Marketing From the Ground Up with Start-Up Expert Annie Katrina Lee

By esantiago@hubspot.com (Erica Santiago)

If you‘re a business owner looking to build your start-up from the ground up, you’ve likely read plenty of blogs looking for advice on marketing your business—but I‘m guessing there’s sometimes been a frustrating lack of resources for your particular challenges.

Most marketing guidance centers on the perspectives of brands that are already established or have a sizable following. But what about the business owners who are starting from zero?

We chatted with start-up expert Annie Katrina Lee, whose previous experience includes marketing for Twitch, Pinterest, Amazon, and various start-ups.

If you want advice on marketing from the ground up, you’ve come to the right spot.

1. Start with the customer.

When learning how to build your start-up, you probably want a step-by-step guide that provides instant, tangible results.

That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?

Except Lee says that’s not the correct approach.

“A very common fallacy is when startups feel like they have to take a very specific piece of advice, whether it’s a best practice or something that they read in a blog,” she says. “I think when things are so definitive like that, it’s a bit misleading.”

Lee notes that start-ups that take straightforward, one-size-fits-all advice will often be disappointed when their journey doesn’t unfold as planned.

(And, trust me, I see the irony: Here I am, in a blog post, telling you not to take definitive advice from a blog post. But please bear with me.)

Rather than looking for step-by-step guidance, try approaching your marketing strategy as a framework that starts with your customer.

Lee says speaking to your core audience and customers is one of the best ways to develop that framework.

“If you don’t know who your customer is, then you don’t know what their needs and motivations are,” she explains. “And if you don’t know what their needs and motivations are, how could you communicate with them?”

Which brings us to our second point:

2. Get feedback.

Wistia‘s CEO, Chris Savage, told us that if a brand’s marketing resonates with 10 of its customers, it will resonate with 10,000 — and Lee says there’s some truth to that.

“The thing about marketing that’s hard is it is a blend of art and science,” Lee says. “The qualitative feedback of 10 people in a focus group is the art. What are you hearing? And how are you translating that feedback?.”

It also doesn’t hurt to pull feedback from a larger pool of respondents.

“If you survey 1,000 people, both potential customers and existing customers, you can compare, evaluate, and synthesize that feedback together. Which, to me, gives you a bigger picture than just one focus group.”