Are you pre-revenue and trying to figure out how to get your first customers? After advising dozens of early-stage startups at UC Berkeley’s Skydeck incubator, I find myself repeating the same advice on go-to-market (GTM) strategy (that is, the process of getting your first product “out there” and getting your first customer and first sales). […]
Are you building a website for your startup? As a marketing advisor to startups at UC Berkeley’s Skydeck incubator, I see founders fall into a lot of common traps. Here are some more common mistakes to watch out for: Mistake 1: Focusing mostly on website looks It’s tempting for founders to spend a lot of […]
I’ve been a marketing advisor to early-stage startups at UC Berkeley’s Skydeck incubator for a few months now, and I wanted to share some common mistakes that I’ve seen repeatedly that hurt these young startups’ marketing efforts — and sometimes even make it hard for me to help them. Recognize these pitfalls and apply the […]
Marketing attribution is about asking, out of the many marketing channels you are using and paying for, which marketing channels actually work? Which ones don’t? And are you paying the right amount for the ones that do work? Measuring marketing attribution is one of the biggest challenges for high-scalability performance marketing, and I don’t believe […]
If you do B2B marketing for startups, or you’re devising a go-to-market strategy for a new line of business in a B2B company, it can be a little overwhelming. You have dozens of channel options, but which ones do you absolutely, positively need to set up, and in what order?
Marketing VPs and even CMOs often get left out of board meetings. If you are invited to present your marketing strategy to an experienced and inquisitive board of directors, take it as more than an opportunity for your big close-up: rather, this is your chance to show how your marketing contributes to overall company strategy and […]
Somebody recently asked me, what is the future of paid search marketing? At first, I thought, the simple (and stupid) answer to this question is: The future of search marketing is whatever Google says it is.
If you do digital marketing in Spanish or many other languages, you quickly realize it’s hard to find good translations for English terms that you use every day.
B2B marketing has changed a lot in the last 15 years – so much so that it’s starting to resemble B2C marketing. Digital marketing and mobile marketing, which used to be non-existent or negligible, are now front and center among B2B marketing tactics. So what happened here, and what does modern B2B marketing look like? […]
I’m often talking to companies who ask me: What do you think of our brand? Do we need to change it? In most cases, they don’t really mean their brand at all: really, what they mean is their logo, or maybe even their trademarked name. Now, your name and logo are important, but they are […]
Whether you’re a founder seeking money from investors, a CEO explaining your company to the press, or a marketer just trying to make some business happen, your audience is going to have the same basic questions about your company. These questions come down to understanding what your company is and why it exists. In essence, […]
LinkedIn Ads is LinkedIn’s advertising platform. I’ve been using LinkedIn Ads on live clients since 2013, and since there aren’t many hands-on reviews from actual marketers, I thought I’d contribute one explaining how best to advertise on LinkedIn. What is LinkedIn Ads? LinkedIn Ads is LinkedIn’s proprietary advertising platform. It’s similar to other pay-per-click (PPC) […]
Many people have asked what my one-page marketing plan template looks like with an example of real-world content filled in. So when my friend Kerry Kobe at Sweet Sanity Designs needed to rethink her marketing strategy, I worked with her to fill out my marketing plan template, and she kindly allowed me to share her real sample marketing […]
A number of my friends have small, local businesses, and I often see them making the same mistakes with their search engine optimization (SEO) — in other words, with making their website findable for search engines. Since SEO is often the cheapest and easiest form of internet marketing you can do, I hereby offer my […]
“Thinking, Fast and Slow” is an approachable and comprehensive summary of behavioral economics from Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. I liked it a lot, and I discuss implications for marketing and management in this book review.