How to build an inbound marketing engine for your startup

A playbook to build, run, and scale a powerful startup marketing motion

Last month, I was invited, separately, to talk at Blume Ventures’ Velocity program and at a SaaSBoomi Growth session in Delhi, on building inbound marketing engines. This is ironic, because though I have spent my career doing exactly this, it is not what I’m doing at Atomicwork, where the motion is almost completely outbound (so there’s a lot on unlearning involved, but that’s a story for another day).

Nevertheless, I worked on compiling what I had learnt to a clear 5 part process for startup founders to understand and implement immediately.

Though this is most valuable for founders and marketers just starting to put together their strategies and tactics, it can be a way to look at your later-stage playbook just to see if you’ve got the basics right.

Let’s dive in.

1. What’s your marketing MVP?

This is the first stage of starting your marketing engine. Your marketing MVP is the macro part of your marketing: Your positioning, your brand, your design and visual language, your blog, and what it stands for, and so on; you get the drift.

The key word is clarity. The most important thing is to get your positioning right: What your product is and who is it for. Everything follows from there.

For early Freshdesk, this was "Your social helpdesk."

What were we? A helpdesk. How were we different? We had Twitter and Facebook integrations, an industry first.

Hence, a social helpdesk.

2. How to get to your marketing MVP?

I’m repeating this point because it’s that important. There’s a formula and it’s simple: What you are, and who you are for. Write down the answer to that and you are mostly done.

This isn’t my formula. I got it from Andy Cunningham’s book Getting to Aha.

Does it have to be that clear? Yes.

That early, when no one knows who you are, you have to tell the world exactly what you are are and what you can do for them. This is not the time and place to be clever.

Once you have this, everything else lines up. If you are a helpdesk, you know your blog should be about customer support, you know your SEO keywords, you know who your ICP is, and you know what are the design and marketing decisions you need to take to appeal to this target audience.

Do this for your startup.

3. The inbound marketing methodology

Once you are done with the above, let’s start doing marketing.

The image below is from an old Hubspot blog. That’s what you do next.

Is building an content engine for inbound marketing that simple? Yes, but please do not confuse simple with easy.

To attract the audience you want, write blogs aimed at them. And with well produced landing pages and CTAs, convert them. This is enough for now. Closing and delighting them comes after.

But remember, if your target audience are not readers but YouTube watchers, then start producing videos. The same process as written content follows after.

But how do you decide on what content to create so you attract the correct audience?
You can use the following guide. (This is mine, not Hubspot’s!)

4. Distribution

Once you have figured out your MVP and started creating content, you need to distribute it. And there are only three approaches to distribution - earn it, borrow it, or buy it.

A classic example of earning distribution is James Clear, who wrote a newsletter on habits for years before writing Atomic Habits and selling the book to the same audience. A good example of borrowing distribution is with influencers and founders in the same domain. Buying distribution is the most clear of them all: Google, Facebook, LinkedIN, and Twitter are at your disposal.

There is no other secret to this. And for SEO to start working it will take a good 2 to 3 months, mostly more.

So you can earn, borrow, or buy distribution. Choose.

5. How do you measure inbound marketing?

You may not like the answer, but I’ll tell you anyway: You don’t.

You can’t measure anything unless there is some amount of critical mass that actually moves the needle. Hence, doing two webinars and saying webinars don’t work is silly. Publishing 4 blogs and saying blogs are useless is stupid.

Produce something consistently, for a month, two months, three months. Make it useful and engaging. Then when you start seeing results, pick a number, any metric that you think will help, track it, try to hit it. Once you start doing this, you will know if it’s the correct metric or not. If it’s not, change it, and go for the number that makes most business sense.

There you go.

How much time will this take, though? That’s difficult to tell and depends on the domain you are in. For example, Atlan’s ace founder/CEO Prukalpa once told me that in the early days she actually devoted a team to finding the correct narrative for the company. I understood that as positioning, and just that took her and her team months.

At the end of this, will your funnel suddenly fill up with leads? Probably not, but you will have working hypotheses on most of the principles above, and you will have the knowledge and the experience to change them when needed. So please begin.

If you find this useful, please go ahead and share it among your friends and colleagues.

And finally, I’m happy to share the deck this essay is based on. There are two versions of the deck, both with different examples, that I think will be useful. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, or mail me at sairamkrishnan@outlook.com, and I’ll send it to you.

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