2) Social hoooks - Your product/service must be social. It must encourage your users to invite others to try it out. Hooks into Facebook and Twitter are obvious. Email invites are another obvious feature. The product should allow people to express themselves in it. Profiles, personalization, etc will allow the users to feel ownership of the product and tell others about it. Foursquare's adoption of a game dynamic when it launched is a particularly clever implementation of a social hook. Games are the most social of all things on the web.
Ugh. Maybe it's just me, but I can't stand this. Whatever happened to just being useful? If I like your product, I'm fully capable of sharing it myself. You see so many pages now that look like they were designed to maximize the possibility that you will accidentally like them on facebook.
There's nothing wrong with a "share this post/page/app/etc" panel but, unless your core functionality is based on social interactions, please keep it reasonable.
Also, not everything needs to be customizable. I don't know who all these people are that supposedly love making accounts and filling out profiles for every little thing they want to try on the internet - I think it's a huge pain. When I studied UX it was pretty well agreed upon that you shouldn't force people to create an account until it was absolutely necessary, not the other way around.
Jeez, I'm way too young to be having these get off my lawn moments.
edit: I also have a problem with his opening sentiments, but it's more of a semantic issue.
I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra).
It's views like this that make people sneer when I say I'm doing marketing. So, thanks.
I believe marketing is how you capitalize on the thoughts and feelings of your audience. This is why you should take support very seriously - people spend sick money trying to find out what your customers (current and potential) are thinking - when they offer it to you for free, that's the biggest marketing opportunity you're likely to get, so treat it as such.
I find it a little bit scary that Fred Wilson might not be able to differentiate Marketing from Promotion.
He must be having an off day.
Every business needs to have vision for how its products and/or services relate to its customers and the wider marketplace. Marketing is fundamental to business.
However, I do agree that for many startups, costly promotional efforts probably wont offer enough return to justify the expense.
I find it a little bit scary that Fred Wilson might not be able to differentiate Marketing from Promotion
Glad to see I wasn't alone in having that thought.
Every business needs to have vision for how its products and/or services relate to its customers and the wider marketplace. Marketing is fundamental to business.
Exactly. If you aren't "marketing," you basically don't have a business. Marketing is just identifying a need, finding a solution to that need, and connecting them. To borrow from Wikipedia[1]:
Marketing is the process of performing market research, selling products and/or services to customers and promoting them via advertising to further enhance sales. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves.
Marketing is used to identify the customer, to satisfy the customer, and to keep the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, it can be concluded that marketing management is one of the major components of business management. Marketing evolved to meet the stasis in developing new markets caused by mature markets and overcapacities in the last 2-3 centuries. The adoption of marketing strategies requires businesses to shift their focus from production to the perceived needs and wants of their customers as the means of staying profitable
My favorite style of marketing is when your users market your app for you. NOT in the way you might think (not through referral programs, emailing friends, etc.) rather that they're encouraged to share their profile, page, website, etc., because it will benefit them directly. In turn it benefits you, but it starts with benefiting them.
What's an example? KickStarter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, etc., are all examples of this. Another is Carbonmade. Artists must share their portfolio (e.g. http://colerise.carbonmade.com/) with their friends, recruiters, etc., to get benefit from it and in turn those friends (usually other artists) see the Carbonmade link at the bottom of the portfolio, click it, and can then sign up for their own. It sets off a viral chain.
Side note: We're seeing nearly as many referrals from Facebook as we are from Google, because people are sharing their portfolios on Facebook as their homepage. Screenshot: http://cl.ly/0a372w1T3y3G1s2U3337 And look at StumbleUpon's comeback!
This is only effective for apps where the content the user puts into the app is put in with the intent of sharing it in the first place (i.e. this isn't a marketing technique, so much as an app-design technique.) You can't just pick a random app in a different vertical (say, Gmail) and tack viral own-data sharing onto it.
The baked-in vs. bolt-on social issue has been explored by Jason Cohen, and I agree with him that baked-in virality is more effective than bolt-on virality. However, consider also that Dropbox's referral program is a bolt-on social feature.
