I recently was talking to a friend who’s doing his own startup. He’s looking for someone to head up marketing for his company. He’s halfway through his formidable seed round and expects to get VC after that. He’s already got a sizable group of devs and he’s off to the races with his product. He made it clear to me that he was looking for a relatively traditional MBA-type candidate. Not a bad thing per se, but very close to many of the traditional marketing folks you see at large companies with fat wallets.

Of course, I couldn’t help myself but offer some unsolicited advice. This advice is skewed a bit towards our situation so it’s not super balanced, but I think the points are still salient even if you don’t embrace them 100%. I told him:

“The person you describe is going to want to spend money. In fact, they (the subpar ones) will look at it as their entire job. They will look at the amount of money they spend as a reflection of how good they are. The more, the better. Instead of hiring this person you could hire a “blogger plus”. In other words… you start a blog targeted at your target audience. It’s not about your offering per se… It’s from your company and all about the trials and tribulations of being a member of your target audience and what they spend their time doing. In fact, the best person would be a former member of that audience talking about how hard it is. Someone with personality and excellent communication skills. In addition to furious blogging (I mean 3-5 short posts per day, 5 days a week) they would troll discussion boards and forums targeted at your audience making several relevant posts a week. They could also do podcasting and videoblogging if they had interesting ideas that would best be expressed in those forms. The url should be it’s own, and not a subdomain of your main site. The blog would be “brought to you by Your Company”. Subtle… not overwhelming. In my mind this is a way better way to spend your money… creating an ongoing dialog with your target audience that’s authentic, bi-directional, targeted, and relevant. But, I also know you’re a smart guy and likely have considered this option.”

Of course he had thought of this but also pointed out that in addition to this blogger plus he wanted someone who was going to be able to do: SEO, SEM, viral, web analystics, A/B testing etc. This is a great point. In my mind the optimal situation would be to find someone who could do all that plus the direct communication. Though I admit that narrows the field of candidates and you may need to split the job between two folks. Additionally, while an MBA is not a bad thing, I’m not sure today’s MBA graduates are getting the teaching to help them dive in to things like SEO. But I could be wrong (as I often am). And if I am, I’m sure some knowledgable folks will tell me in the comments section.

Finally, I should add, there are definitely businesses where spending money to aquire customers is non-negotiable. Someone who knows how to spend that money economically and efficiently combined with the kind of grass-roots low-coast marketing mentioned above is key in my mind. I admit, my bias is towards businesses that can get along with the grass roots only. But until we prove here at Jackson Fish Market that we’re operating just such a business effectively I won’t be claiming expertise quite yet. :)