How to leverage founder-led marketing for your tech company

How to leverage founder-led marketing for your tech company

Founder-led marketing has become a big deal in 2024. Across the tech industry, founders are stepping up to take centre stage in their company’s marketing strategy – posting on LinkedIn, authoring blog posts, engaging with PR opportunities, and giving customers a closer look at the inner workings of their business. 

So we wanted to answer your top three questions: 

  1. What is founder-led marketing?
  2. Does it really work?
  3. How do you do it (and do it well)?

It’s a founder-first approach to marketing (not sales)

Importantly, founder-led marketing isn’t the same as founder-led sales. In the latter, the founder (or key C-suite team members) are actively involved in closing sales. But in founder-led marketing, the founder is engaging directly with customers much earlier – actively using their presence to build the brand, connect directly with customers, and build the trust that draws people into the sales funnel. 

And founder-led marketing isn’t personal branding, either. It’s using the founder to build the company’s brand – not their own individual brand – and grow that company’s audience. 

Notably, OpenAI’s Sam Altman has begun to use his personal platforms to connect with the brand’s audience. Mark Zuckerberg has been doing it for years. Founder-led marketing isn’t just the reserve of startups with limited marketing budgets – it’s an effective marketing strategy for tech companies of all sizes. 

Does it really work? 

The short answer is yes. 

Think of Melanie Perkins, the Co-Founder and CEO of Canva who has built a $26 billion business with a quietly confident founder-led marketing strategy. Head to her LinkedIn, and you’ll find posts detailing an insider’s perspective on Canva’s growth – with actionable strategies that other businesses can learn from. On YouTube, you’ll find interviews in which Melanie talks about the journey from an idea to a successful business. And you’ll encounter her in Forbes, Fortune, Time Magazine; the list goes on. She embraces marketing and PR opportunities and speaks candidly about the business and her role in it. 

It’s not just that Melanie offers valuable advice, though. More than that, she gives her audience something that’s hard to look away from: she shares personal experiences, reveals her doubts and vulnerabilities as a builder-of-a-business, and lets Canva’s growth story be a part of the public domain. That’s what makes her content appealing even to people who aren’t looking for advice on growing their own digital business – and it helps to build Canva’s brand as a real, honest, personable entity in the world. 

How can you successfully leverage founder-led marketing to build your tech brand? 

The main obstacle standing in the way of an effective founder-led marketing strategy is this: founders and C-suite leaders are busy people. With the best of intentions, a vague plan to post regularly on LinkedIn, or make YouTube videos, or engage directly in the comment section of Instagram posts, can quickly fall by the wayside when founders have to focus their time and energy on more urgent tasks. 

We think a founder-led marketing (FML)  strategy works best when it’s managed by someone other than the founder. For the purpose of this article, let’s call that person the FML content lead. 

As the FML content lead, you need to: 

  • Create a system that makes it easy for you to download thoughts from the founder’s brain without demanding too much time or effort from them.
  • Use those thought downloads to create content that drives strong engagement and contributes to building the company’s audience and brand.

To create that system, you need to understand your founder and ask them to share their thoughts in a way that’s easy for them. 

For example, some people think most clearly when they’re writing things down – so they might prefer to have a living Google doc that they can throw notes into as-and-when inspiration strikes, and then you dip in and out of those notes to pull out content ideas. 

Other founders might find it easier to send you voice notes while they’re travelling in between meetings. Some might prefer a regular 1-1 interview in person or on Zoom, where you ask the questions and they give you their answers. 

Or they might like to sit down and record a stream-of-consciousness Loom video – which you can then create written content from, and edit the video itself to produce short video content. 

That’s your thought-download system. And once you’ve got that in place, you need to transform those raw thoughts and ideas into engaging content – for example, a weekly blog post and newsletter; two LinkedIn posts; and a carousel or video. 

The next element of your system is carving out regular time in your founder’s schedule to engage with comments and reactions. They need to be active – at the very least in the comment section of their own posts, and ideally across other people’s posts and content too. Ten minutes a day or an hour a week is better than nothing; but they need to engage regularly and as a human being. 

What kinds of topics should founder-led marketing content cover? 

Go for real, authentic thoughts and ideas. Avoid making them sound superior or overly corporate, and let your founder be a human. 

Posts about the product or service you’re selling work well, particularly when they give fresh insights or perspective. And content that takes the audience behind the scenes and lets them feel like they’re on the inside of your business or industry is always a strong option – telling the story of your company’s growth, including setbacks and worries. 

As an individual, your founder is not your brand. But their humanness can help to build and grow your brand in a way that your audience can feel connected with, and involved in. So create that system and bring the humans behind your brand into your marketing strategy to help your brand stand out from the faceless crowd. 

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