How Houston startups can bolster marketing and communications collaboration

Guest column

A Houston expert shares her pointers on navigating marketing and communication strategies for startups. Photo via Getty Images

Marketing and communications remain crucial to startups. Building a more cohesive team dynamic between marketing and communications can offer a young company purpose, direction and language to differentiate its product or service value.

While marketing and communications have distinct goals, magic happens when the two work together to enhance the company's business objectives. Clients often ask me the difference between marketing and communications and how the two can complement each other. Consider these thoughts and steps to better collaboration.

Communication 101

Startups need support for creating a company narrative to help employees tell the story and show company value to customers and prospective customers. A communications plan includes the strategy for meeting business objectives, the target audiences, and the key messages that will resonate with each audience. Communications plans also identify the best ways to tell the story, i.e., media relations, social media sponsorships, website content, and presentations. In-house communications professionals might consider building a team of strong freelance writers to delegate writing projects.

Marketing 101

Marketing promotes products or services to a specific audience, whether reaching new customers or retaining existing ones. A strong marketing plan includes strategy, competitive analysis, market research, and identifying industry trends. Marketers use communications to develop and share messages with these audiences. Marketers should consider engaging freelance writers to create content.

How do marketing and communications work together?

Close marketing and communications coordination can be an advantage for customer engagement. That strong team approach offers an opportunity to ensure marketing and communication efforts center around the customer. For example, marketers may leverage company blog content (written by communicators) in marketing efforts, i.e., sales pitches, customer outreach, and company webinars, to help generate leads, and make conversions. Marketing teams can then provide analytics or customer feedback to optimize future content.

Examples of successful collaboration include a customer featuring a company’s newly enhanced product at an industry conference after reading the recent product launch in trade media, a series of thought-leadership blog posts after the marketing team received prospective customer inquiries on a hot topic or a successful case study provided by marketing for communications to leverage on the website, whitepaper, and social media accounts.

Data, please

Take advantage of the data most startups have at their fingertips because data sharing proves important in developing compelling content. For instance, marketers benefit from sharing industry trends, customer demographics and behavior, market research and internal data (how customers use the product or service) with communicators to enable them to produce more engaging customer copy. Also, marketers and proposal experts often receive requests for information from customers or prospective customers. Those requests can also be helpful to communicators in writing content. Then, once published, communicators can provide data on engagement to ensure that content resonates.

Report efforts

Find ways to share reporting of marketing and communications efforts. For instance, during a recent meeting, did a customer mention a company-bylined article in a trade publication? Did marketing receive a request for information from a prospective customer after reading a company white paper? Did a company expert get invited to speak at an industry conference due to a blog post? All these shared results help to optimize marketing and communications efforts and inform strategy pivots, if appropriate.

Break the silos

Break any silos for improved marketing and communications collaboration. Consider regular team meetings or create a Teams site or Slack channel to exchange information often. For example, one client recently held a successful all-day brand and team-building workshop. Open communication between marketing and communications teams remains critical to executing a solid marketing strategy and achieving business objectives. For a more cohesive communications and marketing approach, know the business objectives, define roles, and responsibilities, meet regularly, share data, and report efforts for better results.

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Melanie Taplett is a communications and public relations consultant for the technology, energy, and manufacturing industries.

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A Houston expert outlines what startups and small business need to know about their communications strategy. Photo via Getty Images

Here's what Houston startups need to know about internal communications

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Startup founders often focus on outward victories. However, if they look inward and get internal communications right, this can prioritize, inspire, and retain talent, which is the heart of the company.

Consistent internal communication helps employees to understand the company's core values and mission and the evolving internal policies and procedures — health care benefits, reorganizations, remote work — that accompany a young business. Investing in internal communications also supports external public relations efforts because the best company storytellers are well-informed employees.

Consider these tactics for effective internal communications.

Prioritize messaging

In any startup, internal procedures evolve as the company grows. Take control of the narrative while easing employees' minds by prioritizing internal messaging.

Whether transitioning to a more flexible work schedule, updating healthcare benefits, or rolling out a performance review process, planning messages in advance can help team members understand the change, the impact, and how they can contribute positively to the development.

