Marketing
Check satisfaction with your product
Take a unique position
Be specific about your customer
Run consistent experiments
Accept marginal gains
Ensure retention
Create a referral loop
1) Check satisfaction with your product
To have something worth marketing is a natural first step. A good way to check if you have this is to find out how disappointed your customers would be without your product or service. The answer needs to be 'very' at worst. Then ask more questions - what would they use as an alternative, what do they see as the primary benefit, would they recommend you to anyone? Who? Once you're sure that your product has a clear value proposition and your customer is aware of it, only then are you ready to scale.
2) Take a unique position
Marketing is not based on your product but people's perception of it. A unique and therefore the first solution to a problem will always stick in people's minds. A 'me too' product is seen as less valuable. So take a clearly differentiated position. This will enable you to be at the forefront of people's minds, at least for that niche. It will also enable you to provide a more tailored and therefore bespoke solution. A good way to approach this is to look for weaknesses in the leader. For example, McDonald’s had already taken the position of speed. So Burger King rose to prominence by positioning themselves as a more tailored service.
3) Maintain focus on a specific customer
Deep focus on a customer will make marketing much easier. The more specific the customer profile is, the easier it will be to know how to find and approach them. To have a single marketing channel is the ideal situation. To do this, target niche groups outside core markets. Ones with underserved or unserved needs. This will enable you to personalise your message as much as possible. As tempting as it is to branch out, it is usually a big mistake. It can cripple even mature companies. The VW beetle campaign ‘different Volks for different people’ slashed their market share in the US from 67% to 4%. Some consolation is that your target is not necessarily your market. Pepsi is aimed at the young but really is bought by anyone who wants to look youthful. So you can target one market but appeal to a much wider group.
4) Run consistent experiments
Always test and evaluate experiments rigorously and objectively. The closer your data is to real-time the more valuable it is. The most important data can vary e.g. users, revenue, conversions. Be careful to avoid interest in vanity metrics. Your data is like the instrumentation in a plane. It monitors your position, lets you know what is going on and therefore when a correction is needed. However, it doesn't explain why. That's where consistent split or A/B tests can help. Look for ideas for improvement with the highest impact. The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. Rank them in terms of impact, confidence and effect and then test them carefully. Overall be willing to test, as Sam Walton said - 'ready, fire, aim'.
5) Accept marginal gains
Most growth is driven by consistent, thoughtful and marginal improvements which compound over time. When you find one good channel keep using it. Think marketing tests like a game of battleships. Get closer and closer and then don't stop until the channel is sunk. Then test new channels when you see one running out of steam. Small principles like Robert Cialdini's principles of persuasion can create marginal gains. For example, reciprocity, consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity. Usually, three engagements are required to bring a customer to purchase so consistency and long-term thinking is essential.
5) Ensure retention
Often when growth stalls it's because companies have lost touch with their existing customers. Therefore, maintain strong relationships and continue to demonstrate your use. You need to appear credible, relevant and usable at all times. It's much more expensive to find a new customer than to keep an existing one so never provide the opportunity to a competitor. Be consistently remarkable. Increasing customisation, providing extraordinary performance and rewarding existing customers are effective ways to demonstrate your loyalty. It sounds simple but the best way to avoid losing customers is simply to listen to them and solve their problems.
6) Create a referral loop
It's important to build the product for a user, not for inherent virality. However, it can help to have thought about marketing during product development and engineer aspects of the product to be talked about. Word of mouth is likely to be your most important driver of growth early on so think of it first rather than last. All customers are 'acquired' in one way or another, so building marketing into your product can be an efficient use of resources. To combine product and marketing it's necessary to combine the efforts of different departments. Therefore information needs to be shared across departments to ensure effective decision making and development. So break down internal silos as much as possible. Ideally, it's the remarkability of the product, not the marketing, which drives use.
