Marketing From the Ground Up with Start-Up Expert Annie Katrina Lee

If you‘re a business owner looking to build your start-up from the ground up, you’ve likely read plenty of blogs looking for advice on marketing your business—but I‘m guessing there’s sometimes been a frustrating lack of resources for your particular challenges.

Most marketing guidance centers on the perspectives of brands that are already established or have a sizable following. But what about the business owners who are starting from zero?

We chatted with start-up expert Annie Katrina Lee, whose previous experience includes marketing for Twitch, Pinterest, Amazon, and various start-ups.

If you want advice on marketing from the ground up, you’ve come to the right spot.

1. Start with the customer.

When learning how to build your start-up, you probably want a step-by-step guide that provides instant, tangible results.

That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?

Except Lee says that’s not the correct approach.

“A very common fallacy is when startups feel like they have to take a very specific piece of advice, whether it’s a best practice or something that they read in a blog,” she says. “I think when things are so definitive like that, it’s a bit misleading.”

Lee notes that start-ups that take straightforward, one-size-fits-all advice will often be disappointed when their journey doesn’t unfold as planned.

(And, trust me, I see the irony: Here I am, in a blog post, telling you not to take definitive advice from a blog post. But please bear with me.)

Rather than looking for step-by-step guidance, try approaching your marketing strategy as a framework that starts with your customer.

Lee says speaking to your core audience and customers is one of the best ways to develop that framework.

“If you don’t know who your customer is, then you don’t know what their needs and motivations are,” she explains. “And if you don’t know what their needs and motivations are, how could you communicate with them?”

Which brings us to our second point:

2. Get feedback.

Wistia‘s CEO, Chris Savage, told us that if a brand’s marketing resonates with 10 of its customers, it will resonate with 10,000 — and Lee says there’s some truth to that.

“The thing about marketing that’s hard is it is a blend of art and science,” Lee says. “The qualitative feedback of 10 people in a focus group is the art. What are you hearing? And how are you translating that feedback?.”

It also doesn’t hurt to pull feedback from a larger pool of respondents.

“If you survey 1,000 people, both potential customers and existing customers, you can compare, evaluate, and synthesize that feedback together. Which, to me, gives you a bigger picture than just one focus group.”

3. Start organically.

Lee says you want to build an organic audience… Meaning, you don’t want to rely on paid advertising to get your earliest customers.

“That should come in a much later stage,” she explains. “I’m 100% in the camp where you want to jumpstart things pretty grassroots and organically.”

That early organic stage could involve crafting a basic framework for your brand’s voice, tone, or visuals.

“That will allow you to simultaneously create organic content, test it, and get it out there while also collecting feedback,” Lee says. “I don’t think it needs to be such a linear process in the beginning, but I do believe that paid advertising would be a little too soon for that early of a stage.”

It all goes back to learning about your audience. By organically appealing to your target consumers, you can accurately assess the best channels to reach them so you’re not spending money and time in the wrong places.

“If you know who your audience is, you’ll know which channels to prioritize,” Lee says. “I think a lot of early-stage companies make the mistake of trying to do too much at once, which can muddle your message.”.

4. Focus on your product.

Of course, marketing is crucial in the early stages of any business, but you have to have a product that your audience can believe in and connect with. You can’t just sell people a bag of air.

“I’m always of the belief that it starts with the products,” Lee explains, adding that she believes product-market fit must come before any attempts at marketing

According to Lee, this part of the process involves early interviews and gathering information from consumers, which can be applied to your product’s positioning and messaging.

She says, “Partnering with product teams to set that foundation will make the marketing process much easier.”

5. Get personal.

With the rise of AI, consumers want more authenticity from brands before investing in them. That said, you may want to find a way for your brand to get personal with consumers and display its unique personality—a challenge that many established brands struggle with.

“I have yet to see a brand do it extremely well,” Lee says. “Maybe Duolingo because its face is the owl.”

Duolingo’s iconic owl, Duo, has taken on a life of its own, especially on TikTok. The language learning company is among the most followed on the platform and connects with its audience by having the owl participate in online trends (or by acting comedically unhinged).

Don‘t worry; you don’t have to be unhinged on TikTok to get your brand off the ground.

“I think people generally resonate with personal stories,” Lee says. “And I think there’s always a way to get your story out there.”

As Lee said earlier, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to building a brand from the ground up.

However, if you develop your products and brand voice and build a solid, organic relationship with your target audience, you’ll create a solid framework to help set your business up for success.