How NOT to measure your startup's marketing
Plus 5 things you need to be aware of as an early stage marketing team
This little essay is derived from a talk I gave in November last year to an audience of marketers and early stage founders. As I was discussing the topic with the organiser, Pallavi Dhody, founder of Draftt, we told each other so many measurement horror stories that I had to write about it too.
I’m going to add the full video here, for folks who prefer that, but I’ll try to break it down as well.
The metrics trap
At an early stage startup, the easiest thing to do is get caught in the metrics trap. Why? Because founders want to know what is happening, what is moving, and you also want to show impact as soon as you can.
Well, don’t. Obsessing over numbers too soon will slow you down. At a very early stage startup, you shouldn’t be measuring your marketing at all.
Well, why? And what should you be doing? I’ll tell you.
You shouldn’t be measuring anything because you don’t know what I call your Marketing MVP yet. You don’t know your positioning, you don’t know your ICP, and you don’t have a repeatable strategy.
If you start measuring without having any of this in place, what are you measuring?
Distribution and Credibility
Marketing doesn’t start working when you just do things, you have to build up distribution and credibility as well, and that takes time. The content needs to reach your audience, and they need to see your content as trustworthy, what I call content-market fit. At Atomicwork, we did this over two years (I explain how in the video). We stopped obsessing over metrics and focused on three basics: getting our positioning right, creating content that truly resonated with our market, and consistently putting out great stuff at a decent volume.
What this did was create a force field around our audience, CIOs, where they would keep seeing our content, telling them again and again that we were relevant to them and that they should check us out.
Please note that doing all of this doesn’t mean that we abandoned measurement forever. I just started doing it where there were things worth measuring.
Here’s the whole talk. I think it’s worth your time.
If you don’t have time to see the whole thing, here are 5 things I really want you to take away:
Don't start measuring stuff when you haven't created anything meaningful yet. Create a lot of useful thing for your audience, measure after.
Get your marketing MVP down first. That has to be your starting point. Without it, you are shooting blanks in the dark.
Numbers without context, and concrete next steps are useless. They don’t mean anything, nor do they help.
You need to get to your content-market fit, when your content actually starts mattering to your target audience, and they seek out more of it.
Constantly measuring yourself against competitors in totally different fields and with different goals will just lead to bad decisions and burnout.
Dear readers, as I wrote in the last dispatch, we are nearing the 5th anniversary of this newsletter, and I was wondering if a WhatsApp group of marketers/founders/enthusiasts would be something you would want to be a part of? If yes, please email me at sairamkrishnan@outlook.com, and let me know.
I’m also thinking of a get-together of readers sometime in April in Bangalore. If you’d like to come meet me and more readers, please email me at sairamkrishnan@outlook.com.
And if you are new here, do subscribe! It’s March, and this is only the 2nd edition of this year, but I’m just getting out of a real busy period at Atomicwork (I’m a working marketer, after all!), and I have a bunch of stories to tell.
See you in your inboxes.