Lessons from Emily Kramer

Emily Kramer, a seasoned marketing leader and co-founder of MKT1, is a prominent voice in the B2B startup marketing world. Through her newsletter, podcasts, and interviews, she shares a wealth of knowledge and actionable frameworks.

On Marketing Strategy & Frameworks

On the core of marketing: "Forget all the sub-functions that you've heard about in marketing... and just think of marketing as you need fuel and you need an engine." [1][2]
Defining 'Fuel': "Fuel is all the things you create that add value to your audience: your content, you’re positioning and messaging, your design and creative." [1][3]
Defining 'Engine': "Your engine or all of the channels and things that you do to distribute that [fuel]." [3]
The 'Fuel and Engine' analogy: "To build a successful marketing function you need to produce great fuel and craft a well-running engine. Your fuel needs to be custom-made for your engine and your engine needs to be custom-made for your fuel." [4]
On avoiding 'Random Acts of Marketing': "You can't copy what somebody else does and think it's going to work... not only does your marketing need to be differentiated, every campaign you do, the content, the way you get it out to your audience should feel differentiated." [3][5]
The problem with copying playbooks: "You copy another company's playbook... you don't think about your strategy." [5]
Marketing is like product development: "Marketing is actually more like product and building a marketing team is more like building a product team. It's multi-disciplinary." [6]
On strategic planning: "The purpose of planning is to figure out how you're going to win in the short term... how you can continue to succeed in the long term... and then figuring out how you can do all that efficiently." [7]
On differentiation: "Not only does your product need to be differentiated, your marketing needs to be differentiated too." [3]
On identifying marketing advantages: "Identify innate dynamics or characteristics of a business that can help it quickly grow, such as the potential for network effects or product virality." [8]
The four ways to grow revenue: "You can drive more top of funnel... you can drive more top of funnel with a new audience... you can increase the dollars you get per customer... you can increase efficiency of how you acquire customers." [5]

On Content & Brand

Content as a product: "It's not the software product you are creating, but it is another “product” for the same audience. Much like your product solves a big problem for your audience, so should your content." [9]
The importance of distribution: "Don't falsely assume a piece of content is “bad” if you've never properly distributed it." [9]
On content blockbusters: "Content is a game of blockbusters (like angel investing and movie making)." [9]
On creating valuable content: "If you don't want to read it, other people won't want to read it. So I tend to avoid things like white papers, gated content, overly long case studies, etc." [10]
Your brand and story is another product: "Your brand and story is another product your company puts out into the world. You wouldn't... create a software product without a clear idea of what you are building, why you are building it, and who it is for. So you shouldn't do this for your company's story either." [11]
On storytelling with 'Perceptions': "From back in our Asana days, up until today, and likely long into the future, the Dear Marketers Co-hosts have used a method called “Perceptions” to organize and tell a consistent story." [11]
Is the company blog dead?: In a "Dear Marketers" episode, this question is posed, suggesting a shift in how and where content is published in the modern era. [12][13]

On Hiring & Team Building

Hiring 'Pi-Shaped' Marketers: Instead of T-shaped marketers, Kramer advocates for hiring "pi-shaped" marketers who have deep expertise in two areas. [14][15]
Why you don't hire from big companies for early-stage startups: "One of the biggest mistakes I see is that Founders hire a marketer only with experience a big companies... they don't have an understanding of how strategy Works across all of marketing." [16]
The ideal first marketer: "Great first marketers are people that maybe reported to a head of marketing one level down at a later Stage Company... they have had exposure to other areas of marketing." [16]
Hiring generalists over specialists early on: "When you're hiring your first marketer and probably even your first several marketers you're more want to hire generalists and specialists." [1]
The importance of business model experience: "Having the right the same business model experience is almost more important than having like industry experience or experience with that audience." [1]
On the first marketing hire's role: "What's involved in the role is strategy and execution, having to do everything in marketing, even if that's not your speciality, and having to move really fast and have an experimentation mindset." [15]
Building a balanced team: "Hire back and forth, 1 fuel focused person, 1 engine focused person, 1 combo person, as you are building an early team." [4]
Marketing teams are not sales teams: "Many founders, execs and even marketers themselves, view marketing as an extension of the sales team... Marketing should have a much broader scope, otherwise, you'll limit marketing's impact on your business." [17]