Well-informed employees help mitigate uneasiness and tend to achieve business goals more quickly. Make sure to allow the employees time to reflect and react.

Support managers

Leaders and mid-level managers play an integral role in internal communications by cascading information throughout the organization. They regularly engage with their employees, so it is important that managers feel confident and supported in their communication skills.

Managers can benefit from a common company language, talking points, or communications training for more effective and productive conversations. By identifying, clarifying, and reinforcing common goals and key objectives for managers, companies can strengthen productivity and eliminate confusion, especially if the company changes teams' roles and responsibilities.

Be consistent

Make sure that the drumbeat remains steady, whether this includes a monthly town hall meeting or weekly CEO emails. Since communication is not necessarily one-size-fits-all, use a communication approach tailored to the workforce.

For example, there might be more effective communication methods than email for employees not behind a desk. As a smaller company, take that time to connect with the team directly because as the company swells, that one-on-one experience will become increasingly difficult to manage.

Listen to employees

Delivering top-down messaging that resonates with the workforce remains critical. However, internal communication is a two-way street.

Allow team members to give valuable feedback. Encourage team members to share their thoughts about the company, concerns, and how to improve communications. Issue internal surveys or hold face-to-face meetings to gain useful insight.

Understanding these critical proof points will enable more effective communication and quick action on any issues.

Be a human

Keep humanity at the heart of internal communications. Amid the company's transition, maintain transparency and recognize the emotional toll some changes can have on teammates. The best talent will remain when they feel connected, informed and listened to.

Greater employee engagement can help build a strong company culture of accountability, authenticity and communication, setting up the business for bigger success.

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Melanie Taplett is a communications and public relations consultant for the technology, energy, and manufacturing industries.

Set the framework for your startup's social media policy. Tracy Le Blanc/Pexels

Houston social media expert urges startups and companies to establish a sharing policy and strategy

Guest column

While employees mean well, they may share or post company information on social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, blogs, among others) that could be misaligned with business objectives, creating a potential reputational risk for the company. For this reason, it is essential that companies big or small, including startups, develop, and implement a social media policy, so management and employees work from the same playbook.

Build the company’s social media strategy

First, management needs to define its social media to help inform its policy. How active do you want to be on social media? How do you plan to respond to comments? How involved do you want employees to be on social media as it relates to the company, specifically when involving company-issued devices or during business hours?

Companies must consider a proactive role in social media because if the company is not telling its story, someone else will fill the void. Plus, it's a great way to engage with the community and give everyone a glimpse of the company's culture.

Also, define what "social media" is for your company. Companies will likely want to cast a wide net to encompass blogs, personal websites, message boards, Wikipedia, as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.

Determine the company's response process as well. Management's gut reaction might be to censor the content or take down less-than-flattering comments about the company. Management needs to understand the purpose of social media, and instead have a well-thought-out social media response process in place to ensure timely responses to questions and comments, so issues don't linger or snowball.

Once management determines the company strategy, establish tools, i.e., social media monitoring to help achieve the objectives.

Establish social media policy and identify a social media manager

While every company's social media policy is unique, make clear to employees that the company's code of conduct must be followed online as it is followed offline. Employees must protect proprietary and intellectual property and never share any confidential or proprietary information via social media, even through private messaging.

State clearly in the policy that employees can never represent themselves as official spokespersons for the company unless given explicit permission by the company. Moreover, while there should be management support of employee comments or likes on content associated with the company, employees need to make it clear that the views they express on social media are theirs and do not represent the company.

A company should determine one person that is responsible for its public persona and social media efforts, including monitoring and posting regularly on all social media channels. The social media manager must also be the one to handle any negative comments about the company, as well as any media requests.

Conduct regular training for employees

Companies must consider training for employees. Host a brown bag luncheon with social media training to provide employees an opportunity to understand the company's social media policy better, as well as ask questions. Employees often make social media mistakes when they don't know better.

Social media has changed the role of company communications. Companies — both big and small — that build a strong social media strategy and policy see the value of delivering company messages to a broader community, monitoring for feedback, and listening to conversations about their brands.

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Melanie Taplett is a communications professional serving energy, professional services, and healthcare companies. Contact her at mtaplett@taplycom.com or taplycom.com.

