As VP of global marketing at Blackboard, Natasha Davidson led a team of 40 marketers, orchestrating strategies across diverse business lines and regions. More recently, she was the EMEA chief marketing officer at Coursera (raised $464M before going public in 2021), where she spearheaded growth initiatives spanning its enterprise, degrees and consumer segments. Natasha is a first-generation university graduate and, as a Venture Partner within the Emerge community, Natasha has swiftly become an invaluable asset to our portfolio founders, mentoring them on the most effective marketing strategies for breakout success.
This interview was part of a series called Product-Market Fit Academy, run by Emerge in conjunction with our Venture Partner community – operators who have founded and led the biggest businesses in our market, including Duolingo, Udemy, Beamery, HiBob, WalkMe and OpenAI, representing a combined $1tn in market cap.
Here is what founders will get out of this conversation with Natasha:
- How to formulate a solid marketing strategy during the critical early phases of a startup, inc establishing trust and the value of deep user engagement
- Metrics to measure the impact of your marketing efforts and the importance of marketing’s contribution to the sales pipeline
- B2B versus B2C: tailoring your go-to-market approach
- How to achieve brand clarity using her own market positioning grid
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How to approach marketing as an early-stage startup
The initial stages of a startup are make-or-break, and a solid marketing approach is essential. A clear marketing plan can be a gamechanger, but crafting one is challenging, with many marketers oscillating between overly complex or overly simplistic strategies. The right balance is crucial for aligning with business goals. Natasha recommends Forrester’s Marketing Plan on a Page framework; it’s a tool she has used successfully in the past, to create a practical and measurable plan.
To apply the framework, answer the following questions:
- What are your goals?
Reflect on your startup’s key objectives and expansion plans for the upcoming year. This should incorporate yearly sales aims, specific business or product milestones, and targets for different regions. - Where do we stand now?
Examine data on the internal and external environments of the company, including current market strategies, targeted market sectors, distribution channels, product trajectories, historical performance for products and sectors, and insights into potential buyers and existing customers. - What resources do you have?
Think about the expertise of the marketing team, your network of partners and service providers, existing marketing tech tools, and your track record in executing marketing programmes. The total marketing budget allocated for the year is important to note.
This focused strategy ensures that marketing and sales teams are in sync and aligned with the business objective.
But of course, despite even the most thorough plans, there is one key challenge for startups… building trust without an established reputation.
When you have no existing customers to provide testimonials, and no proof of concept, how do you draw in your very first customers?
“For any customers that have chosen to trial or pilot your product, even if you haven’t gotten to the point where you have outcomes yet, creating testimonials that speak to why that customer decided to trial or pilot with you can often help you in creating additional momentum. Talking about why they chose you first, instead of talking about the outcomes that you don’t yet have, can be helpful to mitigate the absence of proof points from those early customers.”
Natasha has seen trials, demos, and even diagnostic clinics used effectively to show off a product and, over time, to explain why your earliest adopters chose you. At first, these can even be your friends and family. Once you have the very first users, Natasha emphasises the importance of crafting testimonials from early on.
When it comes to testimonials, Natasha reminds founders that attention spans are shrinking and customers face a deluge of information each day, so the way you tell your customer stories needs to adapt accordingly. She suggests leveraging short video or audio testimonials to capture the essence of the user experience. Content should be concise and dynamic.
Whether startup or unicorn, Natasha insists that “the secret to the most effective marketing strategies always comes down to one thing: starting with the customer. Engage them directly. Interview them. Understand their experience with the product, identify their pain points and find out how your offering has addressed those.” This feedback can be transformed into diverse content forms, from longer thought pieces to compact testimonials. Whether it’s partnering with a user to craft a case study or having them feature on a webinar, the key lies in leveraging every customer interaction. “Never underestimate the power of these interactions,” says Natasha. “They can be transformed into videos, ebooks or social media posts, all serving to pull in more users or bolster the existing brand narrative.”
