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?

We didn’t have a clear picture of the target customer. Sure, we had an audience in mind, but knew we had to get more specific to determine our marketing channel.

First, building a business on assumptions is sheer stupidity. And second, our assumptions weren’t specific enough.

we needed to identify a place of opportunity — an opportunity for us to listen, learn, and give value.

In order for the 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.

The idea behind content marketing is giving value, ideally for free. That’s what we wanted to do with KISSmetrics. Our tool was designed to provide actionable metrics. Our marketing, then, needed to be valuable for marketers.

If you want your business to be scalable, your marketing has to be scalable, too. In fact, marketing scalability should be a primary consideration when considering business scalability as a whole.

It was interactive
It was focused on content
It was free to join and use
It was scalable, and growing at a rapid pace

It was Twitter.

Twitter in 2008 was pretty limited. But something was becoming popular: hashtags. Hashtags were less than a year old by the time we started using Twitter.

#WeFollow was one of the earliest hashtags to gain popularity. We discovered that by using this hashtag, we could easily gain new followers who were marketers.

Sharing other marketers’ content was the perfect way to spread goodwill, promote great content, and build our own Twitter audience. We began tweeting useful marketing and analytics content, and tagging each tweet with #measure.

Our Twitter audience grew gradually. Then, it grew rapidly. Eventually, our own site was booming with referral traffic from Twitter.

1. Identify underused opportunities in the selected platform.

Today, the hashtag strategy alone wouldn’t work to attract customers.

you need to identify emergent trends within those tactics to engage with your target audience.

Airbnb. They knew that their target audience was searching on Craigslist, so they hacked Craigslist to promote their listings.

Snapchat is another example. They identified their target audience in the high school demographic. They located popular students in high schools, gave them the app, and incentivized the cool kids to share the app with others.

I recommend finding one method that works, and focusing on a single channel at a time.

3.  Focus only on the users that matter.

The only followers that matter are those who want to engage with you. Anyone else is a waste of your time.

4.  Dish out massive doses of value. Expect nothing in return.

Identify your target customer by understanding: 1) what your product does, 2) what problem it solves, and 3) who wants this problem solved.

To find out where your target audience hangs out: 1) create a master list of potential places, 2) establish criteria for what a solid marketing channel is, and 3) vet your list according to those criteria.

To engage with your customer: 1) identify your method of engagement, 2) expand as far as this method allows, 3) confine your reach only to the target audience, and 4) aim to deliver a high amount of value.