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Houston organizations launch collaborative center to boost cancer outcomes

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Rice University's new Synthesis X Center officially launched last month to bring together experts in cancer care and chemistry.

The center was born out of what started about seven years ago as informal meetings between Rice chemist Han Xiao's research group and others from the Baylor College of Medicine’s Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Baylor College of Medicine. The level of collaboration between the two teams has grown significantly over the years, and monthly meetings now draw about 100 participants from across disciplines, fields and Houston-based organizations, according to a statement from Rice.

Researchers at the new SynthX Center will aim to turn fundamental research into clinical applications and make precision adjustments to drug properties and molecules. It will focus on improving cancer outcomes by looking at an array of factors, including prevention and detection, immunotherapies, the use of artificial intelligence to speed drug discovery and development, and several other topics.

"At Rice, we are strong on the fundamental side of research in organic chemistry, chemical biology, bioengineering and nanomaterials,” Xiao says in the statement. “Starting at the laboratory bench, we can synthesize therapeutic molecules and proteins with atom-level precision, offering immense potential for real-world applications at the bedside ... But the clinicians and fundamental researchers don’t have a lot of time to talk and to exchange ideas, so SynthX wants to serve as the bridge and help make these connections.”

SynthX plans to issue its first merit-based seed grants to teams with representatives from Baylor and Rice this month.

With this recognition from Rice, the teams from Xiao's lab and the TMC will also be able to expand and formalize their programs. They will build upon annual retreats, in which investigators can share unpublished findings, and also plan to host a national conference, the first slated for this fall titled "Synthetic Innovations Towards a Cure for Cancer.”

“I am confident that the SynthX Center will be a great resource for both students and faculty who seek to translate discoveries from fundamental chemical research into medical applications that improve people’s lives,” Thomas Killian, dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences, says in the release.

Rice announced that it had invested in four other research centers along with SynthX last month. The other centers include the Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience, the Center for Environmental Studies, the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies and the Rice Center for Nanoscale Imaging Sciences.

Earlier this year, Rice also announced its first-ever recipients of its One Small Step Grant program, funded by its Office of Innovation. The program will provide funding to faculty working on "promising projects with commercial potential," according to the website.

Houston physicist scores $15.5M grant for high-energy nuclear physics research

FUTURE OF PHYSICS

A team of Rice University physicists has been awarded a prestigious grant from the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Physics for their work in high-energy nuclear physics and research into a new state of matter.

The five-year $15.5 million grant will go towards Rice physics and astronomy professor Wei Li's discoveries focused on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), a large, general-purpose particle physics detector built on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, a European organization for nuclear research in France and Switzerland. The work is "poised to revolutionize our understanding of fundamental physics," according to a statement from Rice.

Li's team will work to develop an ultra-fast silicon timing detector, known as the endcap timing layer (ETL), that will provide upgrades to the CMS detector. The ETl is expected to have a time resolution of 30 picoseconds per particle, which will allow for more precise time-of-flight particle identification.

The Rice team is collaborating with others from MIT, Oak Ridge National Lab, the University of Illinois Chicago and University of Kansas. Photo via Rice.edu

This will also help boost the performance of the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), which is scheduled to launch at CERN in 2029, allowing it to operate at about 10 times the luminosity than originally planned. The ETL also has applications for other colliders apart from the LHC, including the DOE’s electron-ion collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York.

“The ETL will enable breakthrough science in the area of heavy ion collisions, allowing us to delve into the properties of a remarkable new state of matter called the quark-gluon plasma,” Li explained in a statement. “This, in turn, offers invaluable insights into the strong nuclear force that binds particles at the core of matter.”

The ETL is also expected to aid in other areas of physics, including the search for the Higgs particle and understanding the makeup of dark matter.

Li is joined on this work by co-principal investigator Frank Geurts and researchers Nicole Lewis and Mike Matveev from Rice. The team is collaborating with others from MIT, Oak Ridge National Lab, the University of Illinois Chicago and University of Kansas.

Last year, fellow Rice physicist Qimiao Si, a theoretical quantum physicist, earned the prestigious Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship grant. The five-year fellowship, with up to $3 million in funding, will go towards his work to establish an unconventional approach to create and control topological states of matter, which plays an important role in materials research and quantum computing.