Measuring the impact of marketing efforts
To ensure that marketing efforts are genuine investments, founders must prioritise measuring impact, to enable strategic decision-making.
For Natasha, the most important metric for any company, and especially for B2B, is marketing’s contribution to the sales pipeline. But this isn’t just about numbers; it’s about defining ‘contribution’. In teams without mutual clarity between sales and marketing teams, metrics can lead to confusion and contention.
“It’s important to look at what you expect marketing to do in terms of impact on the sales funnel and where you expect that impact to happen. Are you more interested in having marketing bring in qualified leads to the top of the funnel – or do you want marketing to also help with conversion of those leads across the funnel until sales starts to take over and close those deals?”
The quality, cost and conversion rate of those leads across the funnel are other key metrics to look at when evaluating the success of marketing efforts. Founders should know how much marketing budget it takes to bring in a quality lead.
There are many other metrics that vary by tactic and channel. A startup’s website, for example, is its silent salesperson – often the initial touchpoint for potential customers. Gauging its effectiveness does not come down to counting visitors; it’s about measuring engagement, such as the time spent on the site, bounce rates and actions taken, e.g. form completions or resource downloads. To measure this, Natasha recommends tools like SimilarWeb, a free tool founders can use to determine the effectiveness of their website in communicating with prospects and customers.
Natasha warns that B2B teams should expect longer feedback cycles on the results of their marketing efforts:
“In many B2B businesses, marketing actions taken in Q1 might not show any return until the next quarter. That is sometimes surprising for sales teams to understand, but the reason that it takes longer in B2B is because there are many more interactions and touchpoints before a buyer will show interest or be ready to take the next step in the sales cycle.”
But these lengthy feedback loops don’t mean teams can’t look for early signals of success. Natasha recommends weaving different marketing tactics into comprehensive campaigns or programmes: “by synchronising various efforts, such as social media posts, website content and even offline events, startups can better gauge their effectiveness as early indicators of an overall initiative that may take longer to show results”. For instance, if you’re active on social media platforms such as LinkedIn or Substack, initial engagement metrics can offer valuable insights into whether your target audience is resonating with your content, even if sales cycles are long.
Business development teams can also provide early feedback. Their interactions with prospects, testing out specific messages and strategies, can offer clues about the effectiveness of marketing activities. If prospects are recalling where they heard about the company or product, it’s a hint that marketing efforts are starting to make an impact. Thus, while certain marketing approaches may not immediately reflect their ROI, the synergy of patience, ongoing assessment, holistic marketing campaigns and tuning into early signals can help startups bridge the gap until definitive sales results appear.
B2B vs B2C: tailoring your go-to-market approach
How can startups amplify their discoverability and truly distinguish themselves from the competition? As Natasha puts it, marketing is the amplification of the early decisions founders make around product-market fit, the problem, persona and proposition.
“A really important element for a startup is to think through the building blocks of brand strategy. What are the values? What’s your purpose? What’s your mission? What’s your vision for your product? What is that value proposition? What’s the identity and tone you want to strike? All these things allow you to create a unique positioning in the market as long as you have thought very clearly about who the customer is and what problems you’re trying to solve for them.”
In such a bustling space, it’s the authentic brands – those that resonate deeply with a clear customer profile and address specific problems – that cut through the noise. The journey is iterative, involving continuous testing and adjustment, but those initial signs of clarity start to inform your go-to-market strategy.
When it comes to go-to-market, there are different tactics to consider:
- A marketing-centric approach aims to etch your product into the customer’s mind, making it the go-to solution through one-to-many communication.
- A sales-focused strategy hinges on detailed one-to-one interactions, often relying on relationship building.
Both have their place and often work in tandem, but may be better suited to certain business models.
