Coming from crypto companies has made me aware of how many projects publish their blog content on Medium. From the SEO perspective, it’s weird! Instead of boosting their domain authority and building that organic traffic growth, they do it for Medium.

There are two explanations for this:

• Medium is a turnkey solution. There is no need to design and develop or choose a WordPress template. It's like a minimum viable product approach to blogging.

• Medium has a huge crypto audience. You can gain more relevant followers faster than you would through a website blog.

Medium – a distribution channel like anything else

In content marketing, you first produce content and then distribute it. For example, when you create an article, it gets distributed to your blog and social media. With Medium, it feels exactly like a blog. So where do you publish it? On both platforms!

It shouldn’t be a decision, just like when you don’t decide whether the article gets published on a blog or social media. The key here is to adapt your content to the channel.

For example, your blog houses the full articles, whereas social posts either provide teaser links or fully adapted content.

How to publish crypto content on Medium

Think about which funnel would give you more results:

• Medium audience > your Medium article > blog traffic

• Medium audience > your Medium article > new follower > homepage traffic

Each funnel would correspond to the strategy you’d pick.

Strategy 1: Teaser link content

The goal here is to redirect your Medium impressions into referral traffic to your website blog:

1. Rewrite the article into a shorter version with key insights

2. Link to your website blog article with a CTA like “for more details, read the full article”

The downside to this would be churning out Medium article views. The current social media algorithms are known to prioritize content without links.

Strategy 2: Zero-click content

The goal here is to maximize impressions and gain more Medium followers:

1. Publish the article as is, closing with a CTA to follow your Medium

2. In the comment section, link to your website blog

The downside to this would be prioritizing Medium account growth over website blog traffic. However, who’s to say your new followers won’t check out the blog link in the profile? Or better yet – when they check out the comments and see that link too?

But what about content duplication?

A website’s search ranking gets penalized if it publishes duplicated content. When you publish the same article on Medium, it’s supposed to penalize Medium.com, not your domain. You’d be interested in getting organic traffic for your website blog, not a Medium profile.

That’s why you can use canonical tags for Medium articles. Medium doesn’t get penalized for your duplicate content. And you drive search traffic to your domain.

However, there might be one unexplored side of duplicated content and canonical tags. Content aggregators like Medium are incentivized to promote exclusive content. Both inside the algorithmic public feed and outside on search engines.

Therefore, it’s likely that Medium articles with canonical tags may not be picked up by the Medium algorithm. In this case, you have to recycle your article in a way that would optimize it for the Medium algorithm. For example, rewriting the content and removing your canonical tag. Consider this your SEO diversification as both versions would be ranked on a search engine.

How to test the strategies

1. Identify your top 5 performing articles

2. Publish them on Medium during a month using one strategy first

3. Measure the results and delete the articles

4. Publish them on Medium during a month again but use another strategy

5. Measure the results and compare them with previous numbers

Look, I’m just a crypto startup so…

Okay! If you’re only starting out on your content marketing, publish your articles on Medium. Set up the publication flow for Medium and then work on the website blog. Once your blog is ready, move your Medium articles to the blog and rewrite them for Medium.

Prototype Formats

Minimum Viable Product is a prototype that validates your business idea. Basically, before building a full product, you’d first need to understand if there is a demand for your solution.

By starting with MVP, you’re reducing the risk of an unsuccessful product. This saves time and costs to check if the product direction is correct. Otherwise, it would be a shame to put so much effort only to find out that the product was not valuable for target audience.

There are many MVP formats. Alpha and beta versions are one way to go. But to optimize the resources, you need to get to the basics. We’re talking demo videos and spreadsheets. You can also try simulating a product experience, a technique called Wizard of Oz. For example, when you’re talking to chatGPT, but in reality, there are actually people replying to you.

MVP types by invested effort:

1. Demo video

2. Spreadsheet

3. Wizard of Oz

4. Alpha/Beta build

MVP Examples

Dropbox’s founder has recorded a demo video. He showed a seamless value experience – dragging a file to a cloud folder. He then published this video in developer groups to gauge the response.

Zappos’ founder has used a concierge approach. Before online shopping was mainstream, no one knew it would take off. To test this, the founder took photos of shoes inside the retail stores.

He then posted the photos on the website, bought the shoes from the retail and delivered them to customers.

Groupon’s founders have created a simple WordPress site and used a spreadsheet to manage the deals that they offered to customers. They manually emailed the deals to subscribers and tracked the redemptions using a Google spreadsheet.

