Some tech trivia to get the brain juices flowing.

In August, Milton Tutu, Chief Marketing Officer at Selar sparked conversations about how marketing talents take on multiple roles in tech startups and were often undercompensated.

As expected, responses began to flood in under Tutu’s tweet, and the discussion rapidly spun into a debate between startup founders and marketing talents. While some argued that a startup’s budget might be a limiting factor to hiring sufficient marketing talents, others argued that marketing talents were not as important as product builders like software engineers—because you know, all products sell themselves.

“I think people should learn how to stick to their budget. If your budget can only hire a social media manager then stick to that,” Tutu tweeted. 

“Milton, have you seen the economy?” tweeted Jude Dike, CEO of GetEquity. 

While Dike’s counter comment might blame the country’s stringent economy as a cover for not employing sufficient marketing talents, Tutu argues that it is not an adequate excuse. “Chief, is it only with marketing talents we look at the economy? What about engineers and product designers (technical talents)? Why don’t we hire one technical talent to do 3–4 different roles? “Stick to your budget and hire what you can afford. If it’s only a social media manager you can afford as a start, hire that and don’t try to give you a social media manager.” 

Reading through the comments under Tutu’s thread, another tweet popped up: 

It appears as though people are conflating different social media roles. 

So let’s get into it. What are the different roles under marketing and who should be responsible for what?

While the conversation on twitter took several turns, with several founders arguing against the motion, today’s #EnteringTech edition looks at the dynamics from the lens of content marketing leads. They give their best advice on what should be the norm and best practices in the marketing space.

“Many early stage startup founders do not understand that content and marketing are different skills,” said Ama Udofa, content marketing lead at Vendease. “They are focused on sales. They don’t really understand that they are different skills. A lot of them don’t understand that building a content engine is long-term play; it’s about building the foundations, it’s about building the community, it’s about building an infrastructure for information so that as you grow and scale, your new users have a bank of information. Many of them are just focused on sales.” 

Image source: Zikoko Memes

Damilare Fakorede, partner and brand and marketing at GrowthMax Africa is of the opinion that startups should have two marketing talents: a head of marketing and a community manager. The Head of Marketing would oversee a startup’s overall marketing strategy and direction, coordinate with other departments to align marketing efforts with business goals, and handle high-level decision-making for marketing campaigns. 

While the community manager on the other end should be someone skilled at building an engaged customer community deploying content that resonates with the startup’s core audience. This unique combo will drive a startup’s growth efficiently in the short and medium term.

Mibiola Ifeoluwa, content lead at BrandEye, is of the opinion that handling multiple roles makes a startup’s marketing less efficient and overwhelms the talent. “One person should not handle more than three roles, especially based on expertise and based on the person’s strength,” she said. Micheal Inioluwa, marketing lead at Cowrywise agrees with this sentiment, “While starting small and working within their budget is understandable, startups should manage talent expectations and know that there’s a limit to how much deep work a marketer can do if they have to juggle five roles at the same time.” 

Image source: YungNollywood

While Ama acknowledges that a startups budget might be an hindering factor to employee multiple marketing talents, he says that a startup should hire a generalists who can handle multiple tasks and be compensated duly. “If you’re going to hire one person to do three people’s jobs, I think you should pay three people’s salary,” he said. Damilare believes that there is talent for every budget and that the goal of every startup will be to find the best talent that matches the startup’s budget.

In the next edition of #EnteringTech, we will bring you perspective from startup’s CEOs to understand how they are thinking about the subject matter. 

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