How to be an Entrepreneurial Marketer

What can marketers learn from entrepreneurs? Plenty. According to Darpan Munjal, serial entrepreneur and successful founder of the naming platform Atom.com, the principles of entrepreneurship—resilience, curiosity, and “roll up your sleeves and try something” — are of immediate use to marketers everywhere. Other principles he shared with us in this episode: Do lots of testing. Choose metrics that have real business value. Find employees who think like entrepreneurs. And our favorite: Hire marketers who “get tech,” and tech people who “get marketing.” Listen through to the end for his answer to where entrepreneurial marketing is headed: It’s AI, of course, but with careful guardrails around maintaining authenticity and delivering a human touch. Brilliant.

Darpan shares these three takeaways:

• Marketing requires a balance of creativity (for new ideas) and discipline (for execution), and so does entrepreneurship.
• Make sure you are clear about the problem your product/company is trying to solve and its distinctive advantage compared to the alternatives.
• The top marketing tactics recommended for entrepreneurial marketing are lots of testing, content marketing distributed via social media and contributed articles, partnerships and community-based engagement.

About our Guest:

Darpan Munjal is the Founder & CEO of Atom.com, a disruptive naming platform and domain marketplace. With a cutting-edge focus on AI, Crowdsourcing, and Branding, Atom is revolutionizing the startup ecosystem by providing essential building blocks for success.

Formerly known as Squadhelp, Atom is a 3X Inc. 500 company, with over 50,000 customers worldwide, including Nestlé, Dell, Pepsi, Hilton, and Alibaba. A serial entrepreneur, Darpan brings over 25 years of experience in leading internet-focused businesses.

Darpan is also a frequent contributor to Forbes and Inc. Magazine, sharing insights on branding, marketing, and entrepreneurship.

WVU Marketing Communications Today: Horizons is presented by the West Virginia University Reed College of Media, which offers renowned online master's degree programs in Marketing Communications.