Meanwhile, the DOE recently tapped three Houston universities to compete in its annual startup competition focused on "high-potential energy technologies,” including one team from Rice.

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This article originally ran on EnergyCapital.

Cart.com makes acquisition, events not to miss, and more trending Houston innovation news

top stories

Editor's note:Let's roundup the top Houston innovation news from the week. Trending Houston tech and startup articles on InnovationMap included news of a Houston company acquiring an Amazon partner, Houston events not to miss this month, and more.

Houston ecommerce scale-up company acquires Amazon advertising partner

With the acquisition of Amify, Cart.com has expanded its workforce and grown its suite of services. Photo courtesy of Cart.com

A Houston tech company has tapped an Amazon partner in a strategic acquisition and is bringing the company's full team on board.

Cart.com acquired Ohio-based Amify, a company that provides optimization and advertising solutions. The terms of the deal were not disclosed but Cart.com will on board Amify’s entire employee base, including its founder Ethan McAfee, CEO Chris Mehrabi, and COO Christine McCambridge.

As chief delivery officer, Mehrabi will take the helm of Cart.com’s professional services business and McCambridge will lead Cart.com’s marketplace services team as vice president of marketplace services operations.

“I’m happy to welcome the entire Amify team to Cart.com and have industry veterans Chris Mehrabi and Christine McCambridge join our leadership team,” Cart.com Founder and CEO Omair Tariq says in a news release. “Amify has been widely recognized for their expertise and technology and we’re excited to leverage their experience to help our customers maximize their potential across channels.” Continue reading.

10+ can't-miss Houston business and innovation events for April

Houston innovators — put these April events on your radar. Photo via Getty Images

From pitching competitions to expert speaker summits, April is filled with opportunities for Houston innovators.

Here's a roundup of events you won't want to miss out on so mark your calendars and register accordingly. Continue reading.

Health tech startup launches Houston study improve stroke patients recovery

NeuraStasis, which originated out of the TMC Biodesign program, is launching its latest study in Houston. Photo via Getty Images

A Houston-born company is enrolling patients in a study to test the efficacy of nerve stimulation to improve outcomes for stroke survivors.

Dr. Kirt Gill and Joe Upchurch founded NeuraStasis in 2021 as part of the TMC Biodesign fellowship program.

“The idea for the company manifested during that year because both Joe and I had experiences with stroke survivors in our own lives,” Gill tells InnovationMap. It began for Gill when his former college roommate had a stroke in his twenties.

“It’s a very unpredictable, sudden disease with ramifications not just for my best friend but for everyone in his life. I saw what it did to his family and caregivers and it's one of those things that doesn't have as many solutions for people to continue recovery and to prevent damage and that's an area that I wanted to focus myself on in my career,” Gill explains. Continue reading.

Houston startup scores $12M grant to support clinical evaluation of cancer-fighting drug

The funds will support the clinical evaluation of a therapeutic antibody that targets acute lymphoblastic leukemia, one of the most common childhood cancers. Photo via Getty Images

Allterum Therapeutics, a Houston biopharmaceutical company, has been awarded a $12 million product development grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT).

The funds will support the clinical evaluation of a therapeutic antibody that targets acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), one of the most common childhood cancers.

However, CEO and President Atul Varadhachary, who's also the managing director of Fannin Innovation, tells InnovationMap, “Our mission has grown much beyond ALL.” Continue reading.

Texas Space Commission launches, Houston execs named to leadership

Here's who's at the helm of the newly announced Texas Space Commission. Photo courtesy of the Office of the Governor

Governor Greg Abbott announced the Texas Space Commission, naming its inaugural board of directors and Texas Aerospace Research and Space Economy Consortium Executive Committee.

The announcement came at NASA's Johnson Space Center, and the governor was joined by Speaker Dade Phelan, Representative Greg Bonnen, Representative Dennis Paul, NASA's Johnson Space Center Director Vanessa Wyche, and various aerospace industry leaders.

According to a news release, the Texas Space Commission will aim to strengthen commercial, civil, and military aerospace activity by promoting innovation in space exploration and commercial aerospace opportunities, which will include the integration of space, aeronautics, and aviation industries as part of the Texas economy. Continue reading.

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