I and someone in my family invested a lot of time trying to be a customer of one of Fred's portfolio sites, Etsy. One of their problems is definitely effective marketing and sane branding. The guy in charge of their marketing, Matt Stinchomb, had no experience in the field other than promoting an indie band, so that's how he promoted Etsy. Their activities since then leave a lot to be desired. I hear so many people who have heard of Regretsy, a site created to mock Etsy, and not Etsy itself. It doesn't make me feel proud to have a shop.
It seems like Fred's plans here are 'one size fits all' without recognizing that not all web ventures are the same. They've treated Etsy like it's some viral Facebook 'tag your chickens in VR' app, more than something that needs to be built into a household name.
I guess this only really applies to consumer web startups with some kind of viral aspect. What if your marketing to businesses in a certain field that makes it unlikely for you to get more than a trickle of word of mouth uptake and your app doesn't get any external exposure from the business.
That kind of thing closes the door on a lot of the methods mentioned, depending on your field to you might need a decent budget just to get a look in on industry events.
Interested to hear others with more B2B based products and what they think about advertising early on.
I'm struggling to see how Twitter is of any use in finding customers.
On the other hand spending on Adwords links me directly to people who are looking for my products. For me it is consistent, reliable, directly measurable and profitable.
I've had luck converting people tweeting about the problem my product solves to beta users. I'm sure it depends on who your customers are and how likely they are to express themselves on Twitter and other social media.
Agreed. This post smacks of hubris too - it's fantastic that your social media investments have a viral loop built in, but good luck selling enterprise software without a customer acquisition cost. Maybe your enterprise software is so awesome that customers are beating down your door, but you still need salespeople to close.
That was Seth Godin's reaction, but I don't think it's that simple...
Consider the context:
1. Fred doesn't write much about marketing.
2. Fred solicits blog topics.
3. Marketing-oriented masses demand marketing post.
4. Fred obliges, with "I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks..."
5. Marketing-oriented masses revolt.
I busted out laughing when I read the start of his post given the background.
Of course marketing is important. However, Fred has surfaced a feeling shared by many non-marketing professionals: Better to back a solid product than to try to market one's way to success with a mediocre one. Yes, both help. Yes, balance is important. ... but I have to say that his answer to the demands for a marketing post were hilariously based in a truth beyond marketing-vs-advertising.
Interesting article, as usual. But a rule like "you shouldn't have a marketing budget" seems too one-size-fits-all. If you're building consumer apps, sure, it makes sense to rely on it being viral, but there's a whole universe of other stuff out there to build where it can be a lot harder to reach the customers.
And even if it is a viral consumer app, don't you want to be able to put the pedal down and accelerate growth at some point?
We launched at techcrunch, but it still cost money to get out there, get material ready for the demo, etc. Isn't that marketing (to investors, but still)? Seems like you're spending time/money on marketing even if it doesn't have a dedicated budget line item.
This post was the biggest surprise of my day. I like the sentiment of good enough products market themselves but it also reminds me too much of "build it and they will come." And we know how often that works out...
I am late to this conversation and Fred already posted a follow up but I wanted to just add that this is not Fred's normal voice. He is upset about something. When usually his posts are very open and constructive, this one was bitter.
Ugh. Maybe it's just me, but I can't stand this. Whatever happened to just being useful? If I like your product, I'm fully capable of sharing it myself. You see so many pages now that look like they were designed to maximize the possibility that you will accidentally like them on facebook.
There's nothing wrong with a "share this post/page/app/etc" panel but, unless your core functionality is based on social interactions, please keep it reasonable.
Also, not everything needs to be customizable. I don't know who all these people are that supposedly love making accounts and filling out profiles for every little thing they want to try on the internet - I think it's a huge pain. When I studied UX it was pretty well agreed upon that you shouldn't force people to create an account until it was absolutely necessary, not the other way around.
Jeez, I'm way too young to be having these get off my lawn moments.
edit: I also have a problem with his opening sentiments, but it's more of a semantic issue.
I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra).
It's views like this that make people sneer when I say I'm doing marketing. So, thanks.
I believe marketing is how you capitalize on the thoughts and feelings of your audience. This is why you should take support very seriously - people spend sick money trying to find out what your customers (current and potential) are thinking - when they offer it to you for free, that's the biggest marketing opportunity you're likely to get, so treat it as such.