Galvanize recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Ryan Metzger, Director of Growth Marketing at Madrona Venture Group, to discuss the ins and outs of growing startups. Previously, he was Director of Acquisition Marketing for zulily. With extensive knowledge in SEO/SEM, customer acquisition, and conversion optimization, he acts as an advisor and coach to Madronas portfolio companies. During our talk with him, Ryan covered 3 key tips to prioritizing growth for startups:

1. How to Grow Your Company When You’re Still Finding Product Market Fit

Growth and customer development can be the same thing. Content marketing can be used as a tool to experiment with both and is relatively cheap. You might ask yourself, “How can I produce content for cheap?” The answer is to write.

Create and experiment with different content formats and topics. Encourage yourself to write 500-1000 words a day. This simultaneously builds your brand and helps you narrow your focus to the most important customers.

2. Influencer Marketing

With social media and various instant communication channels, influencer marketing is more effective than ever. TA McCann, a local serial entrepreneur and Galvanize Mentor, suggests the following tactics for influencing the influencers at little to no cost.

The most critical part in creating an influencer marketing plan is identifying effective influencers. Buzzsumo.com is a great place to start. Next, you need to provide value for these influencers in whatever way possible. Share content with them that they might find useful. Give them feedback on the content they produce and share. When you’ve built and actual (digital) relationship with them ask them for feedback on a piece of content you produced.

If they express that the content is relevant and valuable, ask them if they’d be willing to share it. If that doesn’t work, keep trying!

3. Getting Back to Basics

Ryan had one overarching point he wanted to drive home: marketing has grown into a massive industry of number crunching, funnel optimization, and analytics, but when it comes down to it, people care about stories. People care about your brand, what you stand for, and the way that what you do makes them feel. People care about the why. If, as founders and early employees of startups, we can tell the story of why we do what we do, everything else in the marketing department will work itself out.

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