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In a small startup, marketing touches everything—from sales and product development to fundraising and customer success. When done right, it gives your company a clear, compelling presence in the market and drives growth. When done poorly, it leads to mixed messages, a weak pipeline, and frustrated customers who feel misled by undelivered promises.
Marketing is a core function for any startup—but as a founder, it's not always clear when to invest, whether to hire full-time or how to run early campaigns.
This guide covers when to start, how involved you need to be, and what to do before spending on advertising. It breaks down the core components of foundational marketing, including setting up systems, centralizing knowledge, defining your audience, and establishing a messaging framework. Without these basics, scaling gets a lot harder.
When to get started with marketing
Many founders wait to “do marketing” until there's pressure to grow pipeline, a push from investors, or budget to hire. But by then, you're playing catch-up.
The truth is that marketing starts before you spend a dollar.
Early marketing is founder-led. If you're talking to customers, posting on LinkedIn, or pitching to investors, you're already well on the way. The challenge is turning this into a formal, repeatable plan.
You’ll know it’s time to bring in help when:
- You’re getting inbound interest, but there’s no system to manage it
- You’re hiring sales and need consistent messaging and materials
- You’ve found product-market fit and want to build demand
- Referrals and network alone won’t get you to the next milestone
- You’re raising a funding round and need to show traction and credibility
A marketing function helps move beyond one-to-one sales efforts into demand generation, content, and scalable customer acquisition. Whether you only have the budget for a part-time marketer or freelancer starting early with the right foundations enables smoother growth.
How to get started with marketing
Foundational work should happen before investing in ads, events, or agencies. Some of this you can do yourself; other parts benefit from dedicated support.
Step one: foundational systems and processes
The sooner you can establish basic systems, the better. Creating documentation, establishing repeatable workflows, and centralizing information are typically things larger companies do. However, starting early will make your marketing team's life much easier down the line. These processes don’t need to be complex; they just need to exist.
Start with a CRM system
You probably already have a spreadsheet of contacts—investors, advisors, or early supporters. But CRM platforms prevent contacts from slipping through the cracks. They help you track conversations and relationships for prospects, customers, investors, advisors, and partners. Once all your contacts are stored in a central hub, it's far easier to send communications to a particular group, such as product announcements, invites to an exclusive event or newsletters.
Initially, look for simple, all-in-one platforms with free startup plans. Hubspot is a great choice as it can help you go beyond contact management to email outreach, forms, reporting and workflows. Avoid buying different tools for each task otherwise you'll end up with another job just managing all the software.
Make it easy for people to contact you
If you're driving traffic to your website, make sure you can effectively capture and act on leads. The most obvious choice is via a demo request button or a calendar popup. Reduce friction by minimizing form fields and allowing visitors to schedule a meeting instantly.
But be thoughtful. You don’t want to waste time on unqualified leads, especially when you have a lean team. Tailor the language on the demo request page or add a dropdown to capture the industry or company size to ensure that the right people get in touch.
Finally, you'll need a straightforward process to determine how to respond when prospects reach out. Decide whose responsibility it is to qualify and follow up on inbound leads so potential prospects don't slip away.
Set goals and track progress
Define one or two initial goals based on your business priorities. For example, you might want to drive more inbound interest or improve close rates. Either way, align marketing activity to the outcome you care about most.
If you have a lot of interest in your company, but few deals in your pipeline, you might want to spend energy on the sales process, objection handling and materials to help close those deals. Alternatively, you might have a high close rate but few inbounds. In that case, consider how customers learn about your business and how you can drive more top of funnel demand.
Early metrics might include:
Brand Awareness
- Website traffic and source breakdown
- Impressions and clicks
- Engagement on social posts
Conversions
- Inbound demo requests or sign-ups
- Referrals
- Pipeline
- Conversions and close rate
Get a benchmark to see how various marketing efforts improve these metrics over time. Record data monthly using Google Analytics, Search Console, LinkedIn Insights, and basic funnel tracking in your CRM.
Bonus tip: Ask every lead how they heard about you. Add a question on your demo request form, or bring it up on calls—and log it in your CRM.
