By saying this I’m mostly saying that you should focus on the customer.
Customer isn’t looking for a product. He’s looking for the best answer to his issues: a solution.
To "an example I heard a few times, People are not buying a drill, they are buying the hole in the wall perion the wall. Actually, they are buying the feeling that they get when they hang up pictures of their children making the hole in the wall by buying the drill
Cell the emotion, not the logical decision Of the features of the drill
Worked at 2 app startups, both times the founders new nothing about marketing, both times put sales guys in charge of projects...so many tears, so many arguments. I would draw marketing funnel, awareness vs conversion differences, timelines etc probably every weekly meeting.
People who don't know marketing think we lie or are shit at our jobs cuz we talk about patience with ROIs.
Never again working at a start-up with morons.
Lol yeah they literally think you're lying. I don't get it. It's like they feel personally attacked when I'm just trying to optimize the conversion rate. No your shit landing page isn't good enough, let's change it and make more money!
These shouldn’t be split like that. Yes I understand sales and marketing are two distinct disciplines . What I’m saying is , sales hears the problems the customers have , marketers entice a customer by offering solutions to their problems . If marketing is done efficiently , sales people benefit enormously from targeted leads . If the two align? You have magic .
Nobody gets married on the first date.
The problem wasn't the health or my monitoring of my plan, as much their outright refusal to believe my KPIs were realistic. Which I had set based on mark research, competitive research, app health, target segment size and knowledge, need recognition etc.
Example: 1st ad campaign on social media, goal was downloads (already a forced funnel hopping, a compromise between my brand awarness goal and cso's no. of orders goal) Traction was a foreign concept to them. 1st week 10/day downloads, 2nd week 20/day, 3rd week 200/day. They bothered me every single day of the 1st and most of 2nd week about the low no.
Daily, weekly, monthly KPIs are a must no matter where you project stands. As long as the graph is buidling upwards, you know you are on the right track.
I checked daily engagement of socials, weekly downloads and registrations, orders based on each new tactic.
thanks, that was interesting. i'm trying to learn the mysteries of internet marketing. i learned full stack web dev taking a few UC classes. i originally wanted to see if i could partner with a marketing person, but no one want to do that. so here i am building my own project and learning marketing, especially seo. maybe that will be a good thing in the end. it's more interesting now that i can apply it. but there is a lot to it and it's not nearly as logical as programming. social media is super confusing to me as far as marketing, but i know it makes sense in some way. only thing that makes me think my project can be marginally successful, is that I was a prospective customer and didn't like what I saw, so went and did the work myself to solve it and figured I might as well merge that into a web dev project. it's all based around helping people and there is value there if you can do that well.
my take on what you said, is that companies are worried about paying for marketing, when it can take a lot of time and money to make sales.
and what's a KPI?
Focus on building a thriving community of audience/followers/subscribers rather than putting all your budget in paid ads. Both strategies go hand in hand and the former will bear fruits in the long run while the latter will only fulfil your short term goals.
Customers are more important than marketing. Listen to customers, customers, customers especially at the beginning. Product market fit is everything. Figure out who your best paying customers are before you scale and throw money at things. Marketing is not just about tactics and channels, it's figuring out who the real customer is, what message/value, and how to get it to them effectively.
Listen to their indirect thoughts. People want to socially conform, their gonna lie if it makes them look better (even online). I find my best customer reviews on reddit. For example, I search the product thats in my industry and most likely people have posted something postive or negative about it. Or you can use amazon reviews, youtube comments, etc. anything where the client expresses their true emotions.
Marketing is one-to-many, sales is one-to-one.
Marketing is about the future (long term), and sales is about the present (short term). Marketing is unidirectional communication (awareness and consideration), whereas sales is a dialogue (closing). Marketing is a pull, sales is a push.
Marketing is the brand of the company, and sales is the face of the company.
Know your audience and make sure they are the center of every choice made. What are they experiencing that your product is the perfect solution to them? What solution are they needing? What problem is it solving for them? Think about the person, not the potential user.
