On any given day, startup marketers are doing a bit of everything, from carefully crafting messaging for the website, analyzing the latest email A/B test results, teaming up with sales to collect the latest insights from prospecting calls, or writing a new blog post or a press release (just to name a few). It takes quite a diverse skill set to juggle all these crucial tasks at once.
But unlike large corporations with sizable teams (and budgets), early-stage companies often rely on just one or two marketers to tackle it all.
This puts founders in a pinch when looking to bring marketing talent into their organizations. With job descriptions spanning everything from creative direction to funnel optimization and campaign management, it's tough to know exactly what marketing experience and soft skills align with your specific growth goals and current startup needs.
To help, we pulled advice from The Review’s archives to create a comprehensive skill list needed for early-stage marketing hires and drill into the specific marketing skills that may be more or less consequential depending on your unique startup’s needs.
Soft Skills for Marketers
While you’re looking for a well-rounded marketer, each prospective hire will have their own strengths and weaknesses on their resume. To hire the best person possible for the role, hiring managers need a crisp point of view on what skills are a nice-to-have, versus what is a non-negotiable. Once you’ve decided on your dream marketing hire’s specific background, here are a few marketing skills to consider in your search.
1. Communication
Communication is more than a soft skill. In the startup arena, the real magic happens when oral and written skills collide, propelling your brand forward like a rocket ship. Here are a few examples of what communication mastery looks like for a marketing hire at a startup:
- Writing and publishing compelling content
- Excellent storytelling skills that win buy-in for their ideas
- Clear and concise messaging that resonates with customers and generates leads.
- A strong command of a variety of different communication channels with customers — like email and social media channels
Don’t just expect code to spur your startup to product-market fit, says Upstart founder Dave Girouard:
Words matter. At a minimum, they shape the impression you make on others — often the first impression.
2. Creativity
Creativity is more than just a tired buzzword in job descriptions. When carving a niche in a crowded landscape, a creative marketer can be your startup’s biggest differentiator in the early, mission-critical days of finding product-market fit.
Creativity in marketing also goes a long way in making your startup stand out amidst noise from competitors. Creative marketers can:
- Craft unique product narratives for your sales team
- Execute inspiring and memorable marketing campaigns
- Find inventive ways to distribute your brand’s content in new channels
- Squeeze the most juice out of a limited budget
When Jaleh Rezaei, CEO and co-founder of Mutiny, hires marketers, one technique she uses to gauge creativity is to get extremely granular with how a candidate will execute on a certain project.
“For example, If they say they want to launch a new site, I might ask, ‘How would you do that? What tools would you use to get that done in a week?’ she says.
“You can also push on how scrappy they really are by shortening the implementation window for their ideas — I’ll say, ‘That’s a great suggestion, now I want you to do it in one day. How would you get this out tomorrow?’ I listen for their ability to prioritize and find an 80-20 way to get to the same impact. I also probe at their ability to uncover hidden assumptions by asking things like, ‘What might go wrong? What must be true for this idea to work?’ and when they list their hypotheses I ask them how they can vet them in a few days.”
3. Collaboration
Collaboration isn't just about brainstorming – it's about breaking down walls and creating a feedback loop across the org that results in stronger, more resonant marketing materials. Astute marketers know that marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum — they tap into insights from across the organization.
Here are just a few examples of the types of internal partnerships that startup marketers should forge:
- Data analysts. Amidst a long to-do list, diving into the data can point startup marketers to where their efforts are most needed. Where is there a leak in the funnel that needs attention?
- Sales experts. Marketers and salespeople often work hand-in-hand to identify prospect pain points so they can craft marketing content that will resonate with their target customers.
- Product development. Marketers are often the link between new product updates and sharing them with the world. Keeping in lockstep with the product teams (engineering, PMs, designers) is paramount.
“Marketing has shifted to a point where, without technology and engineering, it’s almost useless,” says Jaleh Rezaei. “But marketing, product, and engineering are very siloed from one another, even though these cohesive partnerships are critical to moving quickly.
That’s why she says founders on the hunt for their first marketer shouldn’t be put off by a candidate who is vocal about fostering this kind of collaboration from the get-go. In fact, it’s a sign of a great marketer, according to Rezaei.
There's this weird precedent that marketing and engineering are separate, and I think that's BS.
4. Strategic Thinking
It’s a common misconception that marketing banks too much of its success on strokes of luck: like a quirky campaign that goes viral or riding the wave of a trend. While being social-media savvy is a plus, marketing still needs a carefully plotted course. That's where strategic thinking takes center stage, transforming creative flashes into tangible impact.
“Strategic marketing is all about assessing the current strengths that exist on the founding team and pinpointing highest priority gaps to fill, prioritizing based on the immediate needs of the company,” says Maya Spivak (a marketing exec formerly of Wealthfront and Segment). Founders scanning for someone with the right balance of experience and strategic prowess will end up with a champion in their corner.
Technical Skills for Marketers
While marketing might be considered one of the more creative seats in a startup’s office, there are plenty of technical chops that are required — especially if you’re marketing a more technical product.
Here are three technical skills to spot on a resume that will pack the biggest punch on a marketing team.
