Mini-tools - simple, standalone apps that showcase a company's core technology - are gaining traction as a marketing strategy. Examples include Copy.ai's cold email generator, Wix's QR code generator, and Canva's color palette generator, which provide free value while subtly promoting the main product. The key to success lies in making these tools independent, easy to use, and immediately valuable without requiring sign-ups.

A popular tactic currently is "Mini-Games Marketing," where brands use simple games to capture and retain user attention. Inspired by Toggl's "Startup Simulator," companies like LinkedIn, YouTube, and Netflix have adopted mini-games to increase interaction. These games work because they keep users on-site longer, foster brand loyalty (by making users feel understood), and have high viral potential, as players share scores and challenges. Mini-games also stand out by being a more memorable experience compared to traditional content.

A product showcase is an opportunity to share recent improvements, enhancements, and capabilities in your product – all bundled together into a cohesive narrative. This tactic is increasingly popular among software companies, as it enhances marketing efficiency, improves customer perception, and facilitates internal alignment. This post includes examples from Shopify, Canva, Hubspot, Workhuman, and VTEX.

Engineering as marketing consists of building tools that help generate awareness and acquire new users. This strategy enables brands to diversify from traditional marketing channels and solve more than one use case for your target audience. Engineering as marketing can take several formats, including interactive templates, calculators, and data sets. To do this well, first identify user needs from user interviews, keyword analysis, or support tickets. Build a simple tool that solves a single use case, then promote it across the appropriate channels.

Curated tactics 💡, trends 📈, and tools 🛠️ for cutting edge marketers

Founder marketing is a crucial no-budget strategy where founders share their expertise and updates on personal social media. Regular LinkedIn posts on product updates, company milestones, and industry trends can build brand awareness effectively. Creative ideas like "Stealth Demo Drops" and "Contrarian Hot Takes" make posts engaging. Active audience engagement is essential for success.

Thought leadership content on LinkedIn can be a cost-efficient way to grow your business. Warmly, an outreach tool, used the “build in public” tactic, leading to 8X growth in inbound demo requests. Air, a creative operations platform, created a physical book on creative ops and also leaned into influencer marketing. June.so, a product analytics platform, used product research and insights to generate organic engagement and signups.

Joseph Lee, the founder of Supademo, an AI-powered product demo tool, shares growth tactics starting with a 4-step SaaS validation framework. The framework involves problem identification, focus definition, hypothesis development, and solution delivery. Supademo's initial growth relied on unscalable tactics, such as manual outreach and leveraging networks. Viral loops, accounting for 70% of Supademo's acquisition, and SEO, contributing 20-25% of signups, were crucial strategies. Sidecar products (complimentary free tools), co-marketing, and reverse trials also drove growth.

Small interactions can significantly impact user experience and differentiate a product. Examples like simplified link creation in Notion, natural language date input in Things, and predictive text in Gmail illustrate how small details can enhance usability. These seemingly minor features become essential as users rely on them, building loyalty and setting apps apart, making them more appealing and competitive.

With how quickly things are changing in tech, marketing playbooks are quickly becoming relics. This article covers an alternative: the RINse and Repeat framework. The first critical step is building a rich understanding of your customers and market with a narrow-to-broad-to-narrow approach. Next, generate novel ideas for campaigns that capture attention in new ways, including new channels you haven’t tried yet. Lastly, narrate the impact and avoid over-indexing on conversion metrics that often under or overstate campaign success.

Powerful product messaging is the backbone of a good marketing strategy. Your website should speak to one specific persona, not a range of segments. Instead of showing a long list of features on your homepage, it should describe the desirable transformation your product will create. Strong customer success stories, case studies, and any other third-party validation will bring validity to lofty promises. Moreover, a compelling and authentic brand personality goes a long way in differentiating your brand.

AI now handles 60-70% of marketing workflows, enabling smaller teams to achieve higher productivity. The rise of AI in marketing has also led to faster product launches, reducing time by 50-60%. Key tools include MarketMuse for white papers, Grammarly for content refinement, and Substack and Convertkit for thematic newsletters. Hootsuite, Taplio, and Buffer manage social media engagement, while Knotch or Chartbeat track user interactions and sentiment. Lately and Circleboom facilitate content distribution across platforms and communities.

Selling developer tools is challenging because developers typically lack the authority to make purchasing decisions. Successful tech companies often bypass IT and target revenue-generating business units. Simply making a tool popular doesn't guarantee profitability, especially with open-source software.

A deep-dive into Notion's multifaceted marketing strategy that covers 3 channels that have helped power its meteoric rise. The product generated some organic buzz early on, so the team focused on templates and ‘superusers' to build up its community. The brand succeeded with influencer marketing by testing new social media platforms and allowing influencers to speak authentically. Notion also put emphasis on user activation, optimizing quick feedback loops and customizing the experience based on user segmentation.

