Joining a startup is exciting. You get to bring a new product or service to market that solves customer problems. Success depends on focusing the internal team on creating a unique offering that serves a large market demand, while ensuring that you can reach prospects to provide revenue and set the stage for growth.
While it can be challenging and risky with limited staff and resources, early-stage marketing is a key to success. I’ve lived the dream leading marketing at multiple early-stage startup companies. Now, as an analyst, I enjoy helping startup teams.
I am often asked about how and when a startup should engage with analysts, so here are my thoughts on how startups can extract the most value from analyst relations and their marketing programs.
Focus on Product-Market Fit
Many think that marketing starts when a company’s founders have developed a product or service and need to find customers to buy it. With constrained resources—many startups are self-funded, and/or they need to manage tight budgets with limited early-stage venture capital funding—many startups deprioritize marketing. It is hard to justify hiring a senior marketing leader and/or multiple marketing roles, such as product marketing, communications, and demand generation when you are still figuring out the product.
However, neglecting marketing is a mistake and risks wasting precious time and limited resources to building a product only to find out that it doesn’t meet customer needs. So, what should early marketing look like? You need to establish product market fit (PMF)—the degree to which your product meets market demand. This entails talking to customers, understanding their pain points, and building the product to meet their needs so that you will have customers who want to buy your product.
While building the product falls into the realm of product management, early marketing needs to understand and write compelling messaging around the answers to three key questions: why buy, why buy now, and why buy my solution? It can be difficult with limited time and resources to find the ideal customer profile and/or design partners to provide the needed feedback. This is where we can help.
Getting Value and ROI From Analyst Relations
Analyst relations (AR) are typically part of corporate communications at larger companies. While startups don’t have the luxury to hire a dedicated person to manage AR, starting analyst relations and leveraging the right industry analysts early can help guide or validate PMF and help fuel company success.
Startup teams should not view AR as a necessary chore where they need to brief analysts covering their space. While that might make sense for briefing reporters for press relations (PR), a good analyst relations program should collect feedback and insight from analysts that can be valuable for validating and improving PMF and reaching a wider array of customers.
Here are the typical ways to get the most out of your AR efforts.
Analyst Briefings
There is no cost to briefing industry analysts, as we want to accurately and comprehensively cover the significant vendors and related news in our coverage areas. It is important to brief industry analysts as part of communications and PR plans for news announcements as industry analysts are often contacted by reporters to provide analysis or commentary for their articles. Analysts should be briefed early, before briefing the press because we might have useful feedback to improve messaging and positioning that you can use to tune your marketing efforts.
However, bear in mind that most analyst briefings are typically one way; analysts might ask questions, but they typically withhold advice or feedback and reserve it for their paying clients. At Informa TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, we are opinionated and vocal, so we typically do provide feedback during briefings, and can go into greater detail in inquiry sessions with clients.
It is also important to be clear on what information is public, and/or get a written agreement for an embargo if you are pre-briefing analysts before a news announcement, such as a funding event or product release where you don’t want any information leaking early.
While the briefings are typically one-way, be sure to pause for questions or feedback from the analyst. Analysts are constantly getting briefings from other vendors, so we have a vantage point that enables us to determine whether you have a unique and compelling value proposition and clear differentiators from what others offer. Or we might spot something that we’ve never seen from other vendors and make recommendations to help you strengthen your messaging.
Utilizing Analyst Research
When I worked at startups and was tasked with marketing, I learned as much as I could about the founders’ story, the problem they were addressing, and the product they built or were building. Marketing efforts needed to focus on the delta between what the outside world understood about the problem and available solutions, and what we could offer with our new approach. This frequently involves fighting against inertia and coming to the battle armed to explain why change is needed and why it is imperative to change now rather than kicking the can down the road.
To do this effectively requires research, including investigating how many customers faced the problems we addressed, and how our product compared to existing products or solutions. There were other areas, including determining pricing and packaging, that required research. In a previous role at a bigger company, I ran the competitive and strategic intelligence team, but I had a whole team at my disposal, and it was a full-time job for each of my team members.
This is where analyst research and feedback becomes valuable. At Enterprise Strategy Group, each analyst runs demand-side market research studies in their coverage areas to examine key problem areas and trends, including top challenges for different personas and teams, what types of solutions they are currently using, what they are looking for in an effective solution, their budgets, and their roles in evaluating and buying products.
Our research portal gives clients access to reports and briefs using the data from these studies, including compelling charts and graphs of the research findings that can be easily integrated into presentations and content. This type of objective research is valuable for startups needing independent data points to validate their thesis and can be used in customer decks, pitch decks, or to build content including press releases, blog posts, and reports.
Inquiries for Feedback and Guidance
Analyst inquiries are the other vehicle for startups to have an engaging and insightful session on what is needed to build awareness and understanding for your company’s offerings. It is very easy to get sucked into in a bubble of excitement and passion for your startup’s mission and offerings and lose sight of the broader market context. Your message might resonate with favorably disposed prospects—“friendlies”—but might not appeal to a broader market.
You will need to understand how to compete against internally built DIY solutions and currently in-use solutions, which could be from larger, more established vendors with multiple deployed products, or point tools addressing your problem area. You will need to help the prospect justify the investment and allocate the budget to buy your product. Analysts can help you in these areas based on our research and our coverage of the vendors in your space to justify the spending. This should save you the time of trying to figure things out, which is especially hard when you are in that bubble that I mentioned above, and/or we can provide sanity checks and validate what you have discovered.
When I was at startups, the other way I used analyst briefings was to help speed up decision-making. For example, when you have limited resources and are determining your roadmap, you might need to prioritize features for your next product update. An analyst can weigh in and likely provide data or research to help you make the best decisions.
Analyst Reports and Custom Assets
From my decades in tech marketing, and later cybersecurity marketing, I’ve found that the most compelling communications and content that vendors can provide should not seem like marketing or sales materials. Yes, you need product info, data sheets, and customer case studies, but it is important to ensure it is informational, educational, and useful content that helps people to complete their tasks more efficiently and effectively. Tech buyers, especially cybersecurity buyers, are conditioned to distrust content from vendors, and they can be easily put off by anything coming off as fear, uncertainty, and doubt that manipulates using scare tactics, or seeming too biased to the vendor’s solution or approach.
This is another area where analyst reports—objective third-party reports covering market trends—can come in handy as a resource for vendors to provide for content marketing. At Enterprise Strategy Group, our research does not rate or compare vendors, and we are committed to objective coverage based on what we’ve learned from our research and interactions with vendors and end users.
We have off-the-shelf reports and other assets for vendors to leverage. For startups, these assets might be difficult to create in house or with outside firms because of the need for data points, creative design, and production. At Enterprise Strategy Group, we have the data at our fingertips from our research, and we have the editing, production, and videography teams to create professional, polished assets. We also help with bottom-of-funnel assets with technical and economic validations that help to independently substantiate solution benefits.
Also, as part of Informa TechTarget, we can also help clients distribute the content, getting it in front of prospects and customers at various stages of the marketing funnel to drive sales. If you’re at a startup, and if we haven’t already reached out to you, feel free to reach out to us. We want to know about what you’re doing and how we can help.