MVPs allow the companies to test demand for their product without investing in inventory upfront. It also helps getting the feedback from customers on their service and the overall user experience.

RAT – a Complementary Framework

Riskiest Assumption Test takes the MVP to its barebones. This framework measures only the demand for a product.

The point is to track usage intent. One prominent approach is a smoke test. It’s kind of a bait-and-switch tactic, but for all the good purposes. For example when it says “sign up”, you’re actually led to a “this page is in development” page. A less bait-y way is to make CTAs more direct – join the waitlist.

Remember that RATs validate only the user acquisition phase. To understand the product’s impact on retention and monetization, you’ll need to continue with MVP.

Concept Trailers

MVP for Movies and TV Series

When you’re an established franchise, you can publish unofficial trailers. Decide on the setting and storyline you want to test, produce the “fan-made” video and publish it from an unofficial account.

You can then analyze the reaction by looking at things like:

• Positive sentiment share from all comments

• Like/dislike ratio

• Views

Here are some examples:

• Warriors Remake

• Prequel to Back to the Future

• Sequel to I Am Legend

MVP for Video Games

Similarly, there are just as many videos of game concepts. As development engines have become more accessible, people started to prototype games they wanted to play.

Video game concepts explore factors like:

• Movie character in a video game

• Innovative gameplay mechanics

• Storytelling

So if you don’t have an established game brand, you can still test the gameplay and storytelling.

As a result, here are the most known videos:

• GTA San Andreas 2

• Superman game

• Open-World Star Wars

The proliferation of such videos has also helped us understand why some video games would be hard to make.

Although more effortful, alpha builds help your audience experience the vision.

These versions can help you crowdfund the game and receive user feedback. For example, Night in the Woods was funded by Kickstarter community. While creating the game, developers have released their MVPs to show the progress and gather feedback.

Another example of iterative builds is Outer Wilds, my favorite indie game! Look how much it has changed since its cradle:

• pre-alpha

• alpha

• final product

Note how the alpha versions have generated the demand via gamer influencers:

Another way to create game concepts is to align it with a tech demo. Quanticdream’s Detroit Become Human was initially a tech demo for their new engine. The original concept featured a character that would then become one of the protagonists.

They’ve continued this approach with yet another tech demo that’s been taken into development:

Microproduct is a small solution that solves a tiny pain of your persona.

Microproducts display attributes like:

• Limited by features or usage capacity

• Meant as a product entry for upselling the main solution

• Either free or costs no more than 5% of your main product

Selling a microproduct builds trust with your brand. You’d basically have your persona experience the consequences of a purchase. This is sort of a safe space for customers as it reinforces feelings of satisfaction rather than regret. This experience assures your persona that buying a more expensive product would produce the same results and feelings if not more.

The Assumption

If we sell a microproduct in a newsletter, it will improve the main conversion for B2B business.

How to Test This Assumption

Newsletter monetization consists of 2 parallel email sequences:

• the content sequence with article digests or personalized content

• the sales sequence with a CTA to buy your main product

Create two subscriber groups and show them 2 different sales sequences:

• one for the main product

• one for the microproduct

Then, compare the main conversion rate between the two groups.

Send me your results so I can include them in this article!

What is a Microproduct

Microproduct is a small solution that solves a tiny pain of your persona. Say a business owner is looking for a marketing agency. In this case, a relevant microproduct would be:

• a spreadsheet template with marketing budget or activities planning

• audit of current marketing setup

Microproducts display attributes like:

Thanks for reading Marketing Conversations! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

• Limited by features or usage capacity

• Meant as a product entry for upselling the main solution

• Either free or costs no more than 5% of your main product

A Test Drive for Purchasing Experience

Microproducts solve 2 goals:

• They capture a pool of your potential personas

• They provide a purchasing experience as a benchmark for upselling

Let’s focus on the second point. It’s harder to decide on the big purchase because its consequences are too uncertain. What if the product/service sucks? What If I will regret this purchase?

Selling a microproduct builds trust with your brand. You’d basically have your persona experience the consequences of a purchase. This is sort of a safe space for customers as it reinforces feelings of satisfaction rather than regret. This experience assures your persona that buying a more expensive product would produce the same results and feelings if not more.

Product experience is a hallmark of PLG tactics. Instead of promising practical consequences in marketing assets, PLG products offer to experience the value firsthand. The positive experience then leads to a paid plan conversion. In this sense, the trial is a microproduct for SaaS.

Should Microproducts be Free?

