Articles by Emily Kramer
How to organize your early-stage SaaS marketing organizationEmily provides guidance on organizing an early-stage SaaS marketing organization. She recommends starting with growth marketing, product marketing, and content marketing, and defines each role along with their responsibilities. As the team grows, these roles will split into more specialized positions. She provides an organizational chart with flexibility, as some roles like social media can fall under different departments. She emphasizes hiring "pi-shaped" marketers with expertise in two areas initially, like product marketing and growth marketing. Finding candidates with experience in all three core roles is very rare for early-stage companies.
- The Art of Content Roadmapping
Emily provides a number of actionable strategies and tactics, including: • Having a content roadmap is crucial for prioritizing the right content that will drive results. • A content list is insufficient and lacks important details such as target audience, goals, potential impact, and required effort. • Pre-work is necessary before creating a content roadmap, including audience analysis, understanding perceptions, defining a focus keyword list for SEO, and mapping content to funnel stages. • Existing content should be considered for updates, expansions, and repurposing. • Content ideas should be added to the roadmap with relevant details, and quarterly prioritization should be done based on impact, effort, and marketing strategy coverage. • Big bets or potential blockbusters should be identified and prioritized. • Content should be prioritized based on impact and effort, considering both high potential impact and low time required as well as high impact and high effort for potential blockbusters. • Coverage across different parts of the marketing strategy, including audience segments, content types, and funnel stages, should be ensured. • Resources and capacity should be reviewed to avoid overload. • Asana is recommended for managing the content roadmap, list, and creation process. • After creating the roadmap, a GACC brief (goals, audience, channels, creative) can be developed to facilitate the content creation process.
- How to measure what marketing activities are actually driving revenue
Emily provides guidance on setting up basic marketing analytics and attribution for early-stage B2B startups. She recommends identifying funnel stages and using a tool like Hubspot to track interactions. Form data should be connected to capture leads and pass UTMs. Reports should break down funnel conversion by source and last touchpoint. Attribution looks at first touch, last touch, and campaign influence. Bottom-up forecasting involves using funnel data and assumptions to project future performance. Getting these basics in place is important to understand what is actually driving revenue. She also touches on some advanced topics like multi-touch attribution and cohort analysis that are worthwhile to explore as a company scales.
- How to organize your B2B growth marketing team
Emily discusses how to organize a B2B growth marketing team and defines the differences between growth marketing and demand generation. Growth marketing is an umbrella term that includes demand generation as one sub-function focused on outbound lead generation. She recommends a growth marketing team contain demand generation, inbound and web marketing, lifecycle marketing, and operations and analytics roles. These roles support full-funnel efforts across multiple sales motions and channels. The growth marketing team must also collaborate effectively with product marketing, content marketing, and brand marketing teams who develop assets. As companies scale, growth marketing roles become more specialized and the structure shifts to a matrix organization. Ensuring alignment between growth marketing and other functions like product is important for driving engagement, upsells, and retention across the customer lifecycle.
- How & when to hire marketing agencies & contractors
Emily provides guidance on when and how to hire marketing agencies and contractors. She recommends first building an internal marketing foundation before bringing on external help. A full-time marketer should manage contractors to avoid wasted spending. Content, paid media, PR, and SEO agencies can help with specialized work, but make sure they fit your stage and business. Common mistakes include unclear scoping, agencies doing work outside their expertise, and missing internal management. Emily outlines best practices for different agency types like only hiring paid media help after establishing content and distribution. Setting agencies up for success requires strong briefs and editing. Carefully selecting specialists at each stage can augment marketing needs efficiently compared to generalists. Following these guidelines can optimize benefits from external support while minimizing costs.
- How to choose the right marketing channels for your startup
Emily provides guidance on choosing effective marketing channels for startups. She advises against random or unfocused channel selection and instead recommends analyzing your audience, growth drivers, and unique advantages. These include your product's value proposition, ecosystem partnerships, and brand storytelling opportunities. She presents a framework for classifying channels as core, scaling, testing, future prospects, or ineffective based on strategic fit and performance. Metrics like qualified leads, pipeline, and customer acquisition costs should be used to evaluate channel success over time. The process involves considering how channels match your go-to-market motion as self-serve, sales-led, or hybrid. She then offers a helpful example analysis for a hypothetical SaaS company.