"What do you like about being a startup marketer?"
Medium · Marketing & Branding · 2016 · 519 words
Visa describes the excitement of marketing in uncharted territory and the personal growth from increasing responsibility.
"What do you like about being a startup marketer?"
I was asked this question by a young guy who was interested in marketing, but didn't know if he wanted to work for a startup or not.
Here's a quick sketch of what I've liked so far; feel free to ask me any questions.
1. Marketing something new for the first time means operating in uncharted territory, which is exciting.
Consider how in the early days, things like soap and cigarettes were unbranded, and marketers had to figure out how to differentiate things. There's no rulebook to follow, no "best practices" — you just pay attention to your customers, experiment, test, learn.
This also means you know that you're the best in the world at that highly-specific thing that you do, which is a nice feeling.
Oh, and it also means that there's very little bureaucracy. If something needs to be done, you just do it. This does mean that things don't always fit into neat and tidy boxes, but personally I prefer it that way.
2. Levelling up and being responsible for more things feels like "real personal growth".
I started out just as an individual writer, and my challenges were to write things that our customers would be interested in. Once I got the hang of that, I had to figure out the meta-games of how to plan a broader strategy for the content (so that it would be progressively more useful to our customers), how to hire other people to do what I had taught myself to do, and how to manage them well.
This is way more exciting than levelling up in a video game– because you're playing with very real stakes now. It's been very fulfilling to me to witness my writers getting better, and to help them think more clearly about things.
3. Learning to think about customers at scale is enlightening.
When you're selling one thing to a person, it's a dialogue. You ask questions, figure out what the person's problems are, help them solve it. (This is quite an enjoyable thing in itself, and that's one of the things I enjoyed in the early days of Statement.sg.)
Once you can do that reliably, you want to be able to move upstream and see the bigger picture– what is the root of this recurring problem that affects many people? How do you shepherd hundreds, then thousands of people to help them find the solutions to their problems? What's the meta-game?
4. Interfacing with all functional groups in a small company and seeing the big picture.
I'm in marketing, but I also interact with people in engineering, product and support every day. It's quite a privilege to see how everything comes together to orchestrate the experience for the customer. (Something I always hated about the idea of working in MegaCorp is being far-removed from the final output of whatever your collective is working on.)
It's a nice challenge to communicate insights and needs across functional groups. And it's very fulfilling to see that something you observed or suggested can go on to make an impact on the entire company.
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Originally published at https://medium.com/@visakanv/what-do-you-like-about-being-a-startup-marketer-718e5491e69c.