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1/ The 3 Real Marketing Strategies that I Know Actually Work. A thread. 
2/ The prerequisite for any company to have successful marketing is that they must define and own a category.
3/ Competing with established brands in an established product category never works and will drive up your customer acquisition cost (CAC) to an unsustainable level.
4/ The best way to do this is to pick some segment or trend that is small (so it’s not competitive) and growing quickly. You want it to be something with natural momentum where you can ride the tailwinds.
5/ Salesforce did this with “the cloud.” All Salesforce’s marketing materials focused on the advantages of adopting the cloud and only briefly mentioned their software.
6/ If Salesforce had marketed themselves as "CRM software," you would never have heard of them.
7/ Often this new category takes multiple trends and compresses them into a single term which you can own.
8/ Hubspot evangelized Inbound marketing which was really a basket of other growing marketing trends like PPC, SEO, and Email Automation.
9/ @RichardKoch8020 calls these business “star businesses” which is based on a framework developed by Boston Consulting Group.
10/ Part of what is unique about internet is the new brand positioning enabled by the long tail. You will never compete with Kleenex for owning the tissue category, but you can compete in the niches - tissues for parents who hate added chemicals.
11/ As a rule of thumb: the category you start with should always feel uncomfortably small. Whawt is your minimum viable market?
12/ Once you have a new category, you have to take prospects through a Hero’s Journey.
13/ The Hero’s Journey was a concept that Joseph Campbell came up with and was made famous by George Lucas and Star Wars.
14/ It is a universal structure which humans can’t help but like. In fact, the best way to think of the hero’s journey may be as a virus - done well, it self-replicates in the mind of your target market, grafting itself onto primordial structures.
15/ In the Hero’s Journey, your company is the mentor or helper (Obi Wan Kenobi/Yoda), the prospect is the hero (Luke Skywalker), and your product facilitates transformation (Yoda's training helps luke to "bring balance to the Force")
16/ The Hero’s Journey is fractal within an organization. The organization should have a grand 25-year vision and then the vision should get more granular on a division and product line basis. At the product level, it should be tightly coupled with an acute pain point.
17/ Take @Stripe. Their mission is to “increase the GDP of the internet” which is grand and inspiring, akin to “bringing balance to the Force." Strip is Obi Wan, helping your company (Luke) on the grand quest.
18/ @Stripe’s Atlas product is "The best way to start an internet business” and the marketing focuses on an acute pain point - how much it sucks to fill out paperwork and navigate a bureaucracy.
19/ This combination allows Stripe to speak to specific pain points that prospects are feeling right now (“paperwork sucks”) and connect it to something that gives them a sense of purpose and grand vision (“I am helping increase the GDP of the internet”)
20/ Once you have brand positioning that resonates, what matters most is marketing stamina. If you have a winning marketing message and campaign, you don’t stop when you get bored of it, you stop when your CAC is no longer profitable.
21/ De Beers came up with the slogan "A Diamond is Forever” in 1948 and they are still beating that drum because it is still working.
22/ It reduces the resale of diamonds which constricts supply to newly mined diamonds for which De Beers owns the supply chain and thus pricing power.
23/ They have a slot machine which they can put $1 and take $2 out, they should never stop putting dollars into that slot machine because they “get bored."
24/ TL;DR:
1. You must own your category. If you don’t, you must create a new category.
2. Your products and services constitute a hero’s journey - You are Obi Wan, your prospect is Luke
3. You must have marketing stamina - never give up a campaign that is profitable.
1. You must own your category. If you don’t, you must create a new category.
2. Your products and services constitute a hero’s journey - You are Obi Wan, your prospect is Luke
3. You must have marketing stamina - never give up a campaign that is profitable.
25/ This tweetstorm now available in article form! - taylorpearson.me/3-laws/
Read it while it's hot off the presses!
Read it while it's hot off the presses!
