This is article #43 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

When you are building a product in startup mode, nobody knows who you are. If you’re following an inbound marketing playbook, you’re creating a story, establishing your messaging and creating content to attract targets to your website to convert them to leads. As you create more content, you’ll start to earn more brand authority and trust in your market. If you are creating quality content that provides unique and valuable insight to your target persona‘s problems, you will start to become a thought leader. Here is how it works:

1. Identify your thought leader

To establish a thought leader persona, you need to identify a person that will be the face of your brand and the go-to “thought leader” for whatever problem your product is solving. This may be your CEO, VP of Marketing or Founder. Once this person is selected, they should be the face of content. That means:

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This is article #42 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

With the right tools and technology, marketing effectiveness can easily be measured. Gone are the days of “50% of your marketing is working, you just don’t know which half.” In this series, I’ve outlined some of the top metrics that B2B startups need to account for when measuring marketing. However, those metrics don’t mean much unless stakeholders from marketing, sales and leadership can easily access them and draw conclusions. To make that happen, you need to build dashboards.

Your marketing automation system is typically the tool used to create and view dashboards. As you are getting an initial view of your marketing metrics set up, consider the following:

1. Configure in the marketing automation system, CRM or BI tool

Build your dashboards using the reporting tools in the marketing automation system (e.g. Hubspot), CRM (e.g. Salesforce) or business intelligence (BI) tool (e.g. Birst). Typically this tool is pretty straightforward to use. Here is what Hubspot looks like:

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This is article #41 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

Throughout this series on marketing, we’ve covered quite a bit about crafting a startup’s story with marketing and positioning. This translates into ebooks, webinars and other inbound campaigns. However, there is a critical source of information during the buyer’s journey that marketing does not have full control over: what messages the sales team conveys. As a marketer, you need to put effort into training the sales team on your messaging and positioning. You need them to embrace your brand’s story and make it their own. It’s essential that you conduct effective training for sales. As you do so, consider the following:

1. Make the story a part of the onboarding process

Every time a new employee joins your team, you need to educate them about your story. It should be hammered into their mind from their first day on the job. You need a comprehensive slide deck that marketing presents to new hires, breaking down the core concepts of your story. Depending on their role, it may be valuable for new hires to read your ebooks, listen to webinars and join sales demos to see the messaging in action.

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This is article #40 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

Ah, swag. It’s the seemingly limitless supply of plastic junk that we pile into tote bags at events. Companies spend thousands of dollars on branded swag as giveaways for prospects and customers. The goals are noble: attract people to your booth at events and get your branding front and center as their desk decoration. Swag can certainly be beneficial, but alone will not make an event booth a winner. I’ve always been wary of investing heavily in swag, so let’s outline how to get ROI from swag and the best approach to selecting items for your business. Consider the following:

1. Candy can’t lose

I admit it, I have a sweet tooth. But hey, so do a lot of us, so keep candy in mind as a simple, inexpensive and effective giveaway. Stick with the big bag of assorted name brand chocolates. I’ve tried printing branded candy… the chocolate is usually low quality. The wrapper ends up in the trash, so just stick to better candy that people actually enjoy.

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This is article #39 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

One of the most frequent requests that the marketing team receives from the sales team is for new collateral. It seems like whenever a new objection is encountered or new use-case identified, additional flyers or ebooks are requested. Needless to say, a growing company’s collateral can quickly become unorganized and disjointed. In order to maintain structure, consider the following guidelines:

1. Define an owner: Product Marketing

The ideal owner for collateral is the Product Marketing Manager (PMM). They should be listening to sales calls, interviewing customers and crafting the company’s messaging and positioning story. While many stakeholders will be pushing for different collateral items, the PMM needs to act as the central hub, prioritizing the collateral roadmap.

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This is article #38 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

The marketing team should meet weekly for at least 30 minutes. There is often a large agenda of items to discuss, so it’s helpful to establish a structure to keep the meeting organized. Consider the following for weekly marketing meetings:

1. Start with highs and lows

I like to start each meetings with a round of highs and lows. Each team member shares an update about the best part of their weekend (high) and then the worst part — often humorous (low). It’s a great ice breaker that helps the team bond and establishes a talking mood. Try to ensure that the team members keep each update brief.

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This is article #36 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

Blog posts are an integral part of inbound content strategy. They provide easily accessible information to target personas and drive them to downloadable content. Launching a blog at a startup is a necessity to convert targets to leads, so let’s breakdown a simple set of steps to get started:

1. Build the infrastructure

Maintaining a blog requires a content management system, such as WordPress. If you are using a marketing automation system, such as Hubspot, it has built in blogging functionality. It is advantageous to use that because it tightly integrates with the analytics, landing pages and call-to-action (CTA) features.

Some blog systems have templates and others may require you to code HTML, CSS and sometimes proprietary content management language from scratch to customize the blog. Designing a blog is a large undertaking, much like developing a website. Plan on a web developer working on it for 6 weeks and include time to A/B test different concepts.

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This is article #35 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

Social media is an important distribution channel for inbound content. Depending on the target persona, social media can also be a fantastic way to communicate, drive word of mouth referrals and generally build brand recognition.

There are plenty of great guides on effective social media and community management. Let’s focus this post on building the foundation of a social strategy for a B2B startup:

1. Lock down the right handle for all channels

The first step for social media is to identify a handle (i.e. username) that can be consistently used across all digital properties. This may be difficult as many handles are already taken. In general, try to keep it short, avoid hyphens, underscores and random numbers.

It may not be possible to get the best handle on every channel, and that is acceptable as long as the most important channels have the right one. For example, my company has the Twitter handle @netpulse, Facebook page facebook.com/netpulse but Instagram handle @netpulseapp.

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This is article #34 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

While you may only attend massive trade shows once or twice a year, your sales team often finds themselves setting up a table at a conference to meet with prospects and sell. Every industry has these conferences, and while expensive and time consuming to attend, they usually yield leads. To make them worth it, you need to carefully plan the logistics and get the details right. After stumbling my way through the first few, here is the approach that my team now takes:

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