What kind of marketer do you need to hire for your startup right now?

We need to talk about something. It’s a secret. But it’s been bubbling to the surface in certain startup circles...

A lot of startup founders are totally confused about what kind of marketer they need to hire, when it’s time to hire them, or how to know they’ve hired the right one. (Maybe even most founders? You know what they say about passing judgment by your own experience.)

What’s the problem? Well, take this example. I recently filled out a form that asked me to select which kind of marketer I am. Just a few options, really…

1. Amazon Marketer

2. Brand Marketer

3. CMO

4. Content Marketer

5. Email Marketer

6. Growth Marketer

7. Paid Search Marketer

8. Paid Social Media Marketer

9. Programmatic Marketer

10. SEO Marketer

11. Social Media Manager

12. Graphic Designer (Paid Social)

13. Other

Um...no wonder founders are confused. Which one of these do you need? And which one right now? Which one next? And no wonder it seems like job titles are starting to mean nearly nothing, job descriptions are all over the place, interviewing processes are becoming longer and longer (especially for senior-level roles), and even picking the right agency seems to have become nearly impossible.

Here’s the thing. I’ve never been one kind of marketer. And I don’t know anyone else who has either.

If I tagged myself as CMO in that list up there, would you assume that I haven’t, couldn’t or won’t do any of the other things, hands-on? Because I have and can do almost all of them (and more, even the graphic design for paid social), and I do, hands-on, the ones that make sense for me to do — even in a leadership role. Because startup marketing execs don’t have the luxury of delegating everything to staff and agencies. They have to do things.

What’s more, in early-stage and lean startups, these marketing disciplines aren’t cleanly separate.

If you’re in a leadership role, you’d better know all of these because you’re overseeing all of them. And if you’re leading marketing in a lean or pre-seed startup, you’re doing all of them. 

Really. You’re most likely simultaneously combining product marketing, demand gen, lead gen, growth marketing, email marketing, and content marketing. Also sales enablement. What else do you call it when you plan a webinar for customers and prospects (both engaged and net-new), structure the content of that webinar to generate demand for you to solve the problem for your audience and showcase the product features to get customers using them and prospects asking for them, plan and publish a series of blog posts to generate traffic and leads, plan a paid social campaign to pull in leads and even design the ads, then turn the transcript and recording of that webinar into yet another stage in the content marketing series, oh and amplify it all via email campaigns and push action at every stage of the funnel with nurtures. It’s all of the above.

So what kind of marketer do you need right now and how do you decide?

You might be ready for a product marketer and a content marketer and a VP of Marketing to lead them. You might need a VP or a CMO who can function at the highest visionary level while also directly doing the work (at least for a while...no one can be a marketing army of one forever).

I know you don’t want to ask this when you’re interviewing your next Head of Marketing. So, here’s a quick primer on what we mean when we talk about these things:

• Product marketing is the strategy, messaging, and tactics that launch a new product into the market, get early adopters to use it, and grow its usage over time.

• Growth marketing is primarily about using paid tactics to test and iterate to grow market share, whatever those primary metrics are for you right now (clicks, leads, customers, whatever).

• Demand generation is basically what marketing is now -- multichannel strategies that influence every stage of the sales and marketing pipeline, from first touch to expansion. 

• Lead generation is what marketing used to be measured on -- how many potential customers did you bring in through that webinar registration form. A lot of people -- and job descriptions -- use demand gen and lead gen interchangeably. 

• Content marketing or inbound marketing is the practice of creating timely, relevant, useful content (blogs, videos, whitepapers, whatever) for your ideal and existing customers and amplifying that content across the right channels so it gets found. So the lines start to blur again when content marketing is amplified by growth marketing tactics like SEO, search marketing, social media marketing, email marketing

• I could list all of those last specializations but they’re self-explanatory and I think I’ve made my point that no part of marketing exists in a perfectly clean little bubble, separate from everything else.

The question of what kind of marketer you need *right now* is even more nuanced.

There’s a reason why startup CMO tenures average 3.5 years. It’s not just that the role is increasingly complex and always changing. It’s also that the startup itself, if all goes well, is always changing. What it needs and who it needs to lead will change. 

Don’t buy into any hard and fast rules about only hiring a VP Marketing or CMO when your team hits a certain size, your ARR reaches a certain level, or any other static benchmark. There’s no one answer for how to grow with marketing, and there’s no one answer for when to grow your marketing in-house, either. What I will say here, though, is you have to have product-market fit, customer engagement, and scalable sales, before a senior marketing leader can be effective. Otherwise, they’re rolling a boulder up that mountain.

At that super early stage, you need someone who can build a vision and do the work.

There are these people. They do exist. Before you have a strong pipeline, before you’re ready for a senior CMO, you need someone who knows how to live inside of HubSpot all day, they won’t balk at actually doing the email campaign for the next product launch or running the newsletter. And, they’ll do it all with a good brand point of view and solid ideal customer profiles that guide their work and align the whole business around the same growth directions. They’ll be your linchpin and your GSD superhero. 

This person knows how to lead, how to build a small team and mentor early-career marketers, how to own the full marketing machine from branding to strategic to sales alignment to tactics and copywriting. They know how to pull in the right freelancers, direct them effectively, and equip them with the right foundational guidance (brand strategy again) to get the right work done at the right price, requiring as little time and money from your team as possible. 

As you grow, the profile of your head of marketing will grow, too.

You’ll find that the person who’s really ready to be in the weeds with all the platforms as a VP might not be ready to build that grand brand vision, to unify an ever-growing chorus of voices and opinions on who we are and who we’re for and what we’re doing and what we’re not doing and why. Or they might just prefer to be more hands-on. You need someone who has enough experience thinking big about a brand’s future, challenging assumptions that have calcified since launch, and driving results in partnership with sales, customer success, and product. That’s a different person.

So…as you hit each milestone, you’ll probably outgrow your CMO again. And again.

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With all of these nuances, how do CEOs decide what you need to hire, and when?

I’m talking to founders about how they’re struggling with this or solving for it. And I’m exploring a potential side hustle that could solve it for you. Want to help build it? Book a call with me. Or contact me to learn more and decide if you want in.