Welcome to issue 1!
To kick off Mehdeeka, I reached out to the Sydney Startups Facebook group to ask what they most needed to know when it came to tech marketing. My hope for future issues is to focus on one topic per week rather than this scattering of topics, so send through your questions via the leave a comment button!
Not into any of these questions? Keep scrolling to see some marketing inspo, and a preview of next week.
Starting from the simplest question and working up to the hardest;
Which social platforms are worth the effort to market on?
Again, this really depends on your business. The first thing I’ll note is that the big ones - Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter - are no longer channels you can grow organically. These are pay to play platforms, however you’re still going to need to maintain some sort of presence on them.
Social platforms are much easier to grow if you have an active face of the brand - for startups this means your founder’s LinkedIn and Twitter, and actively posting in Facebook groups.
I cannot recommend highly enough having a strategy for your founder’s social profiles as much as (or more than) you do for your company page. Individual profiles are favoured by almost all platforms, have better engagement, and people (i.e. potential customers!) prefer following a person over a corporation.
The Pyn co-founders have been doing a great job of promoting their very new startup through their personal profiles.
What’s the difference between an MQL and an SQL?
An MQL is a ‘marketing qualified lead’. It is a lead that has given you enough information (contact details, shown intent to buy, interacted with your content, or whatever prerequisites you have determined marks them as ‘qualified’) in order for you to pass them on to your sales team.
If your sales team uses SDRs (Sales Development Representative), then you will use SQL (sales qualified lead) to signify that the lead has been qualified by an SDR and is ready for a full product demo.
If you do not use SDRs, you are unlikely to use SQL.
Which email marketing platform do I recommend?
When you’re the only person looking after marketing, I can’t stress enough how your biggest priority is figuring out where best to spend your time and resources. Email marketing is important, but learning complex, and tbh frustrating, corporate softwares should be the lowest thing on your to-do list.
Assuming you have a lack of design resources, a lack of time, and probably a lack of email software experience, I would recommend autopilot 100% of the time.
How do I get my first X number of customers?
This is really hard to answer without an idea of the business, but I can give a few examples. The way we got our first customers in my current role was to run an alpha program which gave the participants a $0 12 month contract on our premium tier, in exchange for permission to use their logo, a video case study, and that they would become partners with one of our products (a members only discount).
Their logo, case studies, and partnership enabled us to attract other customers. ‘Social proof’, AKA seeing someone else do it first and then feeling empowered to also do it, is really powerful. It’s why you should be rushing to do as many case studies as early as possible. When you’re on a call with a customer and they say something nice about your product, always ask “do you mind if I quote you on that?”
Want more detailed answers or have a follow up question?
Jordy van den Nieuwendijk: Horse Racing for The Sunday Times Magazine found via It’s Nice That
Cool stuff
For issue 1, I’m just going to share my absolute favourite places on the internet to go for marketing help and inspiration.
Really Good Emails - exactly what it says, a compendium of really good emails
It’s Nice That - design (both graphic and fine art) that’ll inspire you
Dribbble - designer’s portfolios and profiles
Dense Discovery - a tech and design weekly newsletter, always highlighting new productivity apps too
Dissect - a podcast that dissects albums, I really recommend the season on Kanye West
Advice column
I’d really like to develop a career advice column in this segment of the newsletter going forward, but since I haven’t had anyone ask for career advice yet, I thought I’d share 3 articles I wrote about marketing:
Coming up next week
Next week I’ll be tackling just one question that was sent in by Sydney angel investor Rayn Ong - how do marketing strategies change for different price points, from $10 to $100,000+