Are you looking for some valuable insights on marketing and community building?
In this episode, Emily Kramer, the co-founder of MKT1 Capital, discusses various topics, including prepping for a podcast as a guest, the challenges of hiring marketers for startups, and the importance of setting impactful marketing goals.
Emily is a fund manager and marketer. Currently, she’s co-founder of MKT1 Capital, an early-stage B2B fund, and also writes MKT1 Newsletter, and teaches Marketing Leadership courses.
With her background in marketing, Emily shares insights on marketing strategies for startups. She also discussed her experience in marketing and community building, sharing tips on setting goals and testing new strategies. She stressed the need for a targeted approach to marketing and the importance of understanding the audience’s behavior and pain points.
The conversation also discusses the importance of understanding the audience, market, and product and setting impact-focused goals rather than quantity-focused goals.
Topics
- Marketing evolution
- Marketing in early-stage startups
- Early Marketing Career
- Building Marketing Teams
- Importance of Marketing for Startups
- Hiring Sales vs. Marketing
- Marketing as an Accelerant
- Understanding Your Audience
- Marketing Advantages
- Targeting the Right Audience
- Setting Marketing Goals, Long-Term Project Goals, Foundational Goals, and Project Goals for Marketing
- Importance of Quality in Marketing
- Trusting Your Gut
Show Links
- Check out MKT1 Capital & Community
- Connect with Emily Kramer on LinkedIn and Twitter
- Connect with David Khim on LinkedIn and Twitter
- Connect with Omniscient Digital on LinkedIn or Twitter
Listen to the podcast:
Key Takeaways:
[00:14:52] Marketing evolution
Emily talks about how marketing has evolved over the years, becoming more data-driven and strategic, and how it has replaced some sales teams.
[00:16:50] Marketing in early-stage startups
They discuss how marketing is becoming more important in early-stage startups, and how marketers are being pulled in much earlier on, even at the angel stage.
[00:22:10] Early Marketing Career
She talks about their early career in ad agencies and launching an ad tech platform, giving them a strong foundation in marketing ops and data.
[00:29:02] Building Marketing Teams
Emily talks about her experience building marketing teams from scratch at different companies.
[00:34:59] Importance of Marketing for Startups
Emily emphasizes the importance of marketing and go-to-market strategies for startup success and how it is often undervalued.
[00:36:25] Hiring Sales vs Marketing
They discussed the difference between hiring for sales and marketing and how investors tend to lean towards hiring for sales early on.
[00:38:07] Marketing as an Accelerant
Marketing can exponentially scale go-to-market efforts and make a company seem larger than it is.
[00:41:03] Understanding Your Audience
To develop a successful marketing strategy, it is crucial to deeply understand the audience’s behavior, problems, and workflows.
[00:45:19] Marketing Advantages
Explains the concept of marketing advantages, including identifying innate dynamics or characteristics of a business that can help it quickly grow, such as the potential for network effects or product virality.
[00:47:24] Targeting the Right Audience
She shares a common mistake made by clients in targeting the wrong audience for their marketing strategy, using the example of targeting Fortune 500 executives with SEO content.
[00:51:46] Impactful Content Creation
Emily gives an example of how impactful content creation is more important than quantity-focused goals and emphasizes the importance of setting conversion rate thresholds for metrics goals.
[00:52:55] Setting Marketing Goals, Long-Term Project Goals, Foundational Goals, and Project Goals for Marketing
Emily discussed the importance of setting goals for marketing, including KPI goals, project goals, experimentation goals, and foundational goals. She emphasizes the need to set project goals that can drive non-linear growth in the future and move the needle long-term and explains the concept of “grease” or foundational goals, which are the work needed to build the foundation for hitting metrics goals, doing projects, and conducting experiments. She also talks about project goals for marketing, including expanding to a new audience, increasing revenue from existing customers, and standing out over competitors.
[01:04:32] Importance of Quality in Marketing
She shares her opinion that quality is more important than quantity in marketing and that it’s a strategic game of placing bets.
[01:05:24] Trusting Your Gut
Emily talks about the best piece of advice she’s received, which is to trust her gut, especially in situations where she has a bad feeling about something. She also discussed the importance of trusting one’s instincts in business and personal life.
Get the Field Notes
Weekly learnings from working on B2B content & SEO for dozens of companies.
