Primer on Marketing for Founders

A really quick and dirty Primer on types of marketing. I find myself in the middle of conversations about influencer marketing or social media marketing and many founders conflate these disparate types of marketing. Also they constantly think "Advertising" and "Marketing" are the same thing. So this should help bifurcate the two.

Marketing: the act of promoting a product or service.
Parts of this include: Advertising, Community Building, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Public Relations, Influencer Marketing.

This, by no means is meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather a way to help you focus on which marketing channel may work for you, or your product.

Advertising

2 parts: 1) Creative and 2) Media. Creative is the act of branding, writing copy, creating advertisements, slogans, includes market research and figuring out your market position. Media is the act of distribution. You can absolutely do this on your own, but it also helps to hire experts. Creative is writing ads, Media is running the Facebook Ads.
Note: Advertising is specifically buying existing advertisement places across different media. This includes Linkedin Ads, IG Story Ads, Facebook Ads, TV Ads, Youtube Pre-Roll. Anywhere you can pay for placement.

Community Building

This is creating places for existing people to meet, congregate, discuss. It could be subreddit, purpose build forum, or even a whatsapp group.

Key to note here is that you can only build a community that already exists. You just give the people involved a place to meet.
You can also begin the process of community building by being extremely active in existing online communities.

Social Media Marketing

This involves creating your own company accounts and posting as the company. You'll have to build great feeds that people want to follow, which is hard for companies. Brands and non-people are hard to follow. And everyone following will intrinsically know that every post is an ad.

Content Marketing

This is not just a company blog, but also reports, guest posts and anything you can create that can be shared on blogs, etc. You can absolutely use social media to expand your audience for content marketing but it's probably going to be publications that get you the best results.

Public Relations

This is where you get interviewed, quoted, etc in stories. yes you can pitch yourself or your company's story and try to get press that way. You can also become the goto resource in your industry. You can also throw in "speaking at events" into this PR category. And even podcast interviews. PR is generally better to increase a person's image in their community. That's not 100%.

Influencer Marketing

This is my favorite type of marketing, it's when creators and businesses collaborate to create content that is an ad, but also more than just an ad. Integrations, or collaborations, could come about in any number of flavors. Paid, Free Product, Affiliate Marketing or building relationships.
An example of this would be if your Saas is great for no-coders, make sure that your SaaS is being used in No-Code tutorials and classes. Sponsor free classes by @bentossell or build connections with YouTubers who show off tools, perhaps side by side comparisons, or SaaS breakdowns etc.