Marketing Debt

Software developer Ward Cunningham coined the term “technical debt” in 1992 to describe what happens when programmers ship quick-and-easy code they plan to update later.

“A little debt speeds development, so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite,” Cunningham wrote. “The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt.”

A similar thing happens very often with marketing at startups with technical founders. 

Reluctant to invest in marketing when they're seeing early organic growth, founders tolerate not-quite-right marketing for years—excitedly telling investors and peers how much growth they’re seeing without any investment in marketing.

(Quick tangent: There seem to be bragging rights associated with how long a startup waits until investing in marketing. This week, a founder told me that one of his advisors, a CEO/founder of a successful, decade-old, fintech unicorn, told him that he didn’t hire his first head of marketing until this very year. Confused, I opened up my LinkedIn app and showed him my friend’s profile and asked how she could have been VP of Marketing at this same company for many years. Clearly these bragging rights are serious if founders are openly lying about it to other founders!)

But after the bragging rights, there is marketing debt. The extent of debt becomes apparent when a company finally hires its first head of marketing. Lured by opportunities to drive growth during the company’s next chapter, the new CMO instead ends up waist-deep in the marketing equivalent of spaghetti code to sort through first (which helps explain why so few survive for very long).

To avoid this fate, founders should identify where they are accumulating marketing debt and get to work on paying it down right away.

Where debt builds

Here are some common problems that arise when no one at the company is thinking about marketing and/or doing anything about it.

• Messaging: Technical startups in particular tend to send a mix of inconsistent and sometimes contradictory messages to the market early in their journey. For example, what engineers say to prospective candidates and what salespeople say to prospective customers often differs a great deal because everyone is focused on closing and short-term goals. While sharing unpolished messages is a forgivable offense at the earliest stages, companies often wait too long—often years—to refine them and enforce more discipline and consistency across all of their channels.

• Brand: Founders tend to understand the importance of a strong, consistent brand in later stages. But their reluctance to invest in branding at the early stages means they leave a long internet breadcrumb trail of inconsistent branding along the way. What’s more, while most industries think of the product (or service) and the brand as one unified concept, early tech startups often go out of their way to separate product and brand in terms of functions, goals, processes, and roles. 

• Measurement: Too often, a startup’s leadership fails to get aligned around what metrics they’ll use to measure the effectiveness of marketing activities. There is no agreed-upon way to measure an increase in brand awareness or affinity, or how to define a marketing qualified lead (MQL) or a good conversion rate on the website.

• Growth channels: A company might ignore several of its best growth channels because it doesn’t have the bandwidth or expertise to manage them. And the longer it waits to build up a channel, the more expensive it becomes.

• Leads for sales: When B2B startups don’t have marketing, it creates problems in sales. Companies hire great salespeople to close deals, not to spend huge chunks of time creatively searching for leads. While it’s true that salespeople often join early-stage startups because they enjoy problem-solving and wearing many hats, relying on them to find their own leads will lead to confusion down the road on how their performance is measured.

Technical debt redux

The concept of technical debt took on a new meaning in the three decades since Cunningham first coined the term. Programmers today use it to signify when a team outsources a technical problem that will need to be updated later to match the existing code.

This, too, happens in marketing. Startups often hire outside PR firms in pursuit of short-term visibility and buzz. However, media coverage is ephemeral. Without a comprehensive marketing and communications strategy, these tactics end up doing little to impact the company’s long-term trajectory.

To avoid this situation, founders should instead invest FTE time and energy in marketing activities as early as possible to manage their debt with consistent payments. To be clear, this doesn’t have to mean hiring marketers, it means prioritizing marketing activities within the team you already have.

Recently, a number of founders have shared that they find themselves in a Catch-22: They want to wait to hire the best head of marketing they can get; but the longer they wait, the more marketing work there is for them to personally manage, which eats into the time they could spend on finding the “perfect” marketing leader. 

To this I ask them to think of how they got out of the last Catch-22 they were in (answer is usually brute force, powering through, putting one foot in front of the other, etc.) and apply that here.

Paying down marketing debt

This is a playbook any startup can follow to start paying down marketing debt, with or without a marketing leader:

1. Identify what’s on fire. If a company has operated with no marketing talent on the team for years, chances are something is on fire. It could be anything from sloppy messaging or branding to a failure to engage a core customer group or understand where your leads are coming from. Once you identify this area, come up with a plan to address it as you tick off simpler items from this list.

2. Find low-hanging fruit. Identify the things you can do now that will get you on a path to ticking off more ambitious goals down the road.

Do start with:

• analyzing traffic sources,

• creating a publishing calendar for your blog,

• increasing your presence at a relevant trade show, or

• starting to use the social media channel that reaches your target audience.

Don’t start with:

• overhauling the website,

• (scaling up) paid acquisition,

• a major rebrand, or

• an out-of-home campaign.

3. Focus on metrics. As I wrote in “Tech Marketing: How We Got Here,” many of the best Silicon Valley companies are successful because their founders are data-obsessed in how they think about their products. Sign up for simple, measurable marketing goals that your company already understands. You can track marketing metrics that align with the company’s strategic goals while also building a case for longer-term, less-easily-measurable-but-equally-important brand projects :) But track and communicate the metrics first, because establishing baselines and showing that marketing is data-driven is important for its long-term success at your company.

4. Pay it off starting today. I advise founders to start marketing as soon as possible. Task whoever is best suited to set up the basics and then hire one or two generalists to create more structure. That way, when the first head of marketing finally arrives, they are in the best possible position to succeed. The team is educated about the role of marketing, marketing activities are underway, and the marketing leader can focus on the big picture.

This is similar to paying off small amounts of financial debt over time. You don’t have to cut big checks, just do small things that add up over time. Get to work and untrap yourself.