It’s the question I hear second-most often, right after “How do I hire a good developer?”. Marketing is one of those skills a startup can’t do without, and realistically, probably shouldn’t be started without. Most founders have at least some marketing skills, and that works for a while. But they reach a point where they want to focus on what they’re great at, and don’t know how to determine if someone else is as good at marketing as the founder is at coding, business, etc. If you’re in that spot, or just in the unenviable position of trying to attract customers / users to an idling completed product, here’s your guide to choosing someone who can help turn up the heat.

What is Good Marketing?

Good marketing exists at the intersection of awareness, analysis, and creativity.

1. Awareness: Of the market, of how it will perceive different messages, of what others are doing to reach your market, of how your market communicates with each other, and of trends within related markets that may be applicable to yours.
2. Analysis: The ability to take information and create meaning. Being able to answer more than one “why?” about a change’s occurrence. Being able to predict more than one scenario, and explain the factors that make each more / less likely.
3. Creativity: The ability to create new methods, rather than just improvements to existing ones.

What Skills Does a Marketer Need?

Every marketer must have a well-honed talent for effective communication. Someone with average communication skills can take information and restate it in way they’re better able to understand it. Someone with above-average communication skills can take information and restate it in a way that others will be better able to understand it. Above-average communicators can take the same content and frame it many different ways (“in need of repairs” becomes “fixer-upper”). Most importantly for applications, above-average communicators can translate features into benefits.

For web-based businesses, a marketer also needs to be skilled at the following:

• Knowledge of incentives. Understanding what motivates people (to purchase, to participate, to create) is essential for marketing.
• Search Engine Optimization. Search engine traffic drives signups/sales directly, assists with referrals, and provides additional opportunities. A marketer should know how to identify what terms to target, how to find out how often people are searching for different terms, how to increase your rankings, and how ranking well for different terms will accomplish your business goals.
• Content Creation. For cash-strapped startups, being able to create interesting content is key for inbound marketing strategies to bring users. Even if you’re not trying to bring in customers, creating interesting content will get you noticed in your industry, and in the media, leading to partnership, investment, and acquisition opportunities.
• Analytics. Startups that want to accomplish their goals must be able to measure them, and they must have a marketer that’s able to test different means of accomplishing them. You can only improve efficiency by seeing what affects it, whether it’s A/B testing your site, or determining which of your marketing efforts are getting the most bang for your buck (or effort).

How do you Find a Good Marketer?

The best marketers combine passion with the ability to communicate it. A good marketer for your startup is going to be one that understands your target audience, preferably by being a member of it… unless your target market is people who are bad at marketing.

One of the best ways to find candidates is to identify the marketing people at related, but not competing, services targeting a similar demographic, and ask them to recommend someone.

How do you Determine if They Have the Skills?

The best evidence is always just that: evidence. If they can show the results they specifically generated for projects (“I increased…”, not “My company increased…”), that’s excellent.

Some questions you may want to ask in an interview are:

• How would you describe my company to a friend you wanted to use it?
  • Their answer should describe benefits, from a user point of view, rather than features.
• What are two specific types of potential users you think we could better focus on reaching, and how? – or – What are two specific ways you can see our product being used, and how should our marketing target people who would most use it one of those ways?
  • They should demonstrate an ability to make some kind of intelligent segmentation of your overall market into audiences that you can create specific messages or use specific mediums to reach.
• What trends do you see in our industry that we could tap into, to attract more users?
  • Here they should either show you that they know the scene well, or that they’re motivated enough to do research about it. The trends they recommend tapping into should be people-focused.

Be Open to Change, but Establish Trust & Test It

A good marketer can only help you if you let them, and that may mean changing that front-page description that you think is just fine, or targeting search terms that seem counter-intuitive. But remember that there’s a reason you’re looking for marketing help: they’ve learned lessons you haven’t yet!

Work with a new marketing team member to create clear, measurable goals. Provide clear priorities for how you want different resources (their time, development time, money) used. Pursue new marketing efforts with set expectations for when and how they’ll be measured, and let the results speak for themselves.

Today I’m at Real Estate BarCamp Boston, connecting with industry techies, vendors, and agents. One presentation, one interview, and many introductions later, I’m done with the scheduled sessions and off to enjoy some pizza and networking. If video of the presentation or interview become available, I’ll link to it here. Thanks to everyone I met for great conversations; please check out my real estate marketing website service, EasyImpress.

This Saturday and Sunday, “BarCampBoston4″:http://www.barcampboston.org/ is happening at MIT! It’s a fantastic geek unconference, with close to 400 attendees networking, eating, and participating in sessions on everything from _Rapid Application Development_ to _Entrepreneurs Anonymous_ to _Battlestar Galactica: The Aftermath_. The main thing I’m thinking about is… what am _I_ going to present on?

