This is article #33 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

Here’s what I think happened: engineers are always talking about the “stack” they develop in: simply the list of programming languages and template libraries they use to program. Marketers maybe felt a little jealous and also wanted to have a cool way of explaining all of the tools we use. Therefore the emergence of the term “marketing stack.” Similar to engineering, this is a list of the many software applications marketers use to manage campaigns, measure and develop marketing activities.

The competitive landscape for marketing tools is an absolute bloodbath — there are hundreds of valuable SaaS apps for marketers to leverage for better performance and efficiency. Selecting the right mix of tools (i.e. stack) is important to ensure they all work together seamlessly.

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This is article #32 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

Despite the explosive growth in digital marketing over the last decade, good old fashioned email continues to be a primary channel for inbound marketing. Once targets provide their contact information to download a piece of valuable content they become a lead. You now have an opportunity to email them additional content each week, continuing to nurture the relationship until that lead “raises their hand” to request a demo, therefore becoming an MQL.

The weekly email campaigns are incredibly important since they are often directly responsible for driving MQLs. To keep you organized, divide your email marketing into two categories:

1. Plain text emails

These emails look as if they were sent personally and have a familiar look that drives responses. They are best utilized in nurture workflows or automatic responses to an action, like downloading a piece of content.

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This is article #30 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

Suppose your startup is launching a new product. Your product managers have identified what to build, the engineering team successfully built it and now you are ready to bring it to market. So… what happens next? The marketing team is responsible for defining the product positioning, messaging, packaging and go-to-market strategy. You’ll need to answer the following questions:

• How to describe the product to your target persona?
• How does the product fit in with your broader positioning?
• What marketing activities do you need to sell the product?

Let’s break down the process into simple steps:

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This is article #29 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

The marketing and selling process does not stop once a prospect becomes a customer. Especially if your business has recurring revenue (i.e. customers pay monthly and can leave anytime) it is critical that you continue to market new products and valuable content to your customer base. To keep things simple, I separate customer content marketing into 3 categories:

• Content about the industry
• Content about how to maximize product value
• Content that drives upsells of new products or services

Each of these are an important part of the customer marketing mix. Let’s break them down:

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This is article #28 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

Despite the incredible digital channels marketers have today, large trade shows are still a powerful force in the marketing world. These typically involve vendors setting up massive booths in a convention center with thousands of attendees (ideally target persona customers) wandering through the maze of vendors, learning about new products and sometimes purchasing on the spot.

A large trade show will likely be your most expensive marketing investments of the year. Therefore, it’s critical that you manage it exceptionally well and account for all of the little details in order to ensure you are positioned to get a high return on your investment.

When I managed Netpulse’s trade show presence at IHRSA (10,000 attendees); it was the company’s first real trade show experience and we had to define everything from scratch. In the end, the show was very successful for us, and I learned a ton of best practices. This post is a breakdown of those best practices, in chronological order, from preparation months prior to the day of the show.

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This is article #27 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

Inbound marketing is all about attracting targets to your website, providing them with valuable content and capturing their contact information when they download, making them leads. Once you have leads, your goal is to further educate them about your product so they request a demo to talk to your sales team, therefore becoming a marketing qualified lead (MQL).

So what happens between the time you get a lead and when they become an MQL? The key is to nurture them in a systematic, automatic and effort-free way. To do this, you need to build lead nurture workflows. This is simply a drip campaign of emails: a series of emails that are scheduled to send every few days or weeks, one after another, until the lead takes a desired action, such as requesting a demo.

Setting up lead nurture workflows is straight forward. Let’s break it down:

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This is article #26 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

As you are developing marketing in a startup, you typically start with a budget of $0. It involves a small team, with people doing multiple jobs and stretching resources thin. As the team grows and you want to accelerate growth, you need to determine how you can invest in marketing and earn that money back with new customers. To do that, you need to craft a marketing budget: typically a spreadsheet of what items you intend to spend marketing dollars on monthly. To start, the budget should consist of the following items:

• Headcount
• Tools
• Demand Generation
• Events
• Consultants

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