Early: fractional marketing for early and growth stage businesses
We exist to help startups & growing businesses turn their marketing into a strategic, sustainable, sales-aligned and revenue-focussed component of their organisation. As part of the Talented Grid of Companies, we have direct access to some of the sharpest marketers in the country.
Strategic, well-planned marketing turns brands into moats. Just ask the world’s most valued brands. Marketing often forgets to circle back to strategy and we’re helping brands fix this.
Modern marketing has become unnecessarily complicated and hard to keep up with. False choices (performance v/s brand), snake oils being sold as cure-alls (metaverse anyone?), and misleading ideas (advertising = marketing) can seriously harm young businesses.
So, we understand why plenty of early stage founders tend to dismantle it as ‘brand communication’ that doesn’t need priority early on. 90% of startups fail because of marketing related issues.Throwing-things-at-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks is not a sustainable strategy. Failing fast is a really expensive way to learn, especially when you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
A well-planned marketing strategy has been the hallmark of many successful brands. It’s a proven growth lever. And the best part? They’re all mostly repeatable strategies. What you need are those who’ve been-there, done-that and people who get you and your business.Early is a collective of proven marketers, made accessible to startups through a fractional services model. Meaning we function as part of your marketing team and not as an agency. And if you already work with an agency, great, we’ll figure out how you can work better with them.
With us, you get the most efficient, concentrated use of our time, at a price point that makes sense for the business, and without having to pay the overheads associated with a full-time hire.Our goal is to first dive deep into your business, both the supply and demand side, craft a strategy that’s relevant to your unique challenges - tie them to specific, measurable goals, and embed ourselves within your team as your Fractional Partners, to help you operationalise it.
We think we can help you build better by bringing the customer’s voice into the room. Marketing that invests in understanding customers deeply brings unquestionable value to every aspect of the business from product strategy, channel choices, pricing decisions and communications. At Early, this is where our work begins.
Words so rare we’re going to say it again. Specific. Time bound. Measurable. Strategy usually ends up gathering dust somewhere in the recesses of a google drive if it isn’t simple and actionable. If it reads like rocket science or feels like philosophy, it’s not useful.
Marketing strategy with Early is specific, time-bound and tied to measurable objectives. It’s time to turn your marketing into a moat.Have you noticed? That we’ve been saying marketing all along? NOT communications and certainly NOT advertising.
Startup marketing simply isn’t the same as advertising services that the average agency currently offers. This also means we’re tuned to speak a language typical agencies do not.Our previous experiences as strategists, creatives, brand and product marketers on the agency, brand and business side have shown that some of the typical models for marketing & advertising don’t always work for modern, early stage companies.
Building businesses is hard and start-up marketing demands totally different operational traits and skill sets from all involved. Including a certain nimbleness & agility to move at the speed of the client’s business. We’re building a company that’s home to the best start-up marketers for hire in India.One of Early’s critical roles will be to recruit the right set of external partners where needed, oversee and measure their performance, so you don’t have to. We are constantly working on curating a list of high quality, proven partners across different specialist areas.
We’ll help you bring in these experts wherever you need and you will always pay direct and always only pay Fractional Pricing. Remember, we are not an agency on retainer.- What’s going on with my demand funnel, where is the opportunity to grow? What does the data show?
- What are the clear, measurable goals I can legitimately aim for in the short, medium and long-term?
- What specific actions, tactics should I deploy and at what cost to achieve these goals?
- What should be my annual marketing budget and how do I measure it?
- Who are the right partners for me? And how should I evaluate performance?
Strategy needs a champion who can dedicatedly see it through. That’s why Early’s Fractional Partners - who come with project management and marketing experience - are embedded in your company through a part-time, medium-term engagement.
These partners are responsible for operationalising the plan through to results by building and overseeing a high-performing team of internal operations talent and/or onboarding the right external specialists.“The power of approaching marketing strategy from a customer-centric perspective is something that successful brands know and do very well. I’ve seen it first-hand from every vantage point imaginable - including the dozens of founders and early-stage leaders I’ve advised.
This also means my colleagues & I at Early will be tuned to speak a language that typical agencies do not. At Early, we’ll work with founders who want to build and make strategic sense of the marketing landscape, rather than it feeling like unnecessary cognitive overload” - Meghana Bhat, Co-founder, Early.- Transformed a B2C SaaS brand from ‘product’ to ‘brand’ through a research backed customer segmentation and positioning exercise that contributed to 5Xing its growth over 6-8 months.
- Fractional brand and content strategists for one of India’s largest e-commerce marketplaces. Partnering with specific category teams to co-own critical, measurable marketing objectives across the funnel.
- Led early growth with 25 SMB’s and 5 enterprise customers to integrate a virtual assistant tool in their daily workflows.
- Crafted a clear and differentiated positioning for a pet food brand in a cluttered market and a holistic marketing strategy that currently informs everything from partnerships to packaging to comms.
- Curated a vibrant community for a healthcare brand with 300+ fitness enthusiasts talking about health and wellness, with 20% engagement.
- You’ve just raised fresh capital that you want to invest in marketing but you’re unsure of the right way forward.
- You have a leaky demand funnel which you have yet to be able to fix even though you’ve thrown everything at it.
- You’ve been adding all the features that the customer says they want, but there doesn’t seem to be any noticeable impact or change in growth.
- You’ve been told you should “build a brand and you’re doing all the trending things" but you have no idea whether this is money well-spent.
- You have your brand positioning, but your communications and messaging across different media say different things, which feels like an unfixable problem.
- You, the founder, have been doing all the marketing, cloning technology isn’t there yet and you’d much rather spend your energies building.