Free microproducts typically come in a form of a content upgrade:

• PDF guide download

• Spreadsheet template

• Checklist

This is a common practice for marketing-led products. When you produce free but gated content to convert inbound leads.

Paid microproducts are unbundled features or solutions:

• A 5-day lecture session for education courses

• Audits for service agencies

Note that although SaaS trials are free, they are more of an unbundled feature.

You’d think that microproducts need to be free for a better conversion into users. But free use is not associated with a purchasing experience.

In this case, it makes more sense to keep the free microproducts at the top of your funnel. Once exchanged for an email, you can proceed to sell a paid microproduct or a trial.

Microproduct Examples

Website Scanners

Semrush has a free SEO audit for websites.
The full product provides a toolkit for SEO marketers.

Ahrefs offers a suite of free products in exchange for emails:

Pentest tools scans websites for common vulnerabilities:

Content Upgrades

HackenProof offers a full guide on an article that’s part of the guide:

They also have a PR calculator. It’s a spreadsheet that calculates the budget according to set goals like impressions and publications:

Omniscient Digital hosts webinars almost every week:

Usage-based Trials

Mega (a successor to Megaupload!) has created a free usage ceiling for their cloud storage. If users like the product experience, they’ll likely upgrade to a paid plan once they’ll reach 20GB:

Notion’s free plan covers all basic features. The ceiling is set at a number of collaborators. When you use Notion for personal management, something seems off when you don't use it for work:

Ahrefs once had a paid 7-day trial for $7:

Audits & Consultations

Momentum offers a free marketing audit:

Wirtek consults on developing a software product:

How to Create a Microproduct for Your Business

How to Create a Microproduct for a Service Company

Identify the first stage of your main service. For example, most services begin with some sort of preparation step:

• review

• audit

• planning

• consultation

Now position this stage as a standalone microproduct and offer it to your new customers. Try to test free vs paid pricing to see how it impacts your main conversion.

How to Create a Microproduct for a Product Company

1. Research how much value each feature provides to your user

2. Identify the “cheapest” feature, the one with the low value

3. Make this feature a standalone product

Microproducts for SaaS are connected to trials. You can set up your microproduct in a way that would offer high-value features in exchange for a subscription or usage-based plan.

When setting up your trial, it’s also recommended to follow the practice of reverse trials. This is when users start with a time-limited trial and then become freemium users after the trial.

NFT is short for Non-Fungible Token. It's a unique virtual asset located on the blockchain network, similar to cryptocurrency. It's like owning a sword from a video game - you can't touch it, but it's there, online. And it's yours.

What does non-fungible mean?

To grasp it, let's start with fungible items. Imagine you've minted 5 gold coins with the same layout print. Each coin is identical to another. The coins can also be exchanged 1 to 1. Since they are all copies, this makes them fungible.

Non-fungible is just the opposite. It's when the item doesn't have any copy in the world. This time, you're minting 1000 different gold coins. Each coin would have a different print on its head or tail. Therefore, a unique coin is non-fungible.

Non-fungible things are all around us. Your fingerprint is unique, and your online username cannot be duplicated. That's why they are non-fungible. But what about tokens?

Blockchain Tokens

Tokens are just a type of cryptocurrency. If you're familiar with blockchains, you know that blockchain is a network. Bitcoin network has only 1 currency running. But on other blockchains, things get a bit different.

Take Ethereum for example. It has a native coin called Ether, but it can house other coins too. These other coins are referred to as tokens.

Tokens use the same technology as cryptocurrency, but they are not necessarily money. Blockchain tokens are virtual objects but they can be valuable all the same.

A non-fungible token is technically a cryptocurrency that's been created in a quantity of 1. Once it's online on the blockchain, you cannot add more of the same unit, edit or delete it.

Why bother with Blockchain if I can store items on the Internet?

It all comes down to ownership. When you buy a painting, you know it's yours because you can touch and put it anywhere you want. If you buy an online painting, how can you tell no one else owns it too?

That's where blockchain comes in. Blockchain is a network of computers that verify digital ownership. It's this gigantic online ledger that records all the transactions between network users. Once you buy NFT, the ledger records your address as the sole owner of your NFT. Your NFT is the original, while the copied files are just that - copies.

NFTs create many opportunities. Artists can transfer ownership to art collectors. Companies can release trading cards for card collectors. Players can trade their video game items freely. NFTs can be used in many more ways.

NFT Types

Anything can be owned on the blockchain.
All you need is a digital file and your blockchain wallet address.

