Learn the secret behind User Acquisition
One of the few companies in the 1970s with a distinctive industrial design style was Sony. Apple’s first office, after it moved out of the Jobs’ family garage, was in a small building it shared with a Sony sales office, and Jobs would drop by to study the marketing material. “He would come in looking scruffy and fondle the product brochures and point out design features,” said Dan’l Lewin, who worked there. “Every now and then, he would ask, ‘Can I take this brochure?’”
In January of 1977, that’s a date which matters. When Apple first incorporated, investor and advisor Mike Markkula laid down a three part marketing strategy that has worked extremely well for them to this very day:
- Empathy — We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.
- Focus — In order to do a good job of those things we decide to do we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.
- Impute — People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.
But what is the key thing behind user acquisition. Yes, product is important and marketing is important too. What is common thing between fast growing startups? Spotify, Uber, Apple even mid-sized startups like Sendwithus?
PARTNERSHIP
Let’s start with a normal example. Sendwithus is helping businesses send and edit mail templates. About one year ago their question was “how we can grow our startup?” after starting partnering with companies like; Mailchimp, Dyn, Mailgun, Mandrill, Sengrid and Stripe they saw huge impact on their business.
Spotify also great example for that. They integrated their app with the Facebook Newsfeed making it the main provider of music on FB. Within 2 weeks the Spotify saw the number of users increase from 3.4 million to 5.3 million.
Apple is doing well at partnership. Apple’s marketing budget is billion dollar but they don’t spent billion dollar for advertising but their partners do. Important thing is here the carriers are paying for the ads, but Apple is controlling the message. Apple sets a series of restrictions on what those advertisements can look like.
Building partnership with other companies is the most effective way to gain customer + brand awareness and trust in a short time.
