Lessons from 15 years of marketing & design experience

The focus of this will be for new products or startups because that is where most of my experience comes from and that seems to be the stage most people here are in.

Marketing can be an overwhelming beast, and there is a glut of information out there that will send you down the rabbit hole on granular marketing tactics that inevitably don't lead to revenue generation or user growth. For startups you must simplify as much as possible and remember that you know your product best - what works for others is not a turnkey solution for everyone. Trust your instincts and operate within the boundaries of your offering. For example, if you have a B2B product that is targeted at enterprise users, learning all about Instagram advertising is likely going to net you very little.

Assuming you have a working product and you've launched it, the three things you need to be most concerned about in order of importance are:

1. Product Market Fit - Do you have a product that can be adopted and validated?

2. Language Market Fit - Is the way you speak about your product resonating with potential customers, and does it align with the way that they speak about the solution you are providing?

3. Channel Market Fit - Are the channels you are using effective at generating the volume and type of traffic you need to convert?

Product market fit is not the same as solution/problem fit. You may be solving a problem, but is there a market of people who want to buy, and is there enough differentiation in your offering to generate a customer base over another company solving the same problem? As your product gets adopted by users and you start to get real feedback and validation you will begin to see how you fit into the landscape, and you may require a pivot or two. Don't be afraid to let go of an idea if your audience is telling you something different - many products have failed because of an inability to react to and incorporate feedback specifically when it falls out of line of the founder's vision.

Once product market fit has been established I use a lot of experimentation in order to drill down on language market fit and channel market fit. That allows me to put more wood behind less arrows. The goal is to discover the optimal combination of marketing channels and messaging because managing too many marketing activities or too broad of a message will dilute your efforts. If you can master one channel with the right message that is a big win.

Make a spreadsheet of experiments that you can run on your language fit and your channel fit. Score them according to their perceived impact, and ease of implementation and then start running them. By scoring them you'll be able to prioritize which experiments get run on your sprint cadence given capacity and timelines.

I've been asked about A/B testing and analytics as it relates to GDPR and CCPA so I'll address that here. You don't necessarily need to use A/B testing or analytics on your site to test your language fit. If you have budget and want to A/B test ads on Google or in social channels that is a relatively cheap way of honing in on messaging that resonates. However, you can also build a direct relationship with your audience through a multitude of platforms that allow you to to garner feedback in real time. This also gives you the benefit of creating a community around your idea or business and facilitates discussion that can not only elevate your brand, but become a feature that is a selling point. At my current gig we are discussing using discord as our support channel and allowing anyone from the community to chime in. This gives us and our community more flexibility in the ways that we can interact and help each other. Many companies have community forums and boards, but discord takes it to another level.

When you are building web properties, whether they are landing pages or your company website here is what I try to focus on:

1. Tell me why I am here - Focus on the end-user and tell them in big bold letters why they have arrived here and what the impact of using your product is. Don't tell me what it does, or how it works. We can get to that once we've established that this is beneficial to me. If you think about effective marketing campaigns of the last few decades (Apple, Old Spice, Nike etc.) they rarely refer to the product, they are either trying to elicit the feeling you get when using it, or trying to tell you why it is beneficial to you. You may think that because they are big brands that this seems far away or less achievable for your startup, but what they are tapping into psychologically can be applied to your product and audience on the scale that is appropriate to you.

2. Invite me on a journey - Start with the biggest benefit and work down from why to how, giving me a way to progress through my understanding of why I need it and how it accomplishes that.

3. Information hierarchy - related to point 2 but in a broader sense. This is an issue I see time and time again on startup websites. Visual aesthetics are secondary to information aesthetics. You can have an ugly website that still tells me exactly what I need to know in order of importance. If you give me a way to easily consume the most important points AND you have a tight visual narrative you are doing something right.

4. Give me a single action to take - whether it's product emails or landing pages, the most effective way to convert people is to give them less options, not more. When sending product emails have a single CTA or link. On landing pages have a single action to take. Giving people secondary options outside your main goal is giving them a way to move around conversion and giving you a harder equation to solve in terms of why they aren't converting. If you remove the options and you still aren't converting, revisit your language market fit and see if you can't fine tune what you're pitching. When working with a startup I will often just create a single page website that has a single CTA. We don't expand the number of pages until we can start converting off the single page explanation.

5. If you can't explain what you do in a sentence you aren't going to be able to explain it in 100 - Here is an easy way to refine you messaging. Set a timer for one minute and give your elevator pitch. When you're done, start again but this time give yourself thirty seconds. Now move to 10, and then 5. The idea is to cut out the fat and learn to be concise. If you can explain what you do to someone who isn't in your field in less than ten seconds, and most importantly they understand, then you're onto something.

Remember, it starts with a great product. Marketing is infinitely easier when you have a compelling product that tells a compelling story. If you haven't achieved product market fit, then no marketing strategy is going to magically turn into revenue opportunities. I can't stress this enough. Everything else is experimentation. As you get into a rhythm you can up the tempo of experimentation. There are loads of good resources out there for marketing that can help you with your tactics, but I feel it's best to let them live inside the context of what you're trying to achieve from a product, language, and channel fit standpoint.

Happy Hacking!