You can have 0 followers and still generate thousands of visitors by posting on Reddit. However, it’s important to note that Redditors hate spam, lazy marketers, and emojis, and that every subreddit is different. Tips for leveraging Reddit include hosting engaging AMA sessions, posting when communities are most active, targeting active niche subreddits, and engaging in comments on popular posts. A list of 224 growing subreddits is available in this post (requires an email for access).

Implementing a wedge marketing strategy involves capturing a specific niche (or wedge) first and then expanding gradually. This guide covers how the strategy works, its impact on vertical vs. horizontal products, and tips on managing multiple audiences as you scale. An example of a wedge strategy is how Toast started with booking and reservations software for restaurants before expanding to a complete POS for restaurants and beyond.

This article walks through 10 essential steps for crafting a successful referral program. Key steps include choosing the right incentives, incentivizing both referrers and referees, and utilizing tiered rewards for enhanced engagement. The article also shares insights on how to measure incremental impact, combat fraud, and implement a continuous testing process to ensure ongoing program success.

Many businesses feel pressured into tapping into every holiday without having a specific reason. It’s important to build an annual cultural calendar and choose the moments that are most relevant to your brand and audience. While small businesses may lack the resources of larger corporations, they can still leverage psychological tricks like emotional attachment and brand association to showcase their brand in a new light during holidays like April Fools’ Day.

This is a deep dive into how to use humor to grow your product. People tend to think more highly of brands that use humor because it creates a sense of mutual understanding, can be motivating, and helps them stand out. There are 4 places where brands can leverage humor in growth strategies: in marketing, within the product, during the sales process, and internally. The article covers 10 specific opportunities to inject humor, which include 404 pages and confirmation pages.

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.

To boost event sign-ups, consider changing the word 'Sign Up' to 'Apply' in your event promotion. It creates a sense of exclusivity and boosts attendee confidence, while also allowing you to gather more data about your audience. Even though it may deter some potential attendees, those who apply and get accepted are likely to be more engaged and valuable participants.

Lisa Kennelly, Global Product Marketing Strategist at Klarna, breaks down the importance of personalized retention strategies tailored to individual user needs rather than generic approaches. She advocates for A/B testing to refine tactics, collecting insights through surveys and AI tools. She also stresses the significance of distinguishing between retention and activation issues. Actively gathering feedback during cancellation processes is highly effective for extracting insights for retention tactics.

Cava's unconventional approach to social marketing, which uses self-deprecating humor and memes, is driving engagement and growth as it expands geographically. The strategy has proved effective in cultivating a strong and loyal following, particularly among younger demographics. In addition to inside jokes and funny posts, Cava is also collaborating with comedic creators to build a fun brand persona.

Squatty Potty developed a solution to a very common problem, but the issue was no one wanted to talk about going #2. With its early marketing, the brand was able to turn a taboo topic into a product people can't stop talking about. Squatty Potty's unconventional “Dookie the Unicorn” ad used humor to educate the audience, which resulted in over 400 million views and a 600% increase in online sales. The brand illustrates the potential health issues linked with traditional toilet posture, which effectively frames the product as a necessary solution. Squatty Potty also legitimizes its offering with authority by promoting its support from doctors and medical studies.

This post categorizes actionable product marketing metrics into 4 pillars: revenue generation, GTM strategy, retention/product adoption, and enablement. It's important to prioritize 2-3 metrics per quarter. They should be measured as changes between benchmarked time periods and the results after implementing a new initiative.

This article explores the evolution from generic personas to situational segmentation. It sheds light on how this shift empowers marketers to grasp the nuanced needs of customers in various everyday situations. By tailoring strategies to address specific situational needs, marketers can foster deeper connections with diverse audience segments and drive sustainable growth.

An entry point is that pivotal moment when a prospective customer feels intense pain from a problem that your solution could instantly alleviate — if only they were aware it existed. This article provides a 6 step process to identify these entry points, which can then be used to plan marketing and sales activities. The process involves defining your ICP and buyer personas, articulating triggers, customer journey mapping, and entry point mapping.

AppsFlyer, a leader in mobile attribution and marketing analytics, achieved a $2 billion valuation by building a great tool and backing it with a thoughtful marketing strategy. The brand knows how to create content worth sharing and has embraced a wide-net distribution strategy. AppsFlyer invests heavily in social media, including Facebook and Instagram, as well as developer content on Medium. Its website includes a glossary, which brings in significant unbranded content and backlinks. The brand has created in-depth resource content, which brings in less volume but higher value traffic.

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.

VectorVest, a stock portfolio management system, found from research that users were skeptical of starting a trial despite the social proof elements on the pricing page. The company tested a variant of the pricing page that changed the trial offer headline, answered common objections around hidden fees and terms, reformatted the pricing table to connect the trial price to each plan, softened the call-to-action to “Select Plan”, and added a callout above the highest-value plan. This resulted in a 43% increase in paid trials, demonstrating the value of learning from real customers.

This in-depth case study analyzes Amazon's marketing strategy. It highlights the company's customer-centric approaches like personalized recommendations, seamless returns, and excellent customer service. It also discusses how innovation through AI and machine learning enabled inventory management and voice-controlled assistants like Alexa. The case study shares recommendations on how marketers can replicate the strategies.

