One of the suggestions that the Skribit application in my sidebar that has gotten quite a few votes is "Startup Marketing". So giving my readers what they want I am going to start a series of posts on startup marketing that is based on a presentation that I gave at BarCamp Atlanta called Geek Marketing 101. The presentation has 10 slides, so there will be 10 articles. The first slide is entitled marketing is not a department.
For those of you with no formal marketing training it may be helpful to introduce a fundamental concept. The concept of the marketing mix. The marketing mix consists of the 4 P’s which are product, price, place, and promotion. (Yes, this is a simplistic view of marketing. A Pillsbury VP and I came up with over 70 during an interview one day. It was a test. I passed.)
Graphically the marketing mix looks something like this:
There are two things that you need to glean about the marketing mix concept to understand startup technology marketing.
The first is marketing starts with the product concept. It continues with product development until a whole product is created. A whole product that solves a customer need in a way that makes them want to tell their friends about it. And if you have a whole product, a product that has everything that is needed for the customer to buy, you are going to be touching every "function" in the organization. I don’t see anyway around this. Taking this course of thought to its logical conclusion you arrive at the realization that every employee is involved in marketing. And in this day and age they are.
Secondly, promotion, which most people think about when they say marketing, is not some isolated activity that can be bolted on at the end. It interacts with all the other elements of the marketing mix and if you try to address it as an afterthought after the product has been created you are doomed to failure. Doomed.
To do successful startup marketing every employee needs to make decisions from the beginning with the potential customer in mind. And not in the back of the mind. In the front.
Marketing is not a department.