Podboxer - 🎧  tick... tock

Start with sales

• Frank got the idea from manual financial reconciliation work he was doing at his first startup. It was time consuming, boring and error prone. But also mission critical.
• He spoke to other companies and discovered they suffered the same problem. 
• Knew what the problem was, what the pain was and he'd already spoken to multiple companies with the same problem. The idea was validated. So after creating a solution it was a relatively easy sell.
• For the first few months they told new customers “We’ll set it up for free for you, we want to show it to you, give us some feedback and you can always pay once you’re happy with how it’s running and how it’s set up”
• Effective messaging by being focused on one niche (property managers) so you connect with who you’re speaking to. Narrow in one industry and with one type of person.
• In B2B build a product that is deeply integrated into processes and systems. If it adds value then it gets left alone and is harder to swap for another solution.

• Because of solving his own problem in a market he knew well, he already had a lot of contacts to talk to.
• Reached out to 10 founders he had relationships with and found out if they definitely have the problem, how painful it is and how many resources they spend on it. Then, "I can build you a solution for this, are you interested?"
• Got verbal commitments and when they launched the first features, he got them to start using it. They only started paying after 2 months in exchange for giving detailed feedback. 
• Normally you should charge up front. You only really know if someone likes your product if they start spending money on it. But in this case, Frank had deep insight into the industry and was ok with the commitment to pay later.

• Frank found the decision maker at target companies using LinkedIn.
• Sent connection requests with message and got high 80% response rate. LinkedIn is massively underutilized for good messages.
• Messages establish credibility, reason to connect and he gets to the point quickly. For example: “We’ve built something that others are using which does xyz, would you be interested in seeing that? It saves the average property manager x hours a week”
• He then takes them through a process: phone call, demo, onboarding.

• Why has he been successful in last 4 or 5 months and others who’ve put time in haven’t? Two things: Look at successful people and probably they’re good at execution (you actually do the right thing rather than just think about it) and good at prioritizing (working on the right thing)
• You only start learning what customers want once you start speaking to them and then building something, letting them trial it and iterate that process for infinity.
• Don't spend a long time building to find it’s the wrong thing, much better and easier to talk to people and then build. You’re doing them a favor by asking and then building rather than building and then showing.

TikTok is the next channel

TikTok Marketing 101 with Lauren Pope from G2

Throwing in a curveball here. 

Maybe you're already on TikTok but if not, it's a relatively new social platform that's growing like crazy - currently 800 million users worldwide.

The content is short video - music related, stunts, and general funny stuff. Most users are in the 16-24 year old demographic (more stats and info in this article).

So is it the next marketing channel? And how could you use it to build an audience for whatever you're selling?

Lauren Pope from G2 is a self proclaimed TikTok influencer and talks through the basics in this episode of Growth Marketing Today.

Lessons learned

• Not just for teenagers: businesses and politicians are on TikTok growing their brands.
• "My audience isn’t on TikTok" is not true: fastest growing app of 2019
• Certain businesses lend themselves better to video content. For example:
  • Anything visual like fashion or beauty
  • Strange ones: Washington Post with weird off-the-wall content.
  • Madeline Mann career advice coach is one woman show who’s crushing it by giving teenagers resume advice.
  • Ecommerce
• Anyone can find their place on TikTok as long as you have the right angle. What problem are you trying to solve for your audience? Then post content that solves that, even tech solutions.
• TikTok is a music-based app, there’s a catalog of sounds and music and anyone can have access to them on their videos. 
  • Being a talking head can work but jumping on trending sounds will get you in front of more people, faster.
• Content doesn't have to be directly related to what you sell. The Washington Post isn’t doing breaking news stories, they’re leaning into office culture, talking about things that are relevant to everybody. It's building brand recognition.
• A SaaS business example:  you could make content about what it’s like to work on a team of marketers all about the same age, how it feels like summer camp sometimes, and that could resonate with people who are job hunting and possibly inspire some collaborations
• Ads - you can run in-feed ads that show up like native content, brand takeovers so you get their attention immediately, brand hashtags (app tells you what’s trending), types of lenses so you can create a branded lens that people can opt to use in their videos
• Getting reach - consistency and post anything you think is cool. Lauren has some videos that took no time to create with 100K+ likes but others that took hours to produce and got a few hundred.
• “If social media is a main pipeline for your ecommerce sales, I don’t think you can afford not to try it at this point”
• “TikTok is just a different type of audience and an untapped resource that businesses are not taking advantage of”