Sales without marketing isn't the best strategy, it literally turns you into a one man[selling machine where everything is based on your time. Marketing develops channels of customers.
This really depends on the stage your company is at. If you haven't found product-market fit, you need to spend a majority of your time in sales mode talking to potential customers/users so you can figure out who your ideal market is and what your market wants. If you try to start marketing without finding product-market fit, you may end up wasting a lot of time and money without knowing whether anyone even wants your product.
It also depends on who you're selling to as well. Consumer/SMB customers may require less sales efforts than enterprise customers. You will always want to start with talking to users regardless, which is sales.
Well, you sort of described the position I'm in :)
Given that, do you have any recommendations for developing channels of customers? I haven't really hired for marketing before - what should I be looking for in that role?
- Content writers: Helps with Long tail SEO and building thought leadership; Ask within your network if they know someone.
- Website design and branding: Make a good first impression
- Banner and booth design for Conferences: Hopefully the folks from the design and branding can do this. caveat: Once this becomes a viable channel again.
- Ranking etc: Sign-up for a subscription of SEO Moz or something similar
- Adword: DIY
Honestly it's much much harder hiring for Marketing. If you do hire someone – find someone good at Project managing external resources.
From my experiences over the last year I would say there are too many channels that require so much work to reach a point where your reach matters. So unless you have a team I focus on one channel. If you pick youtube learn to create effective videos and use other social channels to reenforce the youtube content by posting on fb, ig about your new videos.
But that's just general advise trying to cast a big nest. The more effective channels usually come from being part of an existing community (think reddit forum or website forum or facebook group) and offering a product that fixes what people want.
As for hiring. Hire someone who has done marketing before or hire someone who is part of a community you want to be in who is usually doing a lot of unpaided work to make the community better.
