How to not hire a marketing lizard🦎 and still wing it!

I founded my first tech startup 130 years ago. That’s in entrepreneur-years, of course, which we all know are measured by amount of pivots and toilet sessions spent reading Quora discussions. Not to mention lost “free time” doing whatever it is others are doing in their Modern Family-esq lives 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧.

What I’ve learned however will save you at least a decade of time. I’ll walk you through two fundamentals of creating a business: 1) how to differentiate your product and 2) understanding your customers. Or as the big boys put it; marketing. Under the hood, however, it’s only about three things; knowing your products, knowing your customers and knowing how to connect the two in an inspiring way 🙌. The rest comes naturally.

I’ll lay out the land for you through my own mistakes, with concrete steps and (best of all) Google Docs templates so you can get started while still sitting on the toilet. I’ll give you the bare🐻essentials! No magic, no jargon, no fluff – just stuff.

Through it all you’ll learn to walk by taking the following steps:

1. Define your key values
2. Know your customers and #win🏆
3. Really know your customers
4. Be bigger than yourself
5. Pick your strategy and stick to it
6. How to run your marketing programs🏃

I’ll spare you from all the MBA bulls**t and jump right into concrete steps. In this post we’ll concentrate on the two first steps – the fundamentals of doing anything — the stuff you should have done before starting the company but didn’t. In later posts we’ll dive into the next ones.

Consider this the secret source code to your customers, market domination and everything.

Step 1: Define your key values

I started my first company at the age of 23, making websites for small companies. My business, however, was exactly the same as that of a thousand guys at the same time; we made websites for SMEs. There were probably more website companies in my city than there were any other kinds of companies during the .com. It was a bad idea. Period 💩. I hadn’t selected a niche or defined myself – I had no key values to offer.

A company without a key value proposition is like a broken pencil… pointless!

You’d be surprised how many companies get started with no clearly defined key values. As founders you always have a vision, but has your product been clearly defined?

This is where Key Value Propositions come in. Key Value Propositions are a template I’ve put together based on business canvases and value definition papers. I’ve found the Russian-doll structure, where each consecutive step builds on the previous, works perfectly for a Dilbert-brain such as mine!

The Key Value Proposition starts from one step earlier than what the product centric engineers inside of us would like to start; the customers point of view. And finally it demands for customer testimonials or proof on how your product solves the customer’s problems. But most importantly, it teaches you about your product or service. It nails down your Key Value Proposition.

👉 Key Value Proposition template in Google Docs.

After Step 1, you’ll have a much clearer picture of your product. Next, let’s tackle the second part of the formula for success: your customers.

Step 2: Know your customer and #win🏆

In my second startup, we started by making online booking systems for tennis courts. During the time, this was a new idea – there were tons of sports halls around the world and nobody dominated the booking market. But we hit a wall already before going global; we couldn’t get in front of the decision maker – or to be honest, we didn’t know who they were. Many of them were run by committees and it confused the hell out of us. They were bad hombres. Complete failure. Sad🌮! We used various strategies to try to meet with different people on the mini-corporate ladder, but ended up wasting a year of R&D and sales time.

So we pivoted🙌. We turned into yoga and pilates bookings. Yoga studios usually had one decision maker and the decision maker was a yoga instructor themselves. Instant success! We were able to define the typical buyer; Harriet. Harriets were usually women in their thirties, their passion was primarily yoga and secondarily money. Their calendars were always booked and they didn’t have time to take care of billing or marketing or anything else. So they were struggling in a chicken-egg world of needing more business but having no time to do anything for it.

This became our secret sauce. We knew their pain points and were able to target that in website SEO. We knew their minds and were able to build the system so that they could get started in seconds and wouldn’t need to invest hours into seeing our benefits. And we hired a part-time yoga instructor to take them through the system introduction. And our new customers loved it. We grew from a $20k turnover company into a $200k turnover business in less than 12 months and continued climbing from there. Hockey sticks for everyone!💰 Only because we went from a fuzzy customer to one we understood.

The Harriets affected our R&D, marketing, sales and support — much more than general customer feedback ever could. It made us prioritize the right things. Later on we had more and more stereotypical personas as we grew as a business. And we knew the personas by first name which was very powerful💪.

Ultimately, no matter what marketing budget or sales channels you have, the one that knows the customer the best, wins.

A Buyer Persona description will let you define your stereotypical customer, already before you get started. It starts from the person’s demographics and goes on to their fears, values and everything that makes them tick. You’ll refine these along the way as you get under your customers skin.

👉 Buyer Persona template in Google Docs.

You’ll now have a clear view of your customers and your product – the next steps are to connect these with each other. Value Cards and Personas are like the foundations of your house – if they aren’t in shape, you won’t be able to build on top of them.

Step N: n+1

Next, you’ll need to connect your products to your customers in an inspiring way 🙌.

To do this you’ll need to understand your customer’s evaluation process, ie. the customer journey. After that we’ll look at how you can ride on the wave of something larger than your product, i.e. mega trends. And finally we’ll pick your marketing strategy and see how to do it operationally as marketing programs.

The general 6-step framework is the same for both small garage startups and large airfield-as-a-campus corporations.

But remember; this is the foundation – you can’t build a Marketing funnel, an Account Based Marketing strategy, a Social Media plan, an ad-words strategy, a content calendar or anything else unless you know the fundamentals. So take your time, a couple of hours should do, and do it well.

I’ll touch the following teaching steps of the framework in more depth in the next blogposts. Heart this post to be notified when it’s out, or follow me on Twitter.

About the Author

Fredrik Rönnlund is the founder of DigitalBooker and the Marketing Lizard at Vaadin. Follow him on Twitter, LinkedIn or Medium.