This is article #10 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

In most B2B companies, several people are involved in purchasing and using your product. There might be an end user, a decision maker and an influencer. When you are building your marketing story and demand generation strategy, consider how you can reach each of these people and what messages will persuade them to take a desired action (i.e. provide their contact details and become a lead). The key to doing this effectively is using personas.

A persona is simply a detailed description of your target customers, outlining their demographics, behavior and preferences. Consider the following steps to determine your personas:

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This is article #9 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

One of your top priorities for marketing is to generate leads. I don’t blame you… leads are awesome and what your sales team is craving to grow. However, before you can effectively build the demand generation side (i.e. driving leads) of a B2B marketing team, you need to establish the story.

The story is simply the narrative that is used to describe what your product is, why it exists and how it helps targets. It’s the foundation for your messaging and positioning. It is used throughout your marketing world: on your website, social media profiles, collateral, ebooks, webinars and verbally in sales presentations and elevator pitches. The story is a key requirement to align your team and ensure your marketing campaigns are focused on messages that will resonate with targets and thus drive them to convert to leads. Let’s walk through how to craft this narrative.

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This is article #8 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

For a B2B startup, establishing a basic marketing function is a requirement for growth. Particularly once product-market fit is established, marketing is needed to:

• Create messaging, positioning and value props
• Establish infrastructure and tools needed to scale (e.g. CRM and marketing automation)
• Generate leads for the sales team

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This is article #7 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

As a B2B startup’s contact list grows, it’s critical that contacts are properly organized and segmented based on lifecycle stage. Lifecycle stage refers to the step in the buyer’s journey that a contact is in. This is often built into your CRM and marketing automation system (or it needs to be added as a custom field). Let’s break down each stage:

Subscriber

These are contacts that may subscribe to your blog or newsletter. You likely do not know if they meet the criteria to become a customer, as some of them may just be interested in your content. Your goal for subscribers is to share top-of-funnel content (i.e. content that is not highly specific to your business) and ultimately push the right contacts towards providing more detailed contact information (e.g. job title) by downloading a larger piece of content (e.g. an ebook).

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This is article #6 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

When you first start marketing at a B2B startup, it may feel like you have a never ending to-do list. Similar to engineering a product, it’s important to break a big project down into small pieces that make it more digestible. In marketing, these small pieces are documented in an Annual Marketing Plan. This is simply a framework and schedule that keeps your team organized, communicating and on pace towards reaching measurable goals.

Let’s break down what goes into an Annual Marketing Plan:

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This is article #5 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

If you are starting marketing in a B2B startup, you probably see the entire team every morning in the mirror (i.e. it’s just you). As the first marketer, you’re faced with a mountain of challenges:

• Defining what marketing needs your organization has
• Researching what tools and infrastructure will work best
• Creating a marketing plan for the next 12 months
• Assembling a team to work with you

If you don’t have the funding needed to hire others, then assume you will have to start by doing every job outlined in this post. If you are ready and able to assemble a team, let’s walk through the primary roles. An early-stage B2B marketing team pursuing an inbound content strategy ideally balances several roles that I refer to as the “Core 4.” These roles are:

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This is article #3 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

Suppose you have a list of 100 leads. You send a cold email to each one using your email marketing software. A few hours later, 15 of them respond, 20 of them just opened the email and the remaining 65 did nothing. So to continue to nurture those leads and get in contact with them, you personally respond to the 15, and log in an Excel file that the remaining 85 need to be emailed again. You could send a slightly different message to the 20 leads that opened the email, but that would be a lot of work.

That is the reality of a marketing and sales organization that lacks an automation system. Let me tell you from experience: that reality sucks.

If there is one product that every B2B marketer MUST have, it’s a marketing automation system.

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This is article #2 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

Marketing is now a data game. Successful B2B marketers are highly data-driven and speak in terms of A/B testing, conversion metrics and trackable journeys. This maniacal focus on data enables marketers to solve the classic problem of understanding which marketing strategies actually work to drive leads, and which are a waste of time. The key to solving this problem is closed loop marketing. As we kick off this 50 post blog series on startup marketing, this concept is exceptionally important to understand.

Closed loop marketing is simply a set of strategies that give marketers access to data on where a lead came from, and what specific marketing activities converted them from target to lead to MQL (if those terms are unfamiliar, read this post). Closed loop marketing is a required strategy for effectively growing a B2B marketing organization. Let’s walk through how it works:

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This is article #1 out of 50 in The Startup Marketing Playbook.

You’ve heard it frequently: “Inbound” is key for B2B marketing. Many resources out there tell the story of inbound marketing, so we’ll keep this one simple.

First let’s review some vocabulary. We’re going to be using these terms often:

• Targets: people who match your criteria to become a customer. For example, for a daytime dog walking service, targets might be mothers between the ages of 30-50 who live in San Francisco and have a dog.
• Leads: targets for whom we have contact information (i.e., an email address or phone number).
• Opportunities: leads that have indicated they are ready, willing and able to make a purchase and become a customer.
• Customers: people who are paying to use your product or service (duh).

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