This guide shares tactics to get the most out of your brand film by turning it into a treasure trove of marketing assets. Short video clips, behind-the-scenes content, and impactful quotes can all be extracted and repurposed to maintain audience engagement and maximize your marketing budget. This approach not only enhances your content calendar but also builds early excitement and stronger connections with your audience.

Brute-Force Marketing entails using your own product on behalf of potential customers and then gifting them the results as if they were already using it. This requires a lot of manual, non-scalable work, but it is a bullet-proof way to boost your acquisition rates. This author recommends identifying potential customers on LinkedIn and then DMing them the ‘gift.' This tactic works because it's unique and personalized, it shows tangible value, and your labor invested makes your product seem more valuable.

Sveta Bay is a marketing expert who built a product in a month, validated it in 2 weeks, and then quit her job. She emphasizes the value of targeting a specific audience and offering free AI tools for SEO to drive traffic and revenue. In this article, Bay provides 15 marketing tips she learned from growing her products, stresses the importance of email marketing for user activation and retention, and advises against subscriptions for products with poor retention rates.

This article offers a roundup of 14 company blogs to serve as inspiration. From niche segmentation and employee contributions to authentic storytelling and actionable tips, the blogs adopt different approaches to keep customers engaged. Examples include IKEA Ideas that share advice with subtle product suggestions, Home Depot's DIY Projects, and Fiverr Guides that offer simple how-tos targeting SMBs.

Companies are leveraging memecoins, or tokens associated with internet memes, in their go-to-market strategies. These companies are taking advantage of memecoins' established communities by integrating popular memecoins into new products or projects. Examples include the BONKbot trading bot using the $BONK token and $SHIB incorporating its token into an Ethereum L2 called Shibarium. This approach can tap into the established userbase and liquidity of memecoin communities, providing a potential solution to getting initial momentum in a project.

Sherpany, a meeting management platform, found in user research that its target audience saw the product as “just another meeting solution.” To better communicate its unique value proposition, the company repurposed some of its expert content into a Digital Transformation strategy guide and offered it as a lead magnet. Sherpany used this to test a completely new lead funnel, which resulted in a 58% increase in platform demo requests.

LowCode Agency's best performing growth channels have been referrals, its online calculator tool, and content marketing.

This article showcases how brands can turn a piece of content into numerous assets. Lincoln Literacy transformed a 30-minute interview into multiple unpaid channel engagements, including PR features, newsletters, and radio spots. Freshpaint used a webinar with a healthcare lawyer to produce social media posts, Q&A blogs, and videos. M Float repurposed case studies for every stage of the funnel, while Qase transformed case studies into employee advocacy posts.

Most marketing today works by grabbing attention, making you emotional, and turning emotion into action. For this to work, your audience has to trust, like, and relate to you – which is where humor comes into play. One tactic is to make fun of yourself, as IKEA did with a playfully misassembled ad. You can also make extreme and humorous analogies to show how your customer’s life would look without your product. Alternatively, brands can take a bold stance against something in their industry they don’t agree with, as Verizon did with its “one size does not fit all” messaging.

Hype language in B2B tech marketing often aims to convey excitement, innovation, and novelty, using terms like “revolutionize,” “transform,” “supercharge,” and “leverage.” However, when everything's made to sound exciting, nothing stands out. This post shares examples of companies avoiding buzzwords and hype language in positioning statements.

Boosted posts serve as a convenient entry point into advertising, offering straightforward promotion of organic content with minimal effort. On the other hand, social ads deliver extensive customization features and precise targeting capabilities, allowing marketers to fine-tune their campaigns for maximum impact. This article shares tips on when to use each to maximize marketing effectiveness.

This blog post offers advice for founders of developer tool startups. Finding product-market fit should be the first priority for founders over building a complex product. Marketing efforts should be scrappy, and founders should try to maintain a work-life balance if possible to get through the hard times successfully.

Effective crypto marketing and community building should be approached as a complex system with various interconnected events and outputs, rather than one-off strategies. Projects should prioritize investing in their community, interacting with community content, emphasizing quality over quantity, and treating community members as real people with valuable feedback. These tips help give projects sustainable community flywheels to set them apart in the attention economy.

Many marketers are missing out on what Reddit has to offer due to a lack of knowledge of the opportunities it presents. Non-salesy community engagement, market research via social listening scans, gathering customer feedback, and creator partnerships are all great ways for brands to get value from the platform. At minimum, companies should use Reddit to listen to customers and understand their needs, but there is additional value gained from engaging with other users' content or even creating posts.

Microfeatures, like sidenotes, tables of contents, and easily linkable headings, enhance the quality of life for readers of blogs and personal websites. Little UX details on a website can have huge ROIs on user experience.

Curated tools 🖌️ , trends 🎨, and inspiration 💡 for design professionals