At LeadSift, we launched a HootSuite app, started a new PR campaign, began aggressive sales and took marketing by the horns, all within a couple weeks. Long Overdue and some good display of team Hustling! And what we found out from this exercise is.. total dope!
At any cash-strapped company, it’s always marketing that takes a back seat. Why spend money on blogging when we can write it ourselves. Why pay for PR when we can just use Facebook and Twitter (to broadcast it to who? Our friends???). We can obviously create some slides ourselves – after all we made so many in school! Those slides look damn good when pitching to the Fortune 500 companies. We got all these awesome investors, can’t we just badger them to get us into the bigger publications or customers? The product is good, we just push sales and get customers – right? NO. No. Not at all!
Here’s a real life scenario: An online bank cold-emailed Hatem and gave him an awesome no fee banking deal! Our first reaction was.. is it spam or is it a scam, let’s scram! If it would have been a bank we’d heard of, a cool new bank that did away with establishment costs and hence had lower interest rate and no fees banking – we’d be ecstatic that they emailed us! The word of mouth epidemic has amazing powers. Would you want to be the unknown amazing product? Would you have your sales team cold call people and offer a powerful cloud-based social-local-mobile app in spite of no one having ever having heard of it? No. It would do injustice to your sales team. And your product team deserves better.
Don’t get me wrong, I am an arrogant nerd and a non-believer of all non-tech roles, scoffer of all MBA’s. But Marketing has it’s role. A role that can make a startup happy! A place important enough that you need to put in money and quality time in it. Marketing can make you or your competition successful. If you’re a startup reading this, please do not skimp on your marketing budget, do not wait till the stars line up to start PR, don’t assume you can make the best slide decks… hand it over to the pros <And here’s a Heartfelt Shout out to LeadSift’s marketing team>! Let’s keep it coming~