Step two: pick an audience and formulate a strategy
Running ad hoc ads, sponsoring events or content partnerships with friends won’t get the desired results unless they align with your audience and goals. So start with research and messaging.
Spend time on customer research
You're probably already talking to customers. Formalizing this work ensures those insights can be shared and used to inform everything, from messaging to picking marketing channels or product decisions. Capture what tools they use, what frustrates them, the language they use to describe their problems, and how they make buying decisions.
AI tools, like ChatGPT or Claude, can help synthesize transcripts and find recurring themes without slogging through hours of recordings. Document and share these findings internally.
Early marketers will also want to interview existing customers to get up to speed. Win-loss interviews are an excellent way to start collecting intel.
Define your audience (and who you’re not for)
Use research to clarify your target market:
- Which industries are you prioritizing?
- What roles or personas are core users or buyers?
- What’s the ideal company size?
- What challenges do they face that you can solve?
- What tools are customers using today?
- Which events, publications and forums are they interested in?
You can evolve your ideal customer over time. However, having a clear focus ensures your messaging will resonate and keeps your team aligned.
Clarify your brand identity
Founders often have a clear idea about their brand, but few write it down. Create a simple one-pager describing your brand voice, tone, and values. It’ll guide marketers, freelancers, and even your AI tool in how to communicate, helping maintain consistency.
Ask:
- What does our company stands for and what makes us different?
- Are we a innovative disruptor or a trusted partner?
- Is our voice casual and friendly or buttoned-up and precise?
If you have a little more time, I recommend Google 3 hour brand sprint which is a great exercise to revisit when you hire your first marketer.
Build a messaging framework
With your customer research and brand foundations in place, you can now craft your messaging framework. This is where you define:
- Your top 2–3 value propositions
- The pain points you solving
- How your solution uniquely addresses them
- Proof points or success stories
Remember, messaging is the output of your research. It's how you *talk* about your company in a way that resonates with your audience and should be shared widely with the rest of your team.
Competitive research can help sharpen your message. Look for gaps in their messaging. What are they missing that you can own? Take note, but don’t over-obsess or copy. It's important to be authentic and differentiated. Create simple positioning statements that explain why your product is different or better.
Remember: Your value prop doesn’t need to solve a deep pain—your product might be faster to implement or easier to use. That still matters.
Establish your go-to-market hypothesis
Now that you’ve nailed your messaging, outline how you plan to reach your audience.
Start with a simple hypothesis: "If we promote [message] on [channel], with [audience], we'll drive [action]."
Pick 2–3 channels based on where your audience spends time:
- LinkedIn ads
- Events or speaking engagements
- Blog content or thought leadership
- Technical content on Reddit or Hacker News
- Email outreach
Here's where you might want to evaluate budgets and what you feel comfortable spending on initial test marketing strategies before fully investing. You might consider:
Create lightweight content to test your messages. Measure what resonates. Align each test with a clear goal—demo requests, newsletter sign-ups, or traffic. If you're working with an agency, insist on clear reporting and learn from each test. These early results inform where to double down.
How involved should founders be in marketing?
Until you hire a marketer, *you* are the marketer. LinkedIn posts, investor updates, customer outreach—it all shapes your brand. Even after you do hire a marketer (or an agency), you’ll still need to be heavily involved—especially in areas like:
- Sharing industry knowledge
- Audience definition
- Brand positioning and messaging
- Setting goals
- Budgeting
You bring the context and depth of knowledge. Early on, marketers will rely on you to shape content and direction, share customer insights, and define how you want the company to be perceived.
A great early-stage marketer won’t be a subject matter expert on day one, but they’ll help build the systems and structure to turn your vision into scalable action. They’ll own things like CRM setup, lead processes, content operations, channel testing, and reporting. They’ll collaborate with you to build out personas, define the messaging framework, and eventually take over sales education and content creation.
Freelancers or agencies can help establish early systems and test a few channels, but the most strategic, aligned marketing comes from a dedicated hire who lives and breathes your business.
Final thoughts
Strong marketing foundations come from setting up the right systems, gathering insights, defining your audience, and crafting consistent messaging.
You don’t need to spend big early on, but you need some structure. As a founder, your involvement sets the tone for how your company shows up in the market. Get the basics right, and everything else follows.
