Alexa, play Brick House 🧱

Over this year, i’ve been formalizing my approach to marketing - i have so much intuition and bits of frameworks and SOP’s, but they rarely leave my brain.

Honestly, that was one of my reasons for doing the marketing foundations series to kick off Not My Job - to put into writing and worksheets what i’ve been doing for the better part of a decade of marketing.

All that knowledge has coalesced into
The Brick House of Marketing Foundations - one wall at a time. 🧱 💜 ⚡️ 

Those first 5 foundations are crucial.

if you don’t have them, the rest of your marketing is going to hell in a handbasket
(while you look more and more like a basketcase). 🧺

I started out the year with an issue devoted to each one.

Once those are down, you can focus on the next row, content + distribution.

“Content” gets a bad rap, to the point that the word hardly means anything anymore.

Here’s what i mean by content.
“An answer to a question your target audience is asking”

that’s. it.

The format (audio, video, written, etc) is whatever works best to answer those question.
And you should start with just one format if you’re not already a marketing whiz.
I wrote a whole issue on how to do it.

But content that no one sees is pointless (and very sad).

Distribution makes sure that doesn’t happen, and i’ve found it breaks down into two buckets;
1. pull distribution (customers are searching for a solution and your content shows up)
- tends to be static - you put it up and leave it there
- ex: SEO, App stores, marketplaces

2. and push distribution (you putting the content directly in front of potential customers
- tends to be dynamic - you have to keep interacting
- ex: Reddit, LinkedIn, professional communities

Start out with a Pull channel (usually SEO or an open marketplace)
Then add a Push one.

They will feed off of each other in a nice flywheel loop. (that holy grail of “content repurposing”)

Setting that up, getting it to run well…that’s a good 6 months of marketing work (yes, seriously!).

For reference, it’s taken me since October to build this out for my marketing agency Ignore No More. We just hit “marketing experiments” in Jan/Feb of this year.

But you’ll see results starting with the first foundation piece being put in place (and it compounds with each brick!).
Exhibit A: this newsletter getting us to ~$32K in pipeline in 3 months.

But once it’s done…you can reliably build up your marketing engine and not wonder if you marketing will work. (always nice!)

Here’s what you can do next.

If you’re an established company;
(ahem, have solid PMF, have someone to own marketing, have consistent growth, have a clear business strategy…)

With those two layers of bricks in place, you can finally get to marketing experiments.

Which will make your marketing look like this:

If you’re finding your footing as a company;
(aka; still finding PMF, looking to expand to a new target audience, or investigating launching a new brand or feature)

Repeat the foundations - but with a twist.

This go-round;

1. Customer Research (do more interviews to confirm that you’re still building what customers need, move up- or down-market or expand to find a complementary ICP)

2. Branding (expanding your assets and clarifying messaging for each buyer stage/multiple personas)

3. Website (add landing pages for each and comparison pages))

4. CRM (do a formal outreach sales push and tighten up your sales process )

5. Emails (add additional email flows, or in-product notifications)

Then add a new format to your content, and add a new push and/or pull distribution channel. This is where you’re “experimenting”, but with clearer parameters.

1. Content

   1. format one - blog posts

   2. format two - interactive tutorials on YouTube

2. Distribution (pull)

   1. first channel: SEO

   2. second channel: Shopify app marketplace (or Chrome extension, or Figma community template)

3. Distribution (push)

   1. first channel: Reddit

   2. second channel: LinkedIn (or Podcast features or YouTube)

Doing that turns your brick wall into something like this:

after that you can add in proper marketing experiments*!

*Ones that are a lot more “What if we tried….putting our software product on Etsy as a digital download?”

Actual experiment i tried!
It did not work out, but it did give us a crap ton of new search terms that we added to content that DID work! Hence, an experiment!

And remember - you can always come back and change things around. Very rarely is something set in actual stone. 🙂

There’s so much to build in each of these rows 2.0 and Experiment rows, from;

• how to setup a marketing experiment and know if it’s working or a dud

• what factors drive some users to become super users and advocates for the product

• how to not be hated on Reddit (my favorite channel for push distribution)

• And a personal favorite: the MOST comprehensive guide to customer research (which i’m doing with my good friend and frequent collaborator Abhishek) than i’ve seen anywhere.

Talking to strangers doesn’t have to be scary!

That’s where we’re headed, plus some occasional diversions on what’s happening in Ignore No More Land (besides lots of purple and peals of laughter over product marketing made simple).

But before i jump on into a writing frenzy….

i’d love to know more about you so i can make these issues and resources as helpful as possible!

Please fill out this Tally form (takes 3.5 min 🙂) and tell me about why you subscribed and what questions you’re dying to have me answer.

So excited to help you build that 🎶 brickkkkk houseeeee 🎶

If you have thoughts on marketing foundations (or bricklaying), join the chatter on LI! the comments are keen.

We’ll see you and your inbox next week!

Cheers!

Sophia ⚡👩🏽‍💻 & Aelia ✨🧕🏽

Powered by a Tropical Girl Dinner Picnic 🌺 & learning how to make paint from rocks 🖌️