Intercom on marketing

Write code and talk to users on any early stage startup. Find time to prioritise even lower tasks: they build your business.

Depending on the industry, customer type and addressable market at your disposal pick the right marketing tactic. Otherwise, it can leave you dead before you’ve even started.

At a fundamental level, marketing is about reaching people; start by understanding the behaviours of the people you’re trying to reach, and then choose a particular marketing tactic based on those exhibited behaviours.

If people respond with “Piss off. Don’t ever contact me again”, this tells you that you need to refine your message.

Getting significant attention among the target audience will not pay the bills; do enough to capture some of the early adopters.

Constantly be working on marketing tactics. No matter how successful your early tactics are, you cannot rely on them forever, eventually you need to reach a fatter part of the market.

No matter how good your product is, if you can’t tell a cohesive, compelling story about it, you’re going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when you actually do take it to market.

Start with what the company wants to sell, and then tell people why they need it.

People don’t discover and buy a product just because of its features. Start your story with “Why” and discover goods for them.

Create the end-to-end story to capture attention and motivate action, before you build anything.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

Have a crystal clear idea of what your company stands for to tell a compelling story about your product.

Marketing is not about a company’s mission but understanding why a customer would care about that mission, translating that understanding into a story, and ultimately make a purchase.

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

People don’t care about you but about themselves and their problems. A good story is a lot like the strings on a piano: When it hits something of the same frequency, it resonates and your story sticks.

Decide who your target customers are, what problems you can solve for them in a way better than anyone else can.

Once you’ve sold, claim about how effective your product will be in solving their problem to accelerate decision making.

Features can often connect the dots and put a story into a greater context, help to stand apart from the competition. Show customers what results they achieved with your product.

What’s most compelling to a buyer isn’t how they can measure customer satisfaction, but rather how they can take specific actions based on that insight.

Product and marketing are two sides of the same coin but aren’t two antithetical forces. Get your marketing and product teams in sync, and you’ll have created an advantage that nobody else can copy.