About the Author: Melanie Friedrichs
College or University: Brown University
Fellow Class: 2012
VFA City: Providence
VFA Company: Andera
Where are you now? Masters program at the London School of Economics
When I started my job as a Marketing Coordinator at Andera, I didn’t know what to expect. My aggressively liberal arts university didn’t offer any marketing courses, or even a proper business major. Working off of “Mad Men” and an article I had read about how Target used customer data to send targeted promotions (no pun intended), I gathered that I would spend half of my time conceiving brilliant advertising campaigns in banter-filled brainstorming sessions, and the other half whipping oodles of raw data into valuable, actionable insights. Surprise! I was not right.
The first thing I learned was that when you’re doing marketing for a startup, you spend most of your time on production, not strategy. That means pulling Salesforce reports and manually matching them to other reports in Excel because you haven’t yet figured out how to automate the process. Editing videos with cheap software you downloaded for free and adding them to your CMS, one by one. Learning how to change the background color of your HTML newsletter and scratching your head when deliverability dips to 85%. Bullying reluctant webmasters into telling you the real cost-per-click of the banner ad in the upper right hand corner, and rejiggering your budget to see if you can afford the spot. If you’re lucky, you can make enough time to look critically at your data or think creatively about your next campaign once a week, but usually you’ll cancel that meeting because you’re trying to make a deadline. Your greatest challenge will be figuring out how to do the boring things as efficiently as possible.
The second thing I learned is that there is no such thing as brilliance. Marketing at a startup is all about conversion, be it from your online advertisement to your website, from your website to your shopping cart, or from your email to your landing page. All marketers agonize over subject lines, images, and templates, trying to guess what will get the consumer to click, and some marketers are better at guessing than others. But no one is better than an A/B test. I’ve seen “A” copy I spent four hours on lose miserably to “B” copy I dashed off last minute, and blog posts that I thought were awful perform twice as well as my favorites. Even your data is often unreliable, because, unless you’re relatively far along, you probably don’t have enough of it to make valid conclusions, and planning your future using data collected from your past might prevent you from seeing (or stumbling upon) new opportunities. Your time will always be better spent creating three versions than nursing your tortured genius with a Don Draper triple whiskey.
In sum: Move fast. Try things. Repeat until it works.