The First Marketing Hire You Need to Make for Your Startup

Where to start with staffing for marketing in your startup organization? If you are a technical founder, this decision can be especially fraught.

Hire or contract for graphic design? For media relations? Hire or contract a digital marketing guru who can handle the website, social media, and SEO? Someone who can develop multi-year marketing strategy, or someone to execute the plan day in and day out?

In speaking with founders, especially early stage founders, I often hear stories of frustration -- they were pitched a specific tactic as "the answer" by a service provider -- only to have the provider fall far short of expectations. The founder is out precious funds, with limited results, and other marketing opportunities were not even addressed. Often, the founder has sought specialized marketing services too early for the stage of their startup.

With that in mind, my first recommended marketing hire or consultant for the early stage startup is a Marketing Generalist -- someone with experience working across branding, customer research, marketing campaigns, digital and social content creation, the marketing tech stack, and possibly PR / media relations. The level of experience and leadership (and thus the job title) will vary depending upon your business goals and level of funding.

The successful Marketing Generalist will:

• Have existing agency and freelance relationships that they can leverage, ensuring higher quality and faster progress
• Understand how to negotiate pricing and deliverables, saving your firm money
• Know the most efficient and effective ways to accomplish marketing goals
• Be adept at setting up the right systems to support company growth
• Be able to oversee select marketing and communications activities in-house

If you are ready to make that first hire or contractor selection, check out our resources at Ladder 17. Happy hunting.