Origins #7 — Thoughts On Marketing Strategy
Educating ourselves on the current marketing landscape and how to approach our marketing and brand building
After some weeks of product development, it was time for us to start thinking about how we want to approach our marketing and brand building strategy. Given the couple of years of programming experience we have, we’ve been closely involved with the marketing team of the companies we work/worked at. We also had some marketing experience previous to starting to code. Marin was a full time marketer at Fox International Channels, and I co-founded a small junk cleaning business, back in my 2nd year of university. Having said that, we needed to brush up on that mindset and get back into it.
What followed was our free time, mornings, evenings, weekends, completely invested in the current social state of the union. Marin was quite in touch with it (if you ask him, he would humbly mention that he was one of the first people to join Twitter and post a video on YouTube), I was the exact opposite, no Twitter or Instagram account, about 3 minutes spent on Facebook and was only using the Facebook messenger app.
So we started to play around with SnapChat and Instagram, as well as invest time in learning about Facebook Ads. Good time to give a shout out to Gary Vaynerchuk ❤, for providing a lot of valuable marketing content on a daily basis, which served as an introduction into current trends of the market, as well as strategy.
It quickly became clear that, if we wanted to lay the foundations of a potentially big business, we needed to look at it as a long-term value creation project, instead of a short term transactional one. We needed to approach this as a brand building, instead of a marketing/sales exercise.
Few priorities emerged:
1. Create a high quality product (value creation)
2. Engagement with our audience. Depth instead of width. (brand building)
3. Volume of content creation. Ideally a balance between consistency, and creative quality.
Having an exceptional product would give us the right to start approaching people that can benefit from it. What we do after that initial contact and the relationships we manage to build on top of that, will be the variable to our success. Being small would play to our advantage of being able to spend more time with people that are interested in what we are doing.
We also think that documenting the journey of starting and running a company in quite a transparent way, would be interesting and valuable, both for us and people that follow us. Imagine if Phil Knight consistently documented the Nike journey, from the first pair of handmade shoes. It would be fascinating to follow, as well as gather insights and inspiration.