On Product Marketing

Rethinking Product Marketing: "I think a better name for product marketing is actually audience marketing." [15][18]
Start with the audience, not the product: "Being an effective product marketer starts from deep audience knowledge, then deep product knowledge, and not the other way around." [19]
The role of a product marketer: "A product marketer... they understand the product they understand the audience and they understand the market in which you're operating. And from there they can figure out how to communicate with your audience about the right things at the right time." [1]
Product marketing's broad scope: "Product marketing deeply understands the company's audience and product and determines how to effectively communicate with this audience." [19]
The challenge for product marketers: "No scarier question for a product marketer then hey what's a product marketer they're like oh shit i have no idea." [1]

On Growth, Metrics & Goals

On setting goals: "The key to prioritisation is really good goal setting. And in marketing, a mistake that I see is just having goals that are KPI based." [15]
Four types of marketing goals: Kramer advocates for setting KPI goals, project goals, experimentation goals, and foundational goals. [8]
The importance of foundational goals: These are the "grease" goals, the work needed to build the foundation for hitting metrics goals, doing projects, and conducting experiments. [8]
On measuring what matters: "Every marketer should know if the activities they are focusing on are actually driving revenue." [20]
The challenge of analytics: "I can nearly guarantee your early or growth-stage B2B startup doesn't have the right marketing analytics in place to determine what's actually working across go-to-market." [20]
On brand ROI: "In my nearly 20 years in the industry, measuring and proving brand-building ROI hasn't gotten any easier... Attribution tools are helping, but they don't always show enough to ease very real concerns about the impact branding makes." [21]
On forecasting: "I like to play with forecasts. and I like to know what's possible and what's not. and if what we're doing is working and I like to connect the dots between what I'm actually doing and that forecast regularly." [7]
The number one SaaS marketing metric: "I like LTV:CAC." [10]

On Leadership & Career

On being a marketing leader: "Leading marketing at a startup is a tough and sometimes lonely job." [22]
On continuous learning: "Take time to hire, surround yourself with people who are really smart, and learn from them." [10]
On prioritization: "I also am a ruthless prioritizer. And I accept that I can't do all the things." [10]
On handling requests: In a "Dear Marketers" episode, Kramer and her co-hosts discuss strategies for prioritizing marketing requests and the importance of setting clear goals. [23]
On common mistakes of new managers: This is a topic of a "Dear Marketers" podcast episode, highlighting the challenges of transitioning into a leadership role. [12][13]
On the evolution of marketing: "I think that the death of channels might be a little more accurate... a lot of the channels that were gotos and sort of no-brainers... I think that's changing." [6]
On building a personal brand: A "Dear Marketers" episode delves into whether a founder should be an influencer on LinkedIn, a key aspect of modern B2B marketing. [12][13]
On finding early-stage opportunities: "Find a way to communicate with the founders; at some point everyone needs marketing." [10]
On the equity gap: Kramer has spoken about the "equity gap," the difference in ownership stake between men and women at early-stage companies, and the importance of knowing what questions to ask during hiring. [24]
On having fun at work: "I also always try to have a little fun at work... That goes along way too." [10]
On her marketing philosophy: "I believe marketing is often misunderstood and underutilized, yet critical to a startup's success. I'm here to help startup leaders figure out how to make marketing their superpower." (paraphrased from her MKT1 about page).
On avoiding burnout: "I can't lie and say I'm awesome at this. But, having a dog helps. I also see a lot of live music, that's sort of my therapy." [10]

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