You’re an entrepreneur launching a new start-up. When and where does marketing fit in? The short answer is that marketing fits in from the beginning, but in small, staged increments.

By the beginning, I mean you have a product or service that’s already passed the first hurdles of market acceptance: you’ve conducted market research, you’ve had a customer say yes or at least express interest in the business value of what you are selling. You have a business strategy for growth. And you have some capital to invest.

What are your first marketing investments?

1. Naming: company, products, services. You may have names, but they might be just placeholders, quickly cobbled together. Chances are there isn’t a lot of brand equity built up yet. If you don’t have the right names, now is the time to make a change. Consult with marketing experts to come up with names that match up to your vision, the market, and most of all your target customers. You’ll need attorneys as well as marketers, to conduct trademark research. Related to naming: make sure you get a url (web address) that makes sense, is easy to remember, and refers to what you do.
2. Positioning. Again, this applies to both your company and your product. Positioning forces you to focus on your target markets and customers, stripping away the dreadful and doomed “we’re everything to everybody” positioning. A good marketing professional can facilitate a positioning exercise and help you fulfill a positioning statement’s core requirements: target customer, customer challenge, your solution, compelling business benefit, competitive differentiator. You need to get positioning right, because from there, all else flows.

Up next: Part Two: Logo and visual identity.