In this episode of The Pitch Room, Malia is joined by Priyanka Sharma to discuss content marketing and building marketing functions from the ground up in the early days of a startup. Priyanka is currently the Head of Product Marketing at LightStep and cofounded WakaTime

Listen in as they discuss the importance of establishing the right corporate voice and setting targets for content cadence. Learn tactics like ‘narrowly defining a topic’ to support developers with writer’s block, or no writing experience.

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In this episode, Malia is joined by Marcy Campbell, SVP WW Sales & Business Development at Qubole. Marcy and Malia discuss how marketing and sales teams can move beyond their differences to improve business performance. Discussion topics include the primary goals of each department, what success should look like, and how to clarify lead scoring and lead generation metrics.

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In this episode Malia hosts Gradle CMO Miko Matsumura to talk about mistakes to avoid in marketing as an early stage startup, how to build a marketing strategy into your next fundraising deck, and different tooling options for your marketing automation stack

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In this episode of The Pitch Room, I had the opportunity to sit down with LaunchDarkly’s Andrea Echstenkamper to discuss multichannel marketing and platforms for thought leadership.

In today’s digital world, many different marketing channels make it tough for early stage startups to choose the right channel. Inspired by the book Traction, Andrea shares a 3-step framework to help prioritize marketing channels:

• How WELL the channel works
• How QUICKLY the channel can be tested
• How much the channel COSTS

A couple of channels are recommended for early stage startups:

Retargeting is a powerful branding and conversion optimization tool. Google AdWords lets marketers pay for clicks, rather than impressions allowing companies to only pay when a visitor is reengaged. Many startups do not have the bandwidth to build out a full email-nurturing plan, and this is a great strategy to receive early interest further down the funnel.

A low budget Twitter or LinkedIn campaign can result in high ROI because companies can get feedback quickly on messaging and measure the strength of its offering. A small tweet boost or Facebook campaign provides valuable information about a startup’s audience. In LinkedIn, marketers can test a hypothesis by targeting users by job title. In Twitter, marketers can target by keyword or Twitter count followers to see where the opportunities are for SEO and partner marketing. These mini experiments will show marketers what works without a huge marketing spend.

Email marketing helps businesses stay connected with current and potential customers. It is also a great platform to be more personal with your audience. Personalizing an email body has been shown to generate greater transaction rates. Airbnb attributes much of its early success to emailing directly to Craigslist users that listed their homes.

Meet-ups or community events allow companies to engage with users face-to-face and develop a community around their product. Events often result in valuable feedback for engineering and marketing departments. Spending time on developing and engaging your network is recommended.

Content marketing is a great tactic to engage with customers and arm them with expert knowledge that will help during their buying process. Developing content that can span multiple channels easily will save time and helps with consistent messaging across all your channels.

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In this episode of the Pitch Room, I had a great time chatting with Runscope’s Ashley Waxman about customer marketing. We discuss customer engagement strategies, tips for marketing to developers and steps to launch your own customer marketing program.

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I had the pleasure of speaking with Cameron Peron following his Heavybit Speaker Series presentation on Creating Killer Trend Stories.

Cameron recently served as VP Marketing at Redis Labs where he led their post Series A marketing activities to accelerate SaaS based customer acquisition fivefold within 24 months. Previously as VP Marketing at Newvem he led their developer marketing team to generate 2.5K users in 14 months from Series A to acquisition.

Listen in as we discuss how to make your organization a source for news, the art of media relations and tactics for effective influencer marketing.

In the age of continuous delivery, there are more frequent software releases than ever before. This decoupling of ‘code’ from ‘product’ creates challenges for marketing teams that are planning dates to announce new features.

In this episode of The Pitch Room, Cameron offers advice for smaller companies on how to overcome this challenge.

• Avoid assumptions: Once a feature update is live, it is rare for your end users and external community to know about it unless you tell them. Do not assume that end users are aware of updates and be sure to communicate changes in a timely manner.
• Latch onto a trend: Small feature updates are not as attractive for bloggers and influencers to write about unless it latches onto a trend or controversial topic. For example, for a data monitoring product, one tactic is to align your company with big data trend stories and provide insight into how a particular monitoring feature is solving a big data challenge.
• Do not get discouraged: Continue to announce feature updates because it keeps your company on the radar. If the announcement does not yield press coverage, continue to post to your blog and share the news with end users. Feature updates are an easy opportunity to connect with your community and establish loyalty.
• Have your customers tell the story: A feature that solves a specific challenge for your customer makes for great content. Track customer feedback and ask customers if they would be willing to speak with the media or contribute to a byline on your behalf.

As the software development market continues to evolve, expect to see traditional communications strategies evolve with it.

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