Even though I spent much of my career doing product marketing, this is never the first marketing role to hire for a startup. If I was a pure product marketer and was the first hire at a startup, I would be a fish out of water.

Before you make your first marketing hire, determine the following:

• How big is your target market?
• Who are your customers?
• Where have you developed the product-market fit?
• What are your funding milestones?
• What is your pricing model?
• What are your other Revenue Operation (RevOp) needs?

Target market

How big is your target market? Is it just the top 20 Telecoms in the US? Is it everyone who uses an Apple iPhone? Is it early to growth phase startups? Or is it established $10B corporations? The type of marketer you need depends on how big the market is and how specific are the target companies.

If you are focusing on the top 20 telecoms in the U.S., then you need to find a marketer that is good at Account Based Marketing (ABM). This marketer knows the companies to attack and can develop messaging and a marketing mix to attack these companies.

This marketer is a specialist that can get into the corporate world to find the right contacts and provide the right incentives for them to meet with you. Some tactics are email campaigns to the right personas, paid advertise remarketing to these companies and people, geofence marketing to these company’s headquarters, and developing specific websites and messages for these companies and personas. As you grow, they can also work with analysts and PR firms to get your brand in front of these companies.

However, if your target market is all small retail businesses, then ABM marketing is not a good fit for you. You need a demand generation specialist that is proficient in digital marketing. Your market is large, and you will only initially capture a small percentage, but you need to get your brand out there.

A marketing specialist in demand gen can create various campaigns to get you to come up on Google and Bing searches and nurture the right people. They can work with a web search engine optimization (SEO) specialist to ensure your website is easily found.

You need marketing to build that demand-gen marketing machine to create leads.

Customers

Who are your customers? Are they executives? Developers? Salespeople? IT people? Small business owners? Where do they get information?

If you are building a sales enablement platform for mid to enterprise sales organization, then you need a marketing that is a demand gen and possibly ABM specialist. You may have a list of 20 organization you target with ABM but you also have an unknown list of companies you want to find you.

The interesting customer is the developer. There are two areas of thought here. First, you may not need a marketer; you need a developer relations (DevRel) person who will do the marketing in that space for you. They will write blogs, run hackathons, coordinate meet-ups, provide education, and create events. The DevRel person will create demand and eventual leads for your company.

However, developers love to play around, and many of the DevRel contacts you get may be just hobbyists or doing a side project and don’t have any money. So, you may also partner that DelRel person with a demand gen marketer that can create demand at the higher developer levels or the business part of the organization that may have the money and business need.

Product-Market Fit

Where are you getting the most interest? What specific need are you fulfilling for that market? Are your first customer just licking up your product?

These first customers are the ones you should target first as they feel the need that your product can fulfill. So, going back to who are these customers are, and how big the market is, you can then decide the type of first marketer you need to hire. The only caveat is that the first product-fit target market may not be your ultimate end market. Then you need to balance short and long-term revenue…I would take the short-term revenue and pivot when you have more runway.

Funding Milestones

How much runway do you have and what do you need to show? If you have a short-term runway, then you need demand-gen marketing to create that demand and get some deals in quickly. ABM marketing will take a long time but each deal may be worth more and you can get that big corporate account. DelRel may also take a long time but may provide a great base of demand in later years.

What type of growth do you need to show to your investors? Audience growth? Having two large corporate customers? Having 10,000 developers in your orbit? Having 100 small customer in 18 months?

Your funding milestones also play a part in what type of first marketer you hire.

Pricing Model

Your pricing model also influences your first marketer decision. Is it a freemium or try to buy model? Or is it a consulting customer quote model?

As you probably guessed, if you have a freemium or try to buy model you should look for a demand gen marketer to get more people to come to your website and get them to continue to use the product. This marketing also needs to understand customer marketing and how to incentivize the freemium user to a paid plan. They can be called a customer marketer or growth marketer.

For a more traditional B2B sales pricing model, think SAP or Oracle, where there are many options and different prices for different levels of customers, then, it depends more on your market and customer types to pick your first marketer.

Startup Needs

Ok, even though I said your first marketer should be an ABM marketer, demand gen marketer, or DevRel, there are other items to consider as a startup.

What are your other needs for this person? After working and consulting for many startups, my job title meant nothing. I had many hats, even though I was “product marketing” or “marketing.” Think about what other roles this person can fill.

Some tasks that a marketer can do are:

• Manage Business Development Representatives (BDR)
• Create funding presentations and documents
• Perform sales enablement
• Redesign the website for SEO
• Create a brand, messaging and positioning
• Manage the initial marketing product releases
• Run the beta testing program
• Write content and create a content strategy
• Manage marketing vendors

These tasks all depend on what you need in the short term. This first marketer needs to make an impact within the first three months.

Associated Needs

With this first marketer, do not leave them on an island with no budget. They will need outside consultants or vendors to build the company brand and generate demand. This could be SEO, website design, analyst relations or PR depending on what we discussed above.

Personally, the more successful first marketers I have seen in startups are marketing generalists with good vendor management skills are individual contributors who GSD (Get shit done).

Need help with designing a market strategy, creating a marketing engine, assisting in hiring the right marketer, or just advice? Contact me at keith@startupmarketingconsulting.com.