5. Digital Marketing (SEO, SEM, Email Marketing, etc.)
Digital marketing encompasses any touchpoints with customers through online media, like search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), marketing automation and email or SMS marketing.
While every startup dabbles in some form of digital marketing, those that are bullish on product-led growth might consider hiring a marketer with this more technical background on their resume.
“When you’re selling a product directly to the end-user, the number one thing that you need is for these prospects to be aware that your product even exists. Ideally, you need a growth marketer who knows how to reach these folks,” says Maya Spivak.
Buying digital ads, crafting email marketing journeys, and executing social media, SEO and SEM campaigns are a few tactics that should be in any good digital marketer’s wheelhouse. “They don’t need to be an expert in all of these areas, but they should have familiarity with all kinds of tactical strategies to directly reach consumers quickly,” she says.
6. Data Analysis and Research
A marketer with a strong command of analytics and data analysis can be a huge unlock to understanding your audience and your customers on a deeper level. Think of it as the difference between throwing darts at random and hitting bullseyes with laser precision.
When sitting down to interview someone for a marketing job, founders should be on the lookout for examples when a candidate delved into customers' behavior, analyzed their preferences, identified their pain points, and came up with a solution rooted in data.
Here’s an example of what that looks like in practice: When Krithika Muthukumar joined OpenAI as VP of Marketing, she sat down with the product, sales and data teams to create a “state of the funnel” report, that helped inform her on the specifics of the buying motion she was stepping into. By diligently synthesizing pages of user research, she found that ChatGPT didn’t have an awareness problem, so high-level branding projects could immediately be deprioritized. “But people didn’t know how they should be using the product. We needed to create that use case epiphany for consumers,” she says.
On top of a keen understanding of the marketing funnel, a solid grasp on analytics will enable a startup marketer to:
- Tailor brand messaging for your website’s homepage
- Personalize outreach to prospective customers to bring in high-quality leads
- Design creative content that resonates with a target audience and spreads brand awareness
As far as some nice-to-haves, here are a few tools to scan for on a resume:
- Google Analytics
- HubSpot (or any kind of software that tracks email conversions)
- Google Search Console
7. Development and Design
With a mile-high to-do list and a slim team, startup marketers shouldn’t expect to just send everything off to the designer or engineering team to build for them. Marketers with a strong sense of design and a knack for some basic development tools have a leg up.
When Robbie Mitchell was Head of Marketing at Knewton, he encouraged everyone on the marketing team to gain relevant technical skills, including himself.
“I had to get comfortable with version control, front-end templates, deployment systems —really a bunch of tools we were using to support and serve our community, and it’s made a huge difference,” he says.
Mitchell’s experience is mirrored by plenty of startup marketing teams, and bringing folks on board with the ability to quickly produce assets can be a key differentiator as the organization scales.
Similar to having an appetite for technical challenges or design, hiring a marketer with an open mind and positive attitude toward left-brain activities can help with cross-functional excellence across your org.
It’s why Joanna Lord, CMO at Spring Health and former CMO at ClassPass, finds her most successful hires have often started in product and found themselves drawn to marketing. “Candidates need to be well versed in topics that don’t necessarily fit neatly in a single discipline: ideation, agile development, launching releases, go-to-market and demand generation, for example.”
Skills for Marketing Experts
As you move up the ladder and consider hiring a more senior marketer, you’re looking for a candidate with a more advanced skill set beyond day-to-day execution. Here are two up-leveled skills to keep an eye out for:
8. Market and Customer Knowledge
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to reaching your customers. Top-notch marketers tailor their channels and outreach to the customer base, with a deep understanding of how they consume information.
“You can’t be on every channel right away and do it well,” says Leslie Schrock, a brand marketing advisor for startups. “Narrow in on the people you really want to get in front of right now. Where are they? Maybe they’re on Snapchat, maybe they’re not. If you’re focused on a more professional crowd, they’re probably on LinkedIn.” More advanced marketers create bespoke strategies to invest time and money wisely to reach the right customers instead of trying to do it all.
9. Brand Management
Broadly speaking, brand marketing is the way that the outside world describes and thinks about your company. “It’s an assessment of your reputation, your look and feel, your voice and tone. Brand marketers are the folks who are responsible for setting that standard and making sure it’s reflected in everything public-facing,” says Maya Spivak. “This could include your website, your big user conference, outdoor advertising and billboards, or direct mail.”
While brand marketers don’t have to be artists, Spivak notes that the throughline tying all brand marketers together is creativity. “They generate ideas — but more importantly, they cross the chasm between that initial spark and bring it to life,” she says. “They create a project plan and maybe bring on designers or an outside creative agency to make it a reality. The best brand marketers are a special mix of analytical, organized and creative.”
Wrapping Up: Don’t Rush the Process
Regardless of which type of marketer you’re adding to your org chart, Spivak leaves us with a prescient reminder that there’s danger in rushing the hiring process. “How do you feel when you leave the interview? Do you leave feeling captivated by the person you just spoke with? That’s what you’re looking for — that golden spark. If you don’t feel that leaving the interview, that should be a pretty telling sign,” she says. “Unfortunately most of the time we ignore that feeling because we’re so desperate to hire. We think, ‘Maybe I wasn’t dazzled, but I really need the help.’ So you settle for good enough. We need to push for great.”