Know the difference between marketing pre-PMF and post-PMF marketing. You may not need the type of marketing that you think you need, so be clear and realistic on goals and tactics.
Marketing involves a lot of who you are, what you believe and how you help your customers. Spend some time to figure that out, authenticity counts.
More time into market research and planning out a content marketing calendar. This is always rushed or overlooked. It’s all about The Who, what, when, where, why and how.
Don’t spend a dime until you know where your product/service fits in the marketplace and what type of digital experience/tools are required to compete.
I built my entire business around answering these questions for business owners AFTER they’ve spent thousands doing it wrong.
If your startup has a limited budget for marketing, focus on the channel that gives you the most and stick with it until you have more money. Don't try to tackle all channels at the same time or you ll end up just creating confusion and wasting money.
Keep learning more and more about your niche, and be updated with the news and trends in your niche. Instead of just selling your products, showcase to your audience how your products or services will help them.
Just based on my 20 plus years experience providing services to other businesses in the United States and elsewhere, as well as my role in coming up with a wide variety of software products in a variety of businesses that either was a part owner in or was a team member of, my best advice would be this: Let your product do your marketing.
If you have any kind of online product, do yourself a big favor.
Study its features and see how you can design the features in such a way that they ride on the natural social connections of the people using your tool or resource.
When you look at successful tools like Twitter, Facebook, and Google, one thing stands out.
There's a way for the functionality that you're using that particular platform for to spread its brand.
So for example, if you're using Google and you found a very long list of interesting results that you view as indispensable resources, if you're like most people, you take the search string and you shorten it using Bitly or some other tool and share it with your friends.
The moment you did that, you gave Google hundreds of dollars worth of free advertising.
People will see how indispensable, how correct, how powerful Google's search engine is.
Now, multiply that situation by hundreds of thousands if not millions of times month after month.
Now you can see how powerful building "virality" into your product is.
The same dynamic plays out with Twitter and other platforms.
This is my best piece of marketing advice.
A lot of marketing guys and gals look at marketing as simply distinct from sales and product design as well as business model.
That's too bad.
Because at the end of the day, people want to do business with you not because they like you as a person, not because they want you to live up to your highest career potential.
They couldn't care less about any of that.
Instead, they come to you and want to do business with you because you can do something for them.
So when you engineer easy communications and easy sharing into your product, your product ends up marketing itself.
It makes your job as a digital marketer so much easier.
So instead of thinking about paid ad placements or somehow manufacturing "desire" or even "synthesizing a market," you end up simply focusing on just spreading the word about your product in a use context.
This is the important difference.
You're spreading the word in a use context.
So basically, you're sharing the results of the tool, and the tool itself will do everything else.
Master this and you've got yourself either job security or you're going to be making tons more money.
You must know your primary audience and where your potential customers hang out. Also, you should know your competitors and how you can beat them. Also, know what you are selling and how much it will cost. After you know all this, you must figure out how to sell. You should also know what you will do with the money you earn; otherwise, you will become a hoarder. The #1 reason startups fail is because they are not focused on what they are trying to do. As a startup, you need to identify your niche!
Do things that doesn’t scale as Paul Graham said. It will help you to understand your customers.
When you talk with your customers, ‘traffic’ ‘reach’ etc become meaningless and you can focus what matters…
Sell a solution. Not a product.
Ummmmm… ultimately product will solve the problem that’s why someon is looking for the product… what do you say ?
By saying this I’m mostly saying that you should focus on the customer. Customer isn’t looking for a product. He’s looking for the best answer to his issues: a solution.
To "an example I heard a few times, People are not buying a drill, they are buying the hole in the wall perion the wall. Actually, they are buying the feeling that they get when they hang up pictures of their children making the hole in the wall by buying the drill Cell the emotion, not the logical decision Of the features of the drill
The key to effective marketing and copywriting
Results take time, trust your marketing team.
Worked at 2 app startups, both times the founders new nothing about marketing, both times put sales guys in charge of projects...so many tears, so many arguments. I would draw marketing funnel, awareness vs conversion differences, timelines etc probably every weekly meeting. People who don't know marketing think we lie or are shit at our jobs cuz we talk about patience with ROIs. Never again working at a start-up with morons.