This post explains how to define your audience by answering 4 questions. First, identify their statistical characteristics (age, gender, income, occupation, and family status). Second, discover your shared connection points (activities or values beyond your products). Third, understand their digital habits (online interactions and purchasing behavior). Lastly, determine their scrolling approach (hourly and daily patterns). Use these insights to guide what and when your brand shares content.

Your value proposition is at the heart of all your go-to-market activities – particularly in the startup stages. First define the problem, while assuming that people don't want more products. Ask yourself what the risk or consequence is that's associated with the problem, which is the customer pain point. Next, list your product's capabilities and connect them to the problems you've identified in the prior steps. The more thoroughly you solve the issue, the more interested people will be. Finally, prove that your product solves the problems with customer case studies. With all of this information, you can now summarize your value proposition - use no more than two sentences.

An effective pricing page reinforces your positioning, provides clarity about the value of your offering to your audience, makes the sales process easier, and increases overall conversion. The number one failure for pricing pages typically happens before you even make the page: bad planning and pricing strategy. This article provides a checklist for evaluating your page and includes deep-dive reviews of pricing pages from Count, Klaviyo, and Lattice.

This 85-slide deck prepared by Cultural Intelligence Studio deconstructs celebrity branding and translates it into cultural narratives and actionable insights. It provides a brief history of celebrity advertising, the evolution of celebrity brands in the last 20 years, today's new generation of celebrity brands, and best practices.

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.

Leveraging buyer beliefs is crucial for effective marketing. Marketers often assume customers have the same knowledge, which can alienate potential buyers. Use clear language to explain complex concepts, such as the importance of note-taking for productivity. Marketers should map out the customer journey, starting with existing beliefs and guiding them to new, required beliefs. Tactics include storytelling, addressing misconceptions, and providing simple demonstrations to build trust.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) describes your ideal customer. Without a defined ICP, your company risks wasted marketing spend, lower conversion rates, and product-market misalignment. Start with details like company size, industry, use cases, and buyer personas. Use quantitative, qualitative, and market analysis to identify profitable segments, understand customer needs, and uncover competitive dynamics. Continually refine your ICP as you gain new insights into the market and your customers.

The AARRR funnel is now seen as inadequate due to its linear structure and the silos it creates. Growth loops offer a more holistic approach, aligning with the non-linear nature of real-world user journeys. Adopting growth loops involves focusing on the entire user journey for a more agile growth strategy. This post illustrates 13 growth loops, including worth-of-mouth, UGC sharing, and product-plug.

A decade or so ago, Google Search was in an era of information scarcity, where hyper-relevant information was hard to find and content was costly to create. Today, the opposite is true, which fundamentally changes how marketing functions. In this era of information abundance, brands should offer new flavors of information that serve unique needs, create completely new information that competitors haven't done, and invest in entertaining the audience rather than churning out rote information.

Referred customers are 4X more likely to make a purchase and have a 37% higher retention rate. This article emphasizes the importance of precise and personalized messaging in securing referrals, rather than relying on vague requests. Combining strategies like NPS with a structured referral program can also help identify enthusiastic customers to drive more referrals.

The best places to run marketing campaigns are where your target audience hangs out. Tactics to identify these places include qualitative customer interviews, seeing where your competitors are most active, market research reports, and your own experimentation. This article includes sample questions to use for customer interviews.

The MKT1 Newsletter focuses on marketing strategy exercises designed to enhance the annual planning process for businesses. The newsletter emphasizes that effective planning is not merely about setting arbitrary metrics or securing budget approvals; rather, it is a critical process that aligns the entire organization towards revenue growth and long-term success. The author, Emily Kramer, highlights the importance of differentiating a startup's marketing strategy, suggesting that it should not simply replicate the approaches of other companies or past practices. To kick off the planning process, the newsletter outlines a series of strategy exercises aimed at evaluating and refining marketing strategies. These exercises are categorized into three main areas: product marketing strategy review, go-to-market (GTM) motion alignment, and identifying marketing advantages. Each exercise is designed to help teams understand their target audiences, assess market dynamics, and leverage unique strengths to drive engagement and revenue. The newsletter is part of a three-part series on marketing planning, with the first installment discussing the anatomy of a marketing plan and the third installment set to cover prioritizing marketing goals and projects. Paid subscribers gain access to templates and additional resources to facilitate these exercises. Kramer encourages teams to dedicate time to these strategy sessions, suggesting that they can be conducted over several weeks. The exercises include prioritizing ideal customer profiles (ICPs), mapping the competitive ecosystem, and aligning marketing strategies with product developments. By engaging in these activities, teams can create a comprehensive marketing plan that reflects their unique positioning and market opportunities. The newsletter also introduces the concept of "fuel and engine" strategies, where fuel represents the content and creative output, while the engine refers to the channels and methods used to distribute that content. Aligning these elements is crucial for effective marketing execution. In summary, the MKT1 Newsletter serves as a guide for marketers to refine their strategies through structured exercises, ensuring that their planning processes are thorough and aligned with their business goals. The focus on differentiation, audience understanding, and leveraging unique advantages positions companies to achieve sustainable growth in a competitive landscape.