As a seasoned marketing executive, Kiersten Gaffney excels at rapidly scaling startups. She specializes in developing and executing comprehensive marketing strategies for B2B software companies, particularly in the dev tools space, such as Dragonfly, Redpanda, and Fermyon, among many others. Whether as an interim CMO, fractional CMO, or go-to-market (GTM) advisor, Kiersten helps companies with their product positioning and messaging, demand generation, GTM hiring optimization, and speed of execution.

Kiersten recently led a roundtable discussion with Crew Capital and our portfolio companies’ founders and marketing leaders, where she shared her insights on refining early-stage messaging, unconventional demand-generation techniques and evaluating paid vs. organic marketing.

Early-stage messaging and marketing hires

To Kiersten, leveraging in-house talent for marketing helps an organization set itself up best for GTM success. Similar to founder-led sales, founder-led marketing allows the people who know the product best to evangelize about it. This requires bandwidth from a founder, yet presents a better use of resources early on compared to hiring a marketing executive too soon in a company’s journey.

“Typically, marketers are going to be an extension of your leadership team after you’ve already figured some things out,” she said. “It’s best if you have a founder, or a product lead, or CTO that has the writing capability to get the website up, to get the emails going, to get the sales depth going, and explore the GTM motion before you hire someone. Otherwise, you’ll probably hire someone more on the product marketing side as your first hire because that person can help you with messaging and building out the initial go-to-market function.”

One point Kiersten reiterated when discussing how to find a company’s ideal messaging: Startups should speak to and market to their customer’s customer. 

“Developers don’t have the budget typically, especially if you’re selling something that’s more than $20,000 a year. Your customer’s customer is the developer in that case. The buyer is usually the DevOps manager, the platform architect, or somebody in a more senior role who has the check book. When you’re building out your messaging, your website, or any collateral, speaking to that customer’s customer is going to get your buyer excited. If you can please your customer’s customer, then your customer is going to be excited about the product and see the benefits.”

Unconventional demand-generation strategies

There are several ways startups can get in front of potential customers, but all of them should end up trying to provide the most value to the customer in the shortest amount of time. “Your job as a business is to help people excel in their role: Save them money, save them time, and make people feel more successful. No matter what type of software you’re selling, that’s the bottom line,” she said. 

Kiersten offered a certification she spearheaded at CodeFresh as an example of a successful content initiative. Certifications and advanced education or training programs like the one she developed allow participants to add a degree of heightened credibility to their professional profiles that figuratively says, “I’m ready to take myself and my business to the next level.” That signal proves a powerful indicator of interest in helping solve customers’ problems, and a quicker path to gaining customer trust.

“I built out CodeFresh’s certification program to be focused on GitOps people. That was our target persona from a customer’s customer perspective. In the first year, we had over 20,000 people sign up for the certification, and then many of them posted on LinkedIn that they got the certification, and that they were becoming an advanced GitOps engineer. When you’re doing these types of programs, it’s not only about your business. It’s also about how you’re making these people more successful,” Kiersten said.

Another common tactic involves a free security analysis. For a small startup, the challenge in security analyses, however, is establishing credibility quickly and standing out from a variety of other companies offering similar checks. Kiersten suggested that credibility, or “brand comfort,” begins with company-founder activity on platforms like LinkedIn.

“If they’re not out there building that initial brand credibility, it’s going to be very difficult for you as a follow-on to try to create that credibility,” she said. “The founders absolutely have to get out there and be the first marketers to share with the world why this matters, why we as a company are credible, and why we should be the ones solving this problem.” 

Brand marketing strategies for early-stage startups

Grassroots marketing can take many different shapes, but in Kiersten’s view, it’s important to consider the value proposition of targeted conversations and channels, rather than casting a wide net to capture as many people as possible.

“You don’t want to do Google ads at first. You should not do LinkedIn ads first either. They’re probably not going to get you the return that you need when you could be doing something else that is more impactful when you are a young startup,” she said.

Instead, Kiersten presented a few different ways to build brand awareness: Leveraging influencers within a space, posting on Reddit, and speaking at conferences. Conferences specifically, Kiersten noted, offer a multitude of opportunities. 

“It’s really important to get out there and speak at as many conferences as possible. You don’t have to sponsor them, but if you have the marketing budget, then you’ll get multiple different returns on the investment. Not only will you get to talk to people on the show floor and get real-time product feedback, but you also get lead generation and brand recognition,” she said. “Speaking at conferences is a great way to get in front of 150 people and not put in a ton of effort towards getting your foot in the door for initial conversations with prospects. Set up coffee chats with every single speaker that’s there, because most likely when you’re a speaker, you’re there to network with as many people as possible. You’re more open to it, and it’s easy to go through the speaker list on LinkedIn and get a coffee chat with them. Then likely, they’ll introduce you to somebody.”