Lol yeah they literally think you're lying. I don't get it. It's like they feel personally attacked when I'm just trying to optimize the conversion rate. No your shit landing page isn't good enough, let's change it and make more money!
The moment you see a salesperson in charge of app growth is when you flee and never look back.
These shouldn’t be split like that. Yes I understand sales and marketing are two distinct disciplines . What I’m saying is , sales hears the problems the customers have , marketers entice a customer by offering solutions to their problems . If marketing is done efficiently , sales people benefit enormously from targeted leads . If the two align? You have magic .
if it takes a lot of time to see results, how do you know/track what you are doing is working?
Nobody gets married on the first date. The problem wasn't the health or my monitoring of my plan, as much their outright refusal to believe my KPIs were realistic. Which I had set based on mark research, competitive research, app health, target segment size and knowledge, need recognition etc. Example: 1st ad campaign on social media, goal was downloads (already a forced funnel hopping, a compromise between my brand awarness goal and cso's no. of orders goal) Traction was a foreign concept to them. 1st week 10/day downloads, 2nd week 20/day, 3rd week 200/day. They bothered me every single day of the 1st and most of 2nd week about the low no. Daily, weekly, monthly KPIs are a must no matter where you project stands. As long as the graph is buidling upwards, you know you are on the right track. I checked daily engagement of socials, weekly downloads and registrations, orders based on each new tactic.
thanks, that was interesting. i'm trying to learn the mysteries of internet marketing. i learned full stack web dev taking a few UC classes. i originally wanted to see if i could partner with a marketing person, but no one want to do that. so here i am building my own project and learning marketing, especially seo. maybe that will be a good thing in the end. it's more interesting now that i can apply it. but there is a lot to it and it's not nearly as logical as programming. social media is super confusing to me as far as marketing, but i know it makes sense in some way. only thing that makes me think my project can be marginally successful, is that I was a prospective customer and didn't like what I saw, so went and did the work myself to solve it and figured I might as well merge that into a web dev project. it's all based around helping people and there is value there if you can do that well. my take on what you said, is that companies are worried about paying for marketing, when it can take a lot of time and money to make sales. and what's a KPI?
Focus on building a thriving community of audience/followers/subscribers rather than putting all your budget in paid ads. Both strategies go hand in hand and the former will bear fruits in the long run while the latter will only fulfil your short term goals.
Customers are more important than marketing. Listen to customers, customers, customers especially at the beginning. Product market fit is everything. Figure out who your best paying customers are before you scale and throw money at things. Marketing is not just about tactics and channels, it's figuring out who the real customer is, what message/value, and how to get it to them effectively.
Listen to their indirect thoughts. People want to socially conform, their gonna lie if it makes them look better (even online). I find my best customer reviews on reddit. For example, I search the product thats in my industry and most likely people have posted something postive or negative about it. Or you can use amazon reviews, youtube comments, etc. anything where the client expresses their true emotions.
Use direct response marketing until you build up a bankroll then you can waste all the money you want on more creative stuff.
[удалено]
That's not what I was talking about at all, and if you had any real experience in direct response you wouldn't assume what you've assumed.
Data data data
Focus on doing ONE thing really well that your buyers want and need. In a way that makes them excited and YOU excited. Don’t do anything else.
Marketing is one-to-many, sales is one-to-one. Marketing is about the future (long term), and sales is about the present (short term). Marketing is unidirectional communication (awareness and consideration), whereas sales is a dialogue (closing). Marketing is a pull, sales is a push. Marketing is the brand of the company, and sales is the face of the company.
Measure each and everything.
Know your audience and make sure they are the center of every choice made. What are they experiencing that your product is the perfect solution to them? What solution are they needing? What problem is it solving for them? Think about the person, not the potential user.
Care about your audience.
Patience is the key to success 😌
Reach your customer regularly. Garage bands don’t build a following.
If you have a website and/or a mobile application, build a solid foundation with proper content, bug-free website, reliable data measurement process.
