What is a startup's marketing MVP?
And why the marketing team needs to get to it as fast as possible
I had a different topic lined up for this month’s first post, but when prepping for the Q2 kickoff with my team earlier this week, I found myself struggling to work out how to explain a really important concept.
So I tried to write, and this essay was the result. (And yes, the kickoff went well too!)
Let’s get to it then. I’ll keep this one brief.
What is the marketing MVP?
The macro part of your marketing: Your marketing strategy, content strategy, positioning, your brand, your design and visual language, your blog and what it stands for, and so on; you get the drift. This is your marketing MVP.
Why do you need to get to the marketing MVP, and why the emphasis on time?
Because only when you get this part right can you start moving really fast on the micro part of your marketing, the tactical part: the messaging for demand generation campaigns, the what of your content creation and marketing, the context of your product marketing for upcoming features and launches, the focus of your sales enablement and collateral, and so on.
The emphasis on time is because freezing this first lets you move very quickly on everything else. For example, if your website, visual language and positioning is clear, your content strategy is easy to arrive at. Once you have that, you can get to a calendar, hire a few freelancers, and churn out content that will compound over time. Contrast this with a startup which does not have this clarity yet. If they don’t know what to write about, they can’t scale content of any kind, SEO or otherwise. And if they can’t scale fast, results will be slower to accrue. And this is just one example. Every other aspect of modern SaaS marketing will be better served if your MVP is clear and is serving as a radiant north star, giving you and your team direction.
At PushCrew (now VWO Engage), for me to get to the marketing MVP took about 4 months. We executed a design revamp, figured out our positioning, got our strategy spot-on, started getting our landing pages right, and generally got our act together in that time. The 2 months after this, we executed aggressively on content, SEO, and SEM. By the end of that 2nd month, our traffic was starting to move up, and with that traffic, came leads, revenue, and growth. Though this timeline is replicable, that was 2016, and PushCrew was an SMB player. There’s a lot more competition now, and this has to be adapted to your product and the domain it plays in.
Is the marketing MVP fixed? What if the strategy changes?
This is the next logical question. And the answer is that there is no if : The strategy will change.
And as it does, your marketing MVP will change too. The companies I have worked for have some sort of meaningful relook/revamp at their larger marketing strategies at least once a year. When that happens, the MVP shifts too. What won’t is you trying getting to a crystal-clear understanding of this new normal as fast as you can. So you can keep building on the base you have already built, and adjust the rudder to shift the ship to its new direction.
Why my team and I were discussing this now
Because we need to get to our own marketing MVP as soon as we can. And once there, we need to get our organic engine rolling. I have a ton of stuff planned out, but to do all of that, we have to get to the MVP. The one advantage I have is that Interview Mocha has its fundamentals very clear. So all we have to do is translate that into a killer strategy and effectively communicate across the website and all our marketing. It’s going to take us some time to do so.
Wish us luck!