Marketing 101

How to build a brand strategy from 0-1: a guide for startups

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Reminder: brand strategy should be done WITH your Head of product and Head of Ops vs presented to them.

This creates buy-in and alignment on why this is important from day 1.
Brand strategy is NOT a marketing plan.

Brand strategy is WHY you will win.

Marketing plan is HOW: levers you will pull to hit your goals.
Step 1: Review Competitive Landscape

Do tear downs.
Understand leading value props.
Interview users of your competition to understand what’s working, what’s not.

Know who the players are and where they play vs where you will play.
Step 1b: Create your “ONLY” statement

Complete this sentence

We are the only brand that does x, y and/ or z.

Are you better, faster, cheaper? What makes you different and how would you say that efficiently.
Step 2: Identity customer segments

Data helps. If you already have a product, know who is already a purchaser and why.

Otherwise, create user personas of ideal customers.

Have fun! How do they get news? What social accounts do they follow? What shows are they watching?
Step 3: use 1 & 2 to create your brand pyramid

A brand pyramid helps you to think about the core essence / brand sentiment.

How do you want to make someone feel.
Step 4: Bring that feeling to life - VOICE

Create your voice & tone of your brand

Use statements like: We are this, not this
Ex: we are bold, not judgemental
Ex: we are funny, not crass

Pull together examples of social captions, welcome email and product copy for North Star.
Step 5: Bring that feeling to life - VISUAL

Pull inspirational photos to guide a designer to create 3 mood boards for your brand to react to. Use the brand pyramid to guide you.

Refine and get to your MVP quickly. Don’t obsess over every pixel in the beginning.
Step 6: Learn and Iterate

A brand is a living thing. Just like a human it learns and grows as new pieces of information from customers, product and market.
If you thought this was useful, join me for a 1 week virtual Masterclass on Agile Startup Marketing

May 6-13th (4.5 hrs total + 1:1s)

Learn exactly how I grew House of Wise w/o Google & Facebook using community-led marketing & sound brand strategy

https://t.co/bUGEl7zBwy
If you find my marketing tweet threads valuable, would greatly appreciate a RT :)

More from Marketing

Master list of how to SCRAPE any category of leads.

Ecommerce, local biz, B2B, LinkedIn searches, info product sellers, enterprise, ANYTHING.

Likes / Retweets appreciated.

THREAD


1/ Ecommerce Stores

Use
https://t.co/McZHDIlDFn

Further filter based on apps installed.

Selling email marketing?

Shopify + Klaviyo

Instantly unlock direct email addresses of decision makers WITH LinkedIn profiles.

Emails are already verified, no need to do it yourself.


2/ Local Biz

Use https://t.co/B53qu5yEIy

"Find B2C local businesses"

Specify country, state, city, sort by ratings.

Instantly unlocks generic email addresses.


But wait

You need direct owner emails.

Take the list of domains, and plug them into Klean Leads "Find B2B contacts"

CEO
CMO
Founder
Owner
etc.

It will process and spit out *direct* email addresses of the titles you specify.


3/ LinkedIn Searches

Let's scrape marketing agencies.

Go to LinkedIn and type in "marketing agency" (just an example)

Click "all filters"

Connections: 2nd, 3rd

Location: US

Industry: Marketing & Advertising

Titles: owner OR founder OR CEO OR CMO

Ready?

Let's scrape it

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#24hrstartup recap and analysis

What a weekend celebrating makers looks like.

A thread

👇Read on

Let's start with a crazy view of what @ProductHunt looked like on Sunday

Download image and upload

A top 7 with:
https://t.co/6gBjO6jXtB @Booligoosh
https://t.co/fwfKbQha57 @stephsmithio
https://t.co/LsSRNV9Jrf @anthilemoon
https://t.co/Fts7T8Un5M @J_Tabansi
Spotify Ctrl @shahroozme
https://t.co/37EoJAXEeG @kossnocorp
https://t.co/fMawYGlnro

If you want some top picks, see @deadcoder0904's thread,

We were going to have a go at doing this, but he nailed it.

It also comes with voting links 🖐so go do your


Over the following days the 24hr startup crew had more than their fair share of launches

Lots of variety: web, bots, extensions and even native apps

eg. @jordibruin with
1. Project 1742 (EcoHealth/DTRA)
Risks of bat-borne zoonotic diseases in Western Asia

Duration: 24/10/2018-23 /10/2019

Funding: $71,500
@dgaytandzhieva
https://t.co/680CdD8uug


2. Bat Virus Database
Access to the database is limited only to those scientists participating in our ‘Bats and Coronaviruses’ project
Our intention is to eventually open up this database to the larger scientific community
https://t.co/mPn7b9HM48


3. EcoHealth Alliance & DTRA Asking for Trouble
One Health research project focused on characterizing bat diversity, bat coronavirus diversity and the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in the region.
https://t.co/u6aUeWBGEN


4. Phelps, Olival, Epstein, Karesh - EcoHealth/DTRA


5, Methods and Expected Outcomes
(Unexpected Outcome = New Coronavirus Pandemic)