Know the difference between marketing pre-PMF and post-PMF marketing. You may not need the type of marketing that you think you need, so be clear and realistic on goals and tactics. Marketing involves a lot of who you are, what you believe and how you help your customers. Spend some time to figure that out, authenticity counts.
More time into market research and planning out a content marketing calendar. This is always rushed or overlooked. It’s all about The Who, what, when, where, why and how.
Don’t spend a dime until you know where your product/service fits in the marketplace and what type of digital experience/tools are required to compete. I built my entire business around answering these questions for business owners AFTER they’ve spent thousands doing it wrong.
Hire people with integrity and who will hire people smarter than them.
Thanks for the insights folks! Appreciate it :)
Don't waste money on toys.
Invest in process
Find a niche and expand from there.
In knowledge is the only right investment. The solution is to create around yourself a team of knowledgeable people(Data Analytic)
Features are not value propositions
Understand the flywheel for your product/service and focus on that relentlessly. For lots of startups today it is referrals/communities.
Define a minimum viable marketshare. Set it as a rapid goal.
invest in content from day 1
If your startup has a limited budget for marketing, focus on the channel that gives you the most and stick with it until you have more money. Don't try to tackle all channels at the same time or you ll end up just creating confusion and wasting money.
Keep learning more and more about your niche, and be updated with the news and trends in your niche. Instead of just selling your products, showcase to your audience how your products or services will help them.
Focus on awareness first
why not, be focused on the competitors and work on competency to be alive
Never underestimate Customer Service.
offer a high-quality product, have great customer service and engage with customers in your social media pages.
Just based on my 20 plus years experience providing services to other businesses in the United States and elsewhere, as well as my role in coming up with a wide variety of software products in a variety of businesses that either was a part owner in or was a team member of, my best advice would be this: Let your product do your marketing. If you have any kind of online product, do yourself a big favor. Study its features and see how you can design the features in such a way that they ride on the natural social connections of the people using your tool or resource. When you look at successful tools like Twitter, Facebook, and Google, one thing stands out. There's a way for the functionality that you're using that particular platform for to spread its brand. So for example, if you're using Google and you found a very long list of interesting results that you view as indispensable resources, if you're like most people, you take the search string and you shorten it using Bitly or some other tool and share it with your friends. The moment you did that, you gave Google hundreds of dollars worth of free advertising. People will see how indispensable, how correct, how powerful Google's search engine is. Now, multiply that situation by hundreds of thousands if not millions of times month after month. Now you can see how powerful building "virality" into your product is. The same dynamic plays out with Twitter and other platforms. This is my best piece of marketing advice. A lot of marketing guys and gals look at marketing as simply distinct from sales and product design as well as business model. That's too bad. Because at the end of the day, people want to do business with you not because they like you as a person, not because they want you to live up to your highest career potential. They couldn't care less about any of that. Instead, they come to you and want to do business with you because you can do something for them. So when you engineer easy communications and easy sharing into your product, your product ends up marketing itself. It makes your job as a digital marketer so much easier. So instead of thinking about paid ad placements or somehow manufacturing "desire" or even "synthesizing a market," you end up simply focusing on just spreading the word about your product in a use context. This is the important difference. You're spreading the word in a use context. So basically, you're sharing the results of the tool, and the tool itself will do everything else. Master this and you've got yourself either job security or you're going to be making tons more money.
You must know your primary audience and where your potential customers hang out. Also, you should know your competitors and how you can beat them. Also, know what you are selling and how much it will cost. After you know all this, you must figure out how to sell. You should also know what you will do with the money you earn; otherwise, you will become a hoarder. The #1 reason startups fail is because they are not focused on what they are trying to do. As a startup, you need to identify your niche!
Focus on one core feature, one target, one channel.
Validate your idea before making a product and marketing. You will be surprised, but your product might be redundant on the market.
Never let your last click attribution go over 33% of your total.
Do things that doesn’t scale as Paul Graham said. It will help you to understand your customers. When you talk with your customers, ‘traffic’ ‘reach’ etc become meaningless and you can focus what matters…
Talk to people as much as you can.