Marketers can learn valuable lessons from startups, such as the importance of maintaining close relationships with customers and utilizing social media for genuine interactions. Startups thrive on innovation and must embrace failure as part of their growth strategy, which larger organizations often shy away from due to risk. By adopting a more agile and customer-centric approach, established companies can enhance their marketing effectiveness.

1. What Marketers can
Learn from Startups
Flickr CC: dskley

2. Ahh Startups…
A romantic notion of a passion
project becoming a livelihood
Flickr CC: heisenbergmedia

3. With small groups of people putting in long hours,
eating copious amounts of pizza and using innovative
marketing ideas to spark a business from the ground up
Flickr CC: avlxyz

4. On the other side,
there’s your organization
It has established a foothold, and operates on
sound processes, strategies, and campaigns that
use solid marketing principals
Flickr CC: elllotsofcrazycharacters

5. Admit It!
Sometimes you look longingly at your friends in
startups and wish for some of that edgy
entrepreneurial magic
Flickr CC: evaysucamara

6. Startups can do things a little differently
because they’re small and nimble
But remember, they have to work a lot harder than you to
capture attention and market their brand-new business
Flickr CC: falcon0125

7. They’re in Survival mode,
While you’re in Growth mode
Flickr CC: crdot

8. Stop creating your own roadblocks and consider
what you can take away from startups and
implement into your own marketing!
Flickr CC: wsdot

9. Stay Close to your Customers
Great startups
develop close
relationships with
their initial customers
and social networks
They have to −
These are the people
who helped them
get going
Flickr CC: vuhung

10. As businesses grow they can
lose that personal closeness
As a marketer, you can make an effort to keep up
active relationships with customers
Flickr CC: Apps for Europe

11. Get on social media and talk to people, or
call some of your early, long-term
customers and see how their feeling
Get Up & Start Talking
Flickr CC: opensourceway

12. Don’t allow yourself to think of
customers as just another entry in
your CRM’s contact database
Flickr CC: lisa_yarost

13. Be Available and Responsive
Larger organizations tend to forget that!
Social media is so much more that a
marketing channel; it’s an opportunity to
actually talk to people

14. The best companies use social media to have a
larger conversation with people and find ways to
interact on a more personal level
Rethink your social
media to ensure you’re
having a two-way
conversation
Flickr CC: marcwathieu

15. Innovate (and Fail)
Innovation is
the bread
and butter
of startups
In some
ways, so is
failure
Flickr CC: cascadianfarm

16. In larger
organizations you
can’t have a true
“let’s try anything
and see if it sticks”
mentality −
There’s too
much at stake
Flickr CC: donotlick

17. Remember that Michael Jordan poster from the
90’s that said something like,
“You miss 100%of the shots you don’t take”?
Flickr CC: Jason Smith

18. To some degree you have to allow your marketing
team to try new things, even if there’s a chance of
failure, because the potential success could be so
much more awesome
Flickr CC: zstasiuk

19. Take the Shot and Make
Michael Jordan Proud!
Flickr CC: basketstreaming

20. Get your business to the next level
See more marketing best practices at leadmd.com