When to deploy account-based marketing 

Account-based marketing (ABM) strategically focuses on high-value accounts within a market or business segment. ABM aims to enhance customer acquisition for targeted accounts, foster stronger strategic relationships, and drive strategic business growth through more personalized buying experiences. Kiersten explained that ABM has three prongs: One-to-many, one-to-few, and one-to-one. As the target group gets smaller, the marketing content gets more specific. 

For example, in one-to-many marketing, content targets an entire vertical or industry, like retail or finance, and all marketing leads back to resources targeting that vertical or industry. “You probably have a solutions page on your website, and it’s a financial solutions page or retail solutions page,” she said. “That page would include a plethora of content that supports that industry so that when you decide on a list of target accounts, maybe a few hundred or a thousand accounts, all of your outreach will lead to the content on that page.”

One-to-few marketing targets a specific persona within an industry. In Kiersten’s example, all marketing content targets a developer in the retail space. “With this strategy, it’s very precise, the messaging is much different than vying for the whole vertical’s attention” Kiersten noted.

The last example Kiersten mentioned, one-to-one marketing, targets a narrow number of accounts, and just one specific person within that account. “It’s just very, very, very specific and very small. So maybe you only have five accounts and you’re trying to land just those accounts. These ones are going to be the most strategic. Your content is highly specific to them,” she said. “The targeted group gets smaller and smaller. And because of that, the content has to get more granular and precise. And with that, very tailored outreach is required.”

Because of the resources ABM requires, Kiersten recommended waiting until a company has annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $20 million or more to consider ABM strategies. Broader marketing efforts will likely benefit a smaller company more, as ABM will require what Kiersten calls a “pod” of specialists to succeed.

“Usually you’ll have one product marketing person solely focused on ABM. And then you’ll have a sales development representative and an account executive working with them. It’s kind of like a pod. And this group is all targeting one vertical at a time. You also have to have a web developer to support building the content on the site for each targeted vertical. You have to have a designer to help make the content look beautiful. It’s a heavy effort, requires a high degree of attention for each industry, and I don’t encourage it until you’re further along, unless your software is built just for one specific vertical.”

How to market from $0 to $1 million and $1 million to $5 million

Kiersten discussed the distinction between paid and organic marketing, emphasizing it’s not just about traffic channels. She outlined key focus areas for companies with $0 to $1 million in ARR, as well as strategies for more mature startups with $1 million to $5 million in ARR.

“The zero-to-one stage should be mostly organic,” she said. “Your founders are getting on LinkedIn. They’re promoting the category and positioning that you’re marketing. They’re basically developer evangelists for the business and trying to get out there in the public as much as possible.” Kiersten doesn’t believe in paying for ads between $0 and $1 million, as the company is likely still figuring itself out. 

Once a company gets to $1 million in ARR, however, the calculus changes. On the topic of driving traffic, Kiersten pointed to organic, direct, paid, and social media as different channels to leverage. She believes roughly 70% of marketing should still be organic once companies eclipse the $1M ARR mark. 

“That means that people are searching for terms and you’re showing up on Google and they’re clicking on you. You want to have a blend of 70% organic traffic and no more than 30% paid,” Kiersten said. “Paid traffic is for doubling down. If you’re past that $1 million mark, maybe you’re headed toward $2 million to $3 million, somewhere around there, and you now have some budget wiggle room, really only then should you start giving attention to layering in your paid marketing activities.”

Kiersten recommends starting with non-branded Google search ads, as the cost comes from people who search a term and click on the ad. Drawing conclusions from what drives organic traffic allows the business to identify high-value keywords that prove more fruitful in luring in prospects. “Nobody knows about your brand. If you have a good idea of why people are coming to your site in the first place, then you can use Google search non-branded terms to double down on that,” she said.

Once a business approaches $5 million in ARR, Kiersten said to consider LinkedIn ads to build brand presence, but warned that LinkedIn ads can be costly and add up quickly. “They’re very top of funnel. They’re not going to give you deals immediately, what they’re going to give you is signups or maybe just names to follow up with. It takes a long time to convert those leads, and they’re more expensive than Google search. Search is great because there’s intent there. If somebody has the intent to look for you, or something about you, then you want those people.”

Lastly, Kiersten recommended co-marketing opportunities. Finding partners, whether adjacent in the tech stack or through existing customers, can open new avenues to sell. “If you have partners in your space where they’re truly complementary, reach out to their marketing team. At the worst, you’ll learn something new, at the best, you enhance your GTM.”