Suresh Sathyamurthy is chief marketing officer at SingleStore, where he leads marketing and product-led growth.
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Startups face many challenges through their growth life cycle. Prominent among them is their transition from a startup to a scaleup. There is a material role that marketing leaders and communication professionals can play to help their startups to become scaleups.
I’ve spent most of my career helping to grow emerging businesses from just a handful of customers to becoming multimillion- or billion-dollar businesses. Over the last year and a half, I have been running marketing, developer relations and product-led growth initiatives for SingleStore, a scaleup unicorn that has raised $278 million over the last couple of years and has grown quickly during that time. From my experience scaling up startups and emerging technologies in large companies, I have discovered these three winning approaches.
Be Bold In Your Marketing
The problem you are trying to solve is obvious. Unlike big brands, if you are a startup, people will not know your name or your product. Without awareness, you will have trouble acquiring customers.
How do you build awareness?
Stretch your marketing and advertising budgets with bold, attention-grabbing campaigns. Use intelligent humor, relate to controversial current affairs, go more directly after the competition, and challenge the status quo. You may worry that this approach is generally risky, but I think it’s better to be talked about than not talked about, and marketing is not about being risk-averse. Remember that the ads are not just for “in-market” buyers. As Tyrona Heath from the B2B Institute at LinkedIn writes, “The best ads drive sales over the longest periods of time by building memories that still have the power to influence our buying decisions years later.”
Serenity Thompson outlined five rules for using controversy well. She wrote: “Controversial marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies because one courageous campaign can also generate high levels of awareness and drive conversions — especially if your topic … goes viral.”
SingleStore uses this approach in our billboards on Highway 101 in Silicon Valley. We also extend the life of these physical billboards by using their digital avatars for our web advertising.
Take An Outside-In Approach
Marketing and communication leaders tend to focus on messaging the core values of their product when building campaigns and programs. Instead, take an outside-in approach. Build campaigns around solving a specific problem for your prospect. Choose problems that a majority of the audience in your target accounts are struggling with that your product can address. Don’t be tempted to talk about everything your product does. This may seem obvious, but you would be surprised by how many martech companies reach out to me (CMO is their target audience) and talk mostly about everything they do instead of telling me how it’s going to help me with my problems.
One of the best ways to win a customer is to solve a specific problem and deliver a quick win for them. At SingleStore, we noticed that modern app builders start with MySQL (a prominent open-source database) and run into errors as their app (and data) scales. These errors could include having too many connections, running out of memory or having a table that is full. Our campaigns and customer journey were designed around signaling that we understand such challenges and helping solve this problem and address those errors. This has led to rapid adoption.
Over time, our customers started using our solution to replace other competing solutions. And we now have the trust and permission of these customers to tell them everything else our product can do. You can expand your customers’ spending and build trust in this way, too.
Double Down On Product-Led Growth
Many technology startups today are software as a service (SaaS) companies, and I believe they should leverage the product-led growth (PLG) approach. PLG, in a nutshell, is about taking the customer through the journey of experiencing the product on their own terms and using their interactions with the product to help convert them to retained paying customers over the long term.
A former CMO of Palo Alto Networks, which is a cybersecurity company and one of my previous employers, recently wrote an article on what PLG means to marketing. In it, he notes, “The PLG marketer’s role is to lead the creation of an in-product experience that at any time feels comfortable to the end-user, guarantees they succeed in what they’re trying to achieve, and creates the trust that is needed to build long-term affinity.”
To get PLG right, partner with your product team and go through the trial experience of your product and that of your competitors. With each cycle of review, identify how you can make the experience faster and better. Over the course of the last year, we have done this and made several improvements to our product experience. This has significantly improved our conversions from sign-up to active trials and then to paying customers.
There is risk and opportunity associated with all three of these approaches. I’ve found that the magic ingredients to get this right are a great team, supportive leadership (and board), good judgment, calculated risk and the right balance of analytical and creative thinking. But the most important thing of all is having the courage to leave the safe harbor.
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