“In a B2B organisation, there’s a marketing engine and there’s a sales engine,” explains Natasha. “In the B2C space, marketing and sales are more merged into one; the lines are very blurred. In many instances you spend a lot more time trying to get an individual consumer to make their decision to buy. But once they buy, that’s your revenue. Whereas in the B2B space you have marketing trying to position the company and get individuals to think of them as their preferred partner. Then once they say, ‘yes, I actually do want to do business with you’, there’s still sometimes a long tail of negotiation and iteration on the sales side to get that prospect to really say yes and to sign. That’s where the revenue comes in. Building that momentum towards revenue can take a lot longer in a B2B space than in a B2C space.”
Allocating resources
With myriad channels available, from website optimisation to the vast expanse of social media, where should founders invest? It’s important to do research to understand how long it takes to see the return on investment for different marketing strategies and how certain tactics build on the success of each other.
“For example, SEO can actually take up to a year or longer for you to really see those benefits. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t start. It means you should think about what the building blocks are for having an effective SEO strategy. One of the critical building blocks is optimising your website. So, before you go out and spend money on SEO, it’s probably a better use of your investment to spend on website optimisation first, thinking about: what content do I have on my site? How is that content connected to the keywords that people might be using to search for a solution like mine? Is my site easy to navigate? Is it engaging? Does it motivate and drive people to fill out that ‘contact us’ form, which is one of the most important elements of the site when you’re trying to gain traction.”
Natasha also advises founders to invest some time in building your presence across other digital marketing channels. For those in B2B, a good LinkedIn presence is indispensable, along with engaging with customers and prospects that might interact with your brand on the platform. For B2C companies, Instagram or TikTok might be the better bet, so founders should spend some time building content that performs well on those channels.
Her parting wisdom for early-stage founders is to continually assess and re-evaluate their marketing strategy, so it can evolve with the company’s stage and needs.
“It’s important to think through, where are you today? What is it that you have at your disposal and what do your assets look like today? Then determine where you should invest to get those returns on marketing. SEO is one that I would probably put a little bit later on the list and instead think about the building blocks that get you to an effective SEO strategy.”
How to achieve brand clarity
In the intricate dance of marketing and positioning, the devil is in the detail. The potency of sharp messaging coupled with an efficient landing page is undeniable. Yet the challenge many founders grapple with lies in articulating a distinct problem-space fit to begin with.
Natasha illuminated this conundrum with a real story. A founder approached Natasha for guidance. Despite securing VC funding and having seemingly defined their company’s identity, they were struggling to close conversations with customers and drive them to a decision. After analysing the company’s marketing and sales materials, Natasha observed that while the solution’s features were crystal clear, its purpose – the specific problem it intended to address and for whom – was not.
This kind of obscurity often arises when a versatile product addresses numerous problems without specifying its primary focus. It can be tempting for founders to tell potential customers about every product feature and show off everything the solution can do. However, that’s an easy way to convolute the product positioning, instead of being a targeted solution to a customer’s specific problem.
To help the company, Natasha shared a tool called the Market Positioning Grid – seven pivotal questions designed to crystallise a product’s market position.
- Target customer
Who is the ultimate buyer? Who holds the decision-making power? - Problem
What’s the predominant issue that plagues the target customer? What is the core pain point that this product addresses? - Market landscape
Which market category or space does the product occupy? - Solution
How does the product serve as a panacea for the identified problem? - Differentiators
What sets this product apart from its competitors? What’s its unparalleled USP? - Competitors
Who are the competitors? If you are building in a new category, then what are the alternatives that a customer might use to solve their pain point? - Product attributes
Beyond mere differentiators, what unique space should this product command in the customer’s mind to foster engagement?
Positioning is about aligning your product’s capabilities with the most pressing concerns of a clearly defined audience.
As Natasha underscores, marketing not only shapes the brand narrative but also helps founders to frame the external articulation of why your product or service exists and how it provides value to customers. It’s the strategy for how you communicate with external stakeholders. It’s also an important learning opportunity.
“When a company is out testing for product-market fit, the feedback and signals from potential customers are essential for the development and refinement of the marketing messaging.”
