The 3-Step Startup Marketing Framework We Created to Grow KISSmetrics

The 3-Step Startup Marketing Framework We Created to Grow KISSmetrics

Signal. The investing network for Founders, VCs, Scouts, and Angels. When you're in the earliest stages of your business, you need to answer these three big questions about marketing: How do you identify your target audience? Where can you find them? How do you engage them? These questions are crucial because without a clear understanding of your target audience, your marketing efforts will be aimless and ineffective.

At KISSmetrics, we faced a similar challenge. We had a general audience in mind, but we knew we had to get more specific in order to determine our marketing channel. Building a business on assumptions is sheer stupidity, and our assumptions weren't specific enough. We needed to identify an opportunity to listen, learn, and give value.

One of the key aspects of successful marketing is providing value, ideally for free. That's exactly what we wanted to do with KISSmetrics. Our tool was designed to provide actionable metrics, so our marketing had to be valuable for marketers. In order for our platform to be successful, there needed to be give and take. We needed to engage with potential customers, and they needed to be able to engage with us.

That's when we turned to Twitter. Twitter in 2008 was still relatively limited, but something was becoming popular: hashtags. Hashtags were less than a year old when we started using Twitter, and we saw an opportunity to leverage them to grow our audience. By using hashtags like WeFollow and measure, we were able to easily gain new followers who were marketers. We also shared other marketers' content to spread goodwill and promote great content. This strategy worked wonders for us, and our Twitter audience grew rapidly. Eventually, our own site was booming with referral traffic from Twitter.

The lesson here is to identify underused opportunities in the selected platform. The hashtag strategy alone wouldn't work now, but you need to identify emergent trends within those tactics to engage with your target audience. Take Airbnb as an example. They knew their target audience was searching on Craigslist, so they hacked Craigslist to promote their listings. Snapchat is another great example. They identified their target audience in the high school demographic and incentivized popular students to share the app with others.

When it comes to marketing, it's important to focus on the users that matter. The only followers that truly matter are those who want to engage with you. Anyone else is a waste of your time. Instead, focus on delivering massive doses of value. Expect nothing in return. This will help you build goodwill and establish yourself as an authority in your industry.

To effectively identify your target customer, you need to understand what your product does, what problem it solves, and who wants this problem solved. This will help you narrow down your target audience and create targeted marketing campaigns.

Finding out where your target audience hangs out is the next step. Create a master list of potential places where your audience might be, then establish criteria for what a solid marketing channel looks like. Vet your list according to those criteria to determine the best platforms to focus on.

Finally, when engaging with your customers, identify your method of engagement, expand as far as this method allows, and confine your reach only to the target audience. By doing this, you can ensure that you're delivering value to the right people and not wasting time and resources on those who aren't interested.

In conclusion, the 3-step startup marketing framework we created at KISSmetrics helped us grow our business and establish ourselves as a leader in the industry. By identifying underused opportunities, focusing on the users that matter, and delivering massive value, you can take your startup marketing to the next level. Remember, marketing scalability should always be a primary consideration when considering business scalability. So, take action today and start implementing these strategies to grow your own startup.