Meeting Recap: Startup Marketing
Last Wednesday, we had the pleasure of hearing from Jennifer Wong who is currently the Head of Marketing and Sustainability at Convoy. In her role, she provides leadership and oversees all of Convoy’s marketing efforts. As a fellow Husky, she is a UW alum and a 5th-year adjunct professor at the UW Foster School of Business. In our recent webinar with Jennifer, she shared with us why startups can be a unique challenge for marketers. Below are a few highlights from our time with her.
Q: How do buyer personas play a role in marketing campaigns?
Buyer personas play a huge role! At Convoy, Jennifer explained how the team highlights different features depending on which audience they are targeting by sharing a truck driver vs an owner/operator for example. “The messaging and the types of features of the same campaign is actually different based on the persona we are targeting.” You should consider what matters most to the audience you are catering your campaign to. Even the same campaign can look different depending on the buyer persona.
Q: How are you able to integrate marketing and sustainability into a campaign?
“It’s not a campaign to us anymore, it’s inherent to our business.” Companies should think beyond sustainability being a program on top of a company, but they should think of business strategy and growth to make sure that it is aligned with sustainability as a whole. A key point to successfully integrating marketing and sustainability is that it should not be one person thinking about sustainability but part of everyone’s role within a company. On the marketing side, it is publicizing the work that is already happening within the different teams. Combining marketing and sustainability is a differentiating factor in the market and extremely powerful if you are able to tell the story.
Q: Do you have tips or advice for joining a new startup?
Jennifer left us with one big piece of advice: “do not go in with preconceived notions or expectations because every startup is different.” There may be some similarities in terms of ambiguous job roles. You will be thrown in and expected to do more, but it is a great opportunity to build your skill sets and connect the different parts of the business. Jennifer stressed that understanding the business objectives allows for you to make better marketing decisions. A new startup can be overwhelming, so she recommends a “block and tackle” strategy. This means creating a roadmap for a reasonable amount of time (i.e. 3 months) of the milestones that you would like to hit. You will earn more responsibility by consistently hitting milestones within the allotted time frame. Ultimately, this will allow you to move faster in marketing.