Find & accelerate your marketing advantages to grow much faster
Find & accelerate your marketing advantages to grow much faster
And why startups who leverage marketing advantages are way more likely to win
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A great product, team, and market have become table stakes requirements for startups to succeed. With the proliferation of B2B startups and the lower barriers to building great products, marketing is now the differentiator.
To succeed at startup marketing, a company needs 3 things:
Founders who approach marketing as a strategic lever, not as a service organization to sales. Founders need to value and enable marketing as they do other teams in the organization. As the company scales, it is critical that all leaders see marketing on equal footing with other teams.
A team with go-to-market skillsets & storytelling ability. Early on, founders need to be able to effectively hire go-to-market talent, including the right first marketer. The team needs to identify and evolve their marketing fuel (story, messaging, design) and marketing engine (distribution, channels, growth levers) based on their audience, market, and product differentiators.
Built-in marketing advantages. Marketing advantages are dynamics in a company’s business, product, or market that inherently drive growth. Examples include network effects, category creation, and regulations—and 6 more below.
Marketing advantages = highly critical to a startup’s overall success
When your startup has marketing advantages, first you need to recognize them, then you need to throw fuel on these fires. You definitely should not sit on these goldmines, but instead build on them.
This is crucial because your startup simply can’t win without marketing advantages. And if your startup doesn’t have marketing advantages, you need to adjust your product, your business strategy, or your go-to-market approach.
This newsletter deep dives on marketing advantages. I’ll cover how to identify them, examples of B2B startups and public companies by marketing advantage, and how to build a strategy and marketing plan around your advantages.
Note: Since publishing, I have updated the marketing advantages framework.I recategorized into 4 buckets, and added a couple additional advantages I observed while talking to startups since I published.
Identifying marketing advantages
When you know what to look for, you’ll spot marketing advantages regularly, especially in high-growth late stage and public companies. The most successful startups typically have more than one marketing advantage they actively leverage. For example, Figma not only falls into the “free plan” category below, but also has network effects, a thriving community, and lots of integrations and creators that help drive growth.
Marketing advantages are best illustrated by examples, so I spent way too long making this chart (but I think it was worth it?):
Marketing advantage definitions
Marketing advantages can be broken down into 3 categories, based on what’s driving the advantage: Product-led growth advantages, Market / ecosystem advantages, and brand advantages. In all cases, it is marketing’s job to accelerate the advantage.
Here’s how we define each advantage:
Product-led growth marketing advantages
⚡NETWORK EFFECTS OR PRODUCT VIRALITY
Virality: When users share your product—internally or externally.
Network effects: When a product gains more value when more people use it–which tends to be a stronger advantage than virality alone.
🤑 FREE PLAN OR TRIAL
When your product has a free version that helps users unlock value faster before purchasing, it typically makes your product easier to market and sell. This is especially true when you have the right "trigger" to convert a company to paid (whether that's time, user count, or feature based). If you have a self-serve motion for new customers or self-serve upgrade process, even without a free product, this can also be an advantage—but usually to a lesser extent.
🧀 WEDGE INTO A LARGER MARKET
When your product and GTM efforts initially target a small segment with a goal of ultimately winning a larger market, you have a wedge in. A wedge in can mean expanding from one audience to additional audiences with the same or slightly different product, or building a specific product for an audience and expanding to become a full-platform or suite of products for that audience.
This is only a marketing advantage if you use your first wedge, both on the product side and the marketing side, to get to the next. Otherwise, you’ll be starting from scratch each time you launch to a new wedge, and you’ll never scale fast enough (this advantage then goes from being an advantage to a disadvantage).
Market / Ecosystem marketing advantages
⚙️ INTEGRATIONS / CO-MARKETING
When your product or business has obvious partners, you have potential for co-marketing opportunities. If you work with partners to leverage each others’ distribution channels or piggyback on their brand awareness, you can grow faster than by building your own audience. You can even piggyback on a “partner’s” audience by writing content about them or segmenting marketing to their user base, without working with the partner directly.
🧑🤝🧑 CHANNEL PARTNERSHIPS & SALES
When you make it easy for other players in your ecosystem to promote or sell your product for a share of revenue, a referral bonus, or a discount for the buyer, you unlock growth. It’s essential to enable your channel partners by properly incentivizing them and helping them market your product. Channel partners can even be influencers or service providers in your ecosystem.
🗓️ FORCING FUNCTION: TRENDS OR REGULATIONS
Forcing functions create urgency to buy. When there is a current trend in the market (like the downturn) you can piggyback on, your messaging will better resonate. Even better than being relevant to a trend, new or changing regulations are incredibly strong forcing functions.
Brand & story marketing advantages
💡 AUDIENCE SEEKS COMMUNITY OR EDUCATIONAL CONTENT
When your audience is underserved by educational content or opportunities to connect with each other, you have an opportunity to fill this gap. When you treat your community and content like a “product” to drive top-of-funnel growth this advantage becomes stronger.
📣 FOUNDER STORY OR FOUNDER/MARKET FIT
If your founder already has relationships or a personal brand built up with your target audience, it’s easier to gain credibility with prospects and customers. In addition to helping build credibility, you can use founders with existing followings as distribution channels. To make this a true marketing advantage though, you need a founder who can and wants to effectively tell this story.
🏆 ABILITY TO CREATE OR OWN A CATEGORY
When your product is an entirely new space and doesn't replace an existing product, you have an opportunity to brand a whole new way of doing something. If your brand becomes synonymous with the category, you have a huge leg up on the competition. Similarly, you can redefine an existing category with new criteria or try to be crowned the winner in an emerging category created by another brand or by analysts.
Not every business should create a new category, it can be extremely time consuming. Creating a category is only an advantage when you are truly doing something new, and aren’t just building 5x-10x better version of an existing product.
Read more on positioning (and creating a category) in this newsletter.
You can create new advantages, but don’t force it
Sometimes, these advantages are super obvious, as they are core to your product and business. In some cases, you may not have the advantage yet, but you can create these advantages, and the benefit of having one of these advantages is worth the investment to get there (think launching a free plan). Other advantages are hard to force—like your founding story or ability to create a category–and you can waste a lot of time trying to make this happen when it isn’t natural.
More from MKT1
✂️ Templates for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find all templates here, including a spreadsheet with all the marketing advantages and their strategies and channels.
🧑🚀 Job board: See roles from the MKT community. Paid subscribers can add jobs to our job board for free.
👁️ Related newsletters: Growth marketing strategy, Creating content like a product, Wedge marketing strategy, Guide to positioning, and How marketing is different from sales
📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which includes how to build a strategy and select tactics that work for your marketing advantages (in a very detailed chart).