When is the right time for a startup to bring on marketing? Are brand and storytelling important before product-market-fit?
We asked Hila Shitrit Nissim*, an experienced CMO, to share her perspective on marketing in Israeli startups. Hila spent 12 years as the VP Marketing for Israeli venture capital fund Viola before embarking on an independent CMO career for startups.
The common case in israel is founding teams flying solo without a marketer until it’s imminently necessary. Do you think different categories or products require different timing in terms of adding on a marketer?
In my opinion, the sooner a marketer is brought on board, the better.
It does not need to be a full-time CMO, but someone who can bring the marketing perspective to everything you do in the early days is essential. Being guided and supported in finding the product-market fit and experimenting with messaging can shorten time-to-market and save valuable resources.
Although this has been known for years for B2C companies, it is interesting to see B2B companies realizing the importance of marketing early on, as well.
A marketer will help the founders to create the larger vision and story for the company, craft the desired brand essence and values, and explore various go-to-market approaches. These steps are vital to securing initial funding and attracting pilots, design partners, and customers.
As Hila shared on Linkedin:
The increasing number of unicorns and success stories out of Israel proves that we certainly have some of the world’s best marketing minds.
As a consequence, founders choose to keep the marketing positions in Israel rather than looking for talent externally (like they did in the past), and they are hiring marketers earlier in the process, realizing that technology alone is no longer sufficient.
This led to an increased demand for marketers and a shortage at all levels of marketing talent.
What’s the best advice or practical tips you have for founders with regards to marketing and branding at seed stage?
My advice is to talk to the market and to potential customers as early as possible and think about your company’s brand from day one. Many founders concentrate on perfecting their product, adding revolutionary features, and staying in stealth mode to avoid the competition. However, the earlier they talk to users and understand their pain points, the better the chances are of gaining traction and better positioning as they launch.
Every successful marketing strategy starts with a well-told story. Talking to your target audience gets you to that point. Among other tips I share, below is my favourite exercise
Try to answer these questions:
- Why should these people (buyers) care about our product?
- What makes our product so much better for their needs?
- How big is the problem we solve for them?
These are the first questions that will help you build the brand and create the right story for it.
There’s a rise in community led startups. What best practices have you seen in Israel when it comes to community building?
There is an impressive pool of marketing talent in Israel, including brilliant community managers. Israelis are great at sharing experiences, tips, and encouraging and supporting one another and these are the basic elements of a strong community. Some of the largest communities on Facebook were created in Israel (i.e Supergirls, Hashavot, Hatochenistim and more) and this talent turned the best practices from social nonprofit communities into communities that cater to specific needs and business purposes.
Companies that succeed in building a community have a great advantage in today’s world when users seek safe and supportive environments where they can also influence one another. It also gives brands a way to differentiate themselves in a fragmented market, where traditional channels become very costly.
What’s expected from a CMO today has changed from 10 years ago. Is there a marketing talent crunch?
The key change from a decade ago is the realisation by entrepreneurs that a great idea plus a strong technological foundation aren’t enough anymore. To grab people’s attention, you need to have a good narrative, build a professional website and collateral, be consistent and memorable, and creatively generate the demand for your solution while charging for it (hopefully at a premium rate). As a result, there is an increasing demand for strong marketing strategists and exceptional marketing professionals across all relevant domains – content, social media, user acquisition, SEO, creative and design, community management and more.
As a member of G–CMO (a community of Israeli based CMOs from global successful companies) I see how attractive this field has become as we share dozens of new open positions every week.
* Hila Shitrit Nissim
Part time CMO for B2B and B2C startups.
With 20 years of marketing experience, Hila is passionate about building strong, meaningful brands and creating differentiated positioning in highly competitive markets.
Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hilashitritnissim/
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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