• Table of Contents

  • What Growth-Stage Startups Get Wrong About Marketing
  • Marketing Isn’t a Department—It’s a Growth System
  • Hiring Too Late, Firing Too Early
  • What to do instead:
  • Confusing Activity with Strategy
  • Here’s what strategic marketing actually looks like:
  • Over-Reliance on Performance Marketing
  • Balance your funnel:
  • Ignoring Positioning Until It’s Too Late
  • Positioning done right:
  • Final Thoughts: Marketing Is a Leadership Function

What Growth-Stage Startups Get Wrong About Marketing

Most growth-stage startups think they have a marketing problem. Spoiler alert: they don’t. They have a focus problem, a leadership problem, and—let’s be honest—a delusion problem. Marketing isn’t a magic wand you wave after product-market fit. It’s a strategic engine that should be built into the chassis, not duct-taped to the hood. In this article, we’re going to dismantle the myths, call out the lazy playbooks, and show you what real marketing looks like when you’re scaling fast and can’t afford to screw it up. If you’re a founder or CMO who’s tired of fluffy advice and ready for some hard truths, buckle up.

Marketing Isn’t a Department—It’s a Growth System

Let’s start with the biggest misconception: treating marketing like a department instead of a system. Growth-stage startups often hire a “Head of Marketing” and expect them to sprinkle some brand fairy dust and suddenly unlock hockey-stick growth. That’s not how this works.

• Marketing is not a silo—it’s the connective tissue between product, sales, and customer success.
• It should influence pricing, positioning, and even product roadmap decisions.
• If your marketing team isn’t in the room when strategic decisions are made, you’re not doing marketing—you’re doing decoration.

Real marketing drives revenue. It’s not about making things pretty; it’s about making things perform.

Hiring Too Late, Firing Too Early

Here’s a pattern I’ve seen more times than I can count: a startup raises a Series A, realizes they need “marketing,” hires a mid-level marketer, gives them zero support, and then fires them six months later because “marketing didn’t work.”

Let me be blunt: if you’re hiring your first marketer after your Series A, you’re already behind. And if you expect them to build a demand engine, define your brand, and scale your pipeline solo, you’re delusional.

What to do instead:

• Hire a strategic marketing leader early—ideally before your Series A.
• Give them a seat at the leadership table and a budget that matches your growth goals.
• Stop expecting miracles from junior hires with no strategic support.

Confusing Activity with Strategy

Just because you’re posting on LinkedIn and running Google Ads doesn’t mean you have a marketing strategy. That’s activity. Strategy is knowing why you’re doing it, who you’re targeting, and how it ladders up to revenue.

Growth-stage startups often fall into the trap of “doing all the things” without a clear narrative or positioning. The result? A noisy mess that confuses customers and burns cash.

Here’s what strategic marketing actually looks like:

• A clear, differentiated positioning that your competitors can’t copy.
• A go-to-market motion that aligns with how your buyers actually buy.
• Messaging that speaks to pain points, not product features.
• Metrics that tie directly to pipeline and revenue—not just impressions and clicks.

Over-Reliance on Performance Marketing

Performance marketing is like sugar: it gives you a quick hit, but it’s not a sustainable diet. Too many startups pump money into paid ads and call it a growth strategy. It’s not. It’s a crutch.

When the CAC starts creeping up and the channels saturate, they panic. Why? Because they never built a brand. They never invested in content, community, or customer advocacy. They optimized for short-term clicks instead of long-term trust.

Balance your funnel:

• Top: Brand, content, thought-provoking POVs (yes, even in B2B).
• Middle: Nurture sequences, case studies, webinars.
• Bottom: Paid search, retargeting, conversion optimization.

If your entire funnel is built on paid ads, you don’t have a funnel—you have a slot machine.

Ignoring Positioning Until It’s Too Late

Positioning isn’t something you fix after you scale. It’s the foundation of your entire go-to-market strategy. Yet most startups treat it like a branding exercise or worse—an afterthought.

Here’s the truth: if your positioning is off, everything else breaks. Your messaging won’t land. Your sales team will flail. Your marketing will feel like shouting into the void.

Positioning done right:

• Starts with customer insight, not internal brainstorming.
• Focuses on the problem you solve, not the features you built.
• Is tested in the wild—on sales calls, in ads, in content—before it’s finalized.

Truth Bomb:
If your startup can’t explain why it exists in one sentence that makes your ideal customer say “hell yes,” you don’t have a marketing problem—you have a relevance problem.

Final Thoughts: Marketing Is a Leadership Function

Marketing isn’t the cherry on top—it’s the batter in the cake. If you’re treating it like a post-funding checkbox or a tactical support function, you’re setting your startup up to stall.

Great marketing at the growth stage isn’t about doing more—it’s about doing the right things, in the right order, with ruthless clarity. It’s about aligning your story with your strategy and your strategy with your customer’s reality.

So here’s your challenge: stop asking “What should marketing do?” and start asking “What does our customer need to believe to buy from us?” Then build everything around that.

Because at the end of the day, marketing isn’t about you—it’s about them. And if you forget that, no amount of ad spend will save you.

Mark Gabrielli
Founder, MarkCMO