Marketing is creating an impression in some people's minds through clear statements. It starts with positioning, continues with messaging, and ends up shaping the sales narrative, social sharing, and so on. These descriptions are a bit vague, and marketers love to use fancy words to make things sound cool and complicated, just like engineers do. The most critical aspect is to explain the concepts as concisely and clearly as possible. I'm trying to do this for marketing in this post.
Beyond the cool definitions, marketing consists of two key elements: communication & distribution. One is about how you message what you want to tell, and the other encompasses how you distribute your messages. Thus, marketing is not a standalone idea/department/work field; it's somewhat fluid, including responsibility areas like product and sales. It requires a founder-level mindset to surf on the waves - see how I can sound like a cool marketer.
I'm writing this blog to explain how I see marketing as a marketer who has worked with several types of founders. Let's start with the first chunk of the marketing tree: communication.
Communication
Basically, communication starts with what you have, what you plan to have, and who this is for. It's entirely possible to draw a marketing plan by answering these questions. We can make these questions deeper and more complicated, but again, this is a concise post.
What you have is about your product, service, platform, or what you'd like to market. Let's call it a product since even services and platforms are products in a way. What's your product for? Is it solving a problem? Or a better way to ask: What powers does it give people to make something better?
You should know:
- What your product is
- What type of people your product is improving conditions for
- What your product improves for them
- How they describe the problem you're solving
The only thing that should be discussed is how your target audience talks about the problems you're solving or the conditions you're improving. This consists of understanding your audience.
If you'd asked me what the most problematic audience definitions to kickstart marketing are, I'd list:
- My audience is everyone
- All people living in the USA
- All small business owners
Remember, you're trying to define your early users and customers. Your early adopters often have different motivations than mainstream customers. No need to overthink it, just find the guys that you can define who they are and where they're hanging out.
Distribution
Distribution is one of the challenging parts of marketing. Presumably, the product details and audience settings are parts everyone has some ideas about, but distribution plays a crucial role in seeing if your product/audience definitions are valid or not.
Define your audience -> be visible to them -> get feedback -> iterate
Starting from your audience leverages your distribution strategy. The first question is: how do they describe the areas that you exist to improve for them? Speaking their language and understanding how they describe your product is the shortest way to grow the company. Specific words and specific terms are crucial.
Before sharing something about your product, I strongly recommend becoming a native member of the communities where your audience hangs out. If your product is an overall to-do app like everyone else is trying to build, be one of the most active people in productivity communities. I mean being a community member in these communities, instead of asking weird questions about the areas where your product is the best.
The best promotion comes from a native community member that everyone can learn something from. Being visible should not be measured by numbers - you can't easily measure influence. So marketing without CTAs is the best long-term marketing tactic. I'll be covering this in upcoming posts.
Every industry, community, and customer segment has linguistic patterns that signal belonging. When you notice language patterns your competitors miss, you've found gold. These phrases aren't just about "speaking their language" - they often reveal deeply held beliefs, values, and pain points that marketing surveys will never uncover.
After adding their lexicon into your vocabulary, focus on articulation. The answer to this question makes things super clear: How would my audience describe my product to their best friends? Polish the answer and put it at the beginning of your homepage.
Not all channels are equal. In fact, for most startups, one distribution channel will likely outperform all others combined for your specific product. Your job is to systematically test different channels until you find the one with disproportionate returns. Once you find it, double down until it stops working or saturates. A mediocre product with excellent distribution will beat an excellent product with mediocre distribution every time.
The early authentic relationships you build won't scale, and that's exactly the point. Do things by hand that don't scale first, then systematize only after you've learned what works. Join the communities, answer questions personally, follow up individually. This seems inefficient, but it creates the foundation for word-of-mouth growth that no ad budget can buy. Once you understand exactly what resonates, then you can think about automation and scale.
The single metric focus
All love numbers, especially for numbers related to the margin. But most marketing metrics are just noise for early-stage products. One metric that actually matters for your specific stage would be great to grow the companies without dealing with unneccassary actions. If you're pre-product-market fit, this might be weekly retention If you're scaling, it might be customer acquisition cost. Whatever it is, rally your entire team around this number. When engineers and marketers track the same metric, they suddenly start speaking the same language. See how cool it is to talk these terms.