Startup marketing strategy

Lecturer-Efrat Fenigson

Our Digital Marketing for Entrepreneurs course hosted Efrat Fenigson, VP of Marketing at Mindspace, to speak about startup marketing strategy. Marketing is frequently underestimated in early startups, and poor marketing is often the cause of failure while proper marketing can lead to great success.

Knowing when to hire a marketer is key. A product should be minimally at alpha level: working and ready to start testing. Trying to market a product that doesn’t exist yet is dangerous and ill-advised. As soon as you’re ready to start interacting with customers, it’s time to bring in a marketer. If you can achieve product/market fit without a marketer’s help, the next best time to bring in someone is after you have a more advanced beta version of your product to assist with a go-to-market strategy.

Fenigson spoke about her previous work at Airobotics, a pilotless drone developer. She researched their target market, the target’s needs, and communication style so they could introduce the product in the best possible way. This research allowed them to acquire their first customer without even bringing their product for a demo first. Through marketing work, they knew how to communicate effectively with their customers.

In the words of Seth Godin, “People do not buy goods and services. They buy relationships, stories, and magic.” Your brand is your story and your audience’s emotional connection to it, so the sooner you can cultivate it, the more likely you will succeed. As future entrepreneurs, it is important that we understand we cannot rely on a product to sell itself. Especially with young startups, it can be seemingly hard to justify spending limited funds and time on marketing.

Fenigson seamlessly took fundamental lessons we have been learning in our course and gave us key tools to develop marketing strategies relevant to us