Some ideas I’ve been thinking about…
* Boston public startup space – getting one started.
* The Entrepreneur’s Lifecycle – learning, doing, outreach, and mentoring.
* Kicking ass at competitive research for web services.

Starting a Boston Startup Space

Right now, the Boston startup community is an invisible network with no persistent points of connection or knowledge-sharing. Students, newcomers to the area, and corporate refugees have a particularly hard time discovering and feeling connected to the local community, resulting in a talent drain from Boston as individuals move to San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere.

Events like BarCampBoston & Web Innovators Group are great at drawing them out some of the time, but these events are ships making port only occasionally, and often passing in the night. A persistent, publicly-available space for the Boston startup community would act as a magnet for entrepreneurs & talented individuals. It would allow them to network, collaborate, gain inspiration, and feel more connected to the community.

The session would be about my vision for such a space, the challenges in creating one (some questions I still don’t have answers to), and some action items for any who want to be involved, or can pass along the items to others who may want to be involved.

The Entrepreneur’s Lifecycle

Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to advise a couple of entrepreneurs younger than myself. One an intern from CareerNumbers, the other a connection from a high school friend, now in college. I was amazed at how much advice I actually had to give; that is, how much I’ve learned since moving to Boston almost three years ago, attempting my first startup, and now working on my second. It got me thinking about where I became aware of entrepreneurship, from my mother as a small business owner, and what I’ve done to make others aware of it.

I’m not sure what the goals of this as a session would be, though. My main thought right now is it would be interesting to hear the stories of others from different stages of this lifecycle.

Kicking Ass at Competitive Research for Web Services

This relates to the article I wrote on Evaluating Your Competitors’ Products. First you have to know who your competitors are. And just as important as understanding how their product works and how their customers like it, is understanding where their customers are coming from (and where they’re not). Essentially, this session is me compressing a bunch of marketing expertise, bundling it with a dozen or so useful tools, and uploading it into everyone’s brains at T3 connection speeds.

Leave a comment if you’re particularly interested in any of the above, I might not present until Sunday. I’ll post slides after the presentation, but hope to see you at BarCampBoston4!

At IgniteBoston5, I gave a presentation entitled, “Is Social Media Bullshit?”. I’ve synced up an audio recording of the talk with the slides, and embedded it below.

Self-awareness is what separates man from the ape. And high-quality self-knowledge is what separates the successful entrepreneur from the failed one. What do you spend most of your time on? What are your weaknesses? Who do you talk to the least that provides good advice the most often? The more we know about ourselves, the better we’re able to spend our time, and the easier it is to identify the areas where improvement will have the biggest effect. This is more than learning from our mistakes (though I’ve “been doing that”:http://socialstrategist.com/2008/10/28/news-armada-post-mortem, too); it’s helping ourselves avoid errors and make the most of our strengths.

The downside is, it takes a lot of time to evaluate yourself, and a more heightened awareness of all the actions we take every day than most of us really have. For some things, it requires keeping track of actions over the course of weeks or more. It takes a ton of mental energy, or making the extra effort to setup a system to track things for you, to get this done. *It’s the information overload of life.*

And that’s what technology is for.

After attempting to determine which of the nearly 700 feeds I’m subscribed to I should keep, based on what my sketchy memory tells me about how often each of them has provided any kind of value, I’ve decided to finally move on from Bloglines as a feedreader. I’m hammering on another link in the chain of “Google’s Information Ecosystem”:http://socialstrategist.com/2007/07/08/the-google-information-ecosystem, and switching to Google Reader. It doesn’t have all the analytics I’d like (# of links I click by feed, for instance), but its “Trends”:http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/01/i-like-big-charts-and-i-cannot-lie.html feature at least shows me which feeds I’m actually reading (and some other nifty data). Google Reader isn’t the only tool that’s enlightening me about my habits…

“RescueTime”:http://www.rescuetime.com/ is something I decided to give a try this year, and it’s been tremendously helpful in showing me where I spend my time on the PC. “Mint”:http://www.mint.com is to my money what RescueTime is to my time. And one of my fondest wishes is for GMail to get some kind of Xobni or ClearContext-like functionality that will show me who my most frequent contacts and conversation subjects are. The best thing about these apps is that they don’t require any effort on my part past installing them. No data entry, no tagging (though I can, if I want to improve the already very good results), they *track my naturally occurring actions without me having to think about it*. That means I can spend my time on gaining insight, not measuring usage.

If you frequently find yourself wanting to get more out of what you have, whether it’s an hour from your day or a dollar from your wallet, take 5 minutes to sign up for the apps above. And let me know if you find more like them!