

Before a startup has its first product in the market, or is actively seeking partnerships, in can be difficult for company leadership to understand why they would want to invest in marketing and external communications.

Investing in the right marketing and communications strategies and activities early on can drive both external momentum and galvanize a startup team. One key challenge, especially for technical founders or operators, is understanding the impact that an investment of time and resources in marketing will have on hitting a startup's milestones. The field of marketing may be completely foreign to the founder, or they may have limited to no exposure to how marketing can ladder up to key business goals. 

In my experience, marketing will help an early-stage firm, ideally in the pre-seed or seed phase, in two key ways:

• Refining the Business Case and Go-to-Market Strategy

In order to build out your startup's positioning and story, your team will need to have defined and resolved upon its target market, the competitive landscape, its ideal customer profile, the primary use case, and an initial go-to-market strategy. By going through the process of committing to what your firm will and won't do, a more focused positioning and story will emerge. This work, in turn, will lead to key organizational choices, such as: the infrastructure investment needed to build out one distribution channel over another, how to integrate the "voice of the customer" into the product development process, or the role that federal or state grants will play in setting organizational priorities. Often, these decisions will directly impact investor "asks."

•  Fundraising

When a tight positioning and company story are presented in a way that 1) brings to life the power of a technology to solve an important and valuable problem, and 2) is presented in a clean, clear, and visually engaging manner, both of which are targeted to the investor, it signals that a company has progressed successfully though strategic decision-making, and has become externally focused. It tracks that this external focus will apply not only to potential investors, but to partners, collaborators, and customers, as well. It is a signal of enterprise readiness.

In closing, using these approaches will help a leadership team to define the specific language and marketing assets that will be most effective in converting partners and customers, and can be used to engage employees to tell a common narrative, using the same words and stories as a company's founders.