What marketing should look like at series A, B, and C

Photo credit: William Iven / Unsplash

The role and expectations of marketing in a startup are often high. What’s needed in a seed-stage startup will not be what’s required in series A, B, or C. With limited resources, it’s important to know what teams and activities will serve you best as you scale.

Having learned a lot of lessons from experience and research in a trial-by-fire manner, I thought I’d write this article to help others avoid the same mistakes. Do note that this article is in no way meant to be all encompassing, and that marketing requirements can be very different in some verticals and situations.

I’ve tried to provide the rationale behind my suggestions so you can decide whether these ideas are right for you.

Seed to series A: Awareness and customer/product research

Focus: market research, product-market fit, and organic traction
Headcount: 1

In my opinion, this is usually the most ambitious and exciting part, especially for marketers. There are a lot of important learnings marketing can provide in these first stages:

Search for strong data points to find your product-market fit. With your founders spread thin and the development team putting insane time into your product, a marketer can help by researching competitor analysis, beta user feedback, target audience, and market/vertical research.

Down the road, this work can be handed off to a product marketing team, but for now, a great marketer with research as a secondary skill is all that’s required.

Test your organic marketing channels for traction. During this time, your marketer should be testing myriad earned and owned channels. Owned channels are those that you are currently developing (your social channels, email, website), while earned channels include media, events, partnerships, and referrals.

Learn how these channels could work for your startup. Then, establish the core marketing channel activities that add the most value.

Get the word out there. When you’re strapped for cash, you shouldn’t budget much, if anything, on marketing activities, especially when you’re looking to give your startup ideally about 18-21 months of runway. Finding a marketer who understands how to get traction from non-paid marketing channels will be a boon to your startup.

From my experience, I’ve found focusing on PR-able content right at the beginning really helpful. A marketer doing great PR crafts the story and narrative for your startup, manages potential image and media risks, and gets you a share of voice and industry awareness (which helps your SEO rankings).

Series B: Leadership and process building

Focus: setting a long term foundation for marketing success
Headcount: 5-10

About half of all series A startups make it to series B. As competition becomes fierce, marketing becomes a full-fledged function. Competitors are coming for your head. Investors have greater expectations. You need to hit revenue targets.

Series C: Expansion and scale

Series D and beyond