Your startup doesn’t need a marketing team—and other early-stage marketing tips

As your startup begins its marketing efforts, it’s important to spend scarce resources wisely. Keep in mind that startups have different marketing needs and challenges than established companies. It makes sense to employ strategies suited the size and stage of your business.

The MaRS Entrepreneur’s Toolkit has launched new articles that explore marketing best practices for startups. We discuss:

• Conducting market research that is effective for startups: Find out what relevant information your early-stage company needs about your potential customers so that you can craft a targeted marketing message.

• Developing your initial brand strategy: It takes time to develop a brand. Learn what you need to focus on now and things to do (and not do) to successfully advance your brand.

• Getting started with digital advertising: Take advantage of the instant feedback and analytics that digital advertising provides. With digital advertising, startups can optimize tight resources by stopping, starting or changing campaigns very quickly.

• Using digital marketing analytics: The key to managing the performance of your digital marketing is to use digital marketing analytics. The most important takeaways are to measure, track, analyze and learn. But check out the article for more details.

• Scaling and deploying a successful growth strategy: Don’t scale too soon! Have an appropriate growth strategy for your startup. There are two levers for growth you can pull: quality and quantity. Which one to pull? It depends on the complexity of your sales channel.

• Not building a dedicated marketing team: During your customer discovery and validation stages, you do not need a marketing team per se. Your startup team should work all together on your sales, marketing and business development activities—these are not separate tasks.

Other new published topics include implementing a process to monitor your marketing analytics, identifying effective distribution channels and delivering a superior customer experience.

Over the summer, we’ll publish content on differentiation, customer service, public relations and more.

Have a topic you’d like us to explore? Let us know. I’m at nblase@marsdd.com.