Here's a list of possible NFT types:

• Paintings

• Songs

• Videos

• Trading cards

• Video game items

• Virtual real-estate

• Real real-estate

• Cars

• ID cards 

• Software licenses

• Social media posts

• Social media stickers

• Articles

• Tickets

Roadmaps are cool:

• We use them to plan our business activities

• Every teammate knows where we’re heading to

• It manifests the vision of the company

When you think about it, all our efforts are destination maps with A and B points. Point B is our goal, while point A is our current benchmark.

The map gets more detailed when you figure out ways to reach B. You discover that B requires going through X and Y first. All while X and Y have their own roads.

On the destination map, there are several roads to reach B. Some are easier or more rewarding than others. When you identify the most optimal route to B, the map narrows into a roadmap:

A roadmap helps a company lock in on the target goal. It removes chaotic ideas by asking, “will it help us reach our roadmap goals?”. This saves time on more important ideas.

For investors, roadmaps assure 2 things :

• The founders know where they are heading to

• The investors can see the full potential of a startup

That last bit actually plays with our mindset vulnerabilities.

Why roadmaps are faulty

Roadmaps exploit our wishful thinking. Showing a linear progress timeline implies that each pitstop point turns out successful. Realistically, each roadmap goal depends on the success of the previous goals.

The roadmap concept is not aligned with agile planning. It doesn’t account for unexpected forces that make the goal irrelevant. Typically, roadmaps go 1 year and beyond, which is highly unusual for startup planning.

Roadmaps are especially susceptible to the planning fallacy. Underestimating the odds of successful plan execution leads to unreal expectations. This optimistic vision promises that each roadmap point will be accomplished without setbacks.

Roadmaps fixate on a single path to achieve the goal. If the path is faulty, sticking to it is similar to being a dogmatic believer. Startups are not meant to execute the original vision. They are meant to reach a product-market fit (PMF) adjacent to the original vision. This means ditching a roadmap when it doesn’t show any sign of the PMF.

Roadmap alternative – code of conduct

Don’t criticize without a suggestion!

Instead of roadmaps, I propose to use Code of conduct, for lack of a better word.

Code of conduct is a set of principles for guiding business decisions. Instead of polishing the roadmap, improve the logic behind it. With code of conduct, you enlarge the destination map to ask better questions than “what will we be doing”?

The right questions would be:

• “Are we sure that’s where point B is”?

• “Are we sure that’s the right road to point B”?

• “Are we sure the current road to point B is the best one”?

By doubting your current decisions, you force to match your decision logic with the code of conduct.

Code of conduct is like an algorithm with “if” and “then” logic rules. The growth models inspired by Lean Startup follow a self-improving algorithm:

1. Research hypotheses

2. Test hypotheses with metric goals

3. If successful – scale

4. Otherwise – repeat step 1

Roadmap vs Code of сonduct

Marketing gamechanger

When I started learning marketing at university, I didn’t know how far it had been digitized. I thought all you needed was an outstanding campaign, and the results would have reflected how good that campaign idea was.

Google and Facebook ads have changed that. The code tracks everything from the banner views up to purchases. You can now tell how many clients you’ve acquired from a specific ad. This enables the ROI machine. When you are confident that a particular channel returns 5x of your expenses, you’ll increase the budget for that channel.

Performance marketing is a prime example of science manifestation in marketing.

Growth engines & metric calculating

Performance marketing is so effective it has been identified as one of the core growth engines of business, as told by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup. The company will grow as long as lifetime value (LTV) exceeds customer acquisition cost (CAC). It’s incredibly convenient for businesses with recurring purchases like eCommerce and SaaS.

I love performance marketing because it’s as easy as keeping the scores. In our space, we have a term for planning performance metrics – unit economics. The idea is to calculate every performance metric to make financial sense. Before the business launch, unit economics are used to determine if a business model will be profitable. After the launch, unit economics optimize performance metrics like CAC and conversion rates (CR).

Tracking offline activities

Even the offline marketing channels have integrated with performance tracking:

• Out-of-home (OOH) billboards include QR codes to count the website visits

• Retail stores use proximity marketing tech like geofencing, Bluetooth beacons, and NFC tags

With that many channels, you’d need a funnel nurturing approach that applies to all channels simultaneously.

Onwards to omnichannel marketing

Total data control

Omnichannel analytics is when you track every touchpoint between your brand and the target audience. “Omni” is an interesting choice of words. I associate it with “omnipotence,” a power so unlimited that anything is possible. No wonder it’s usually applied to gods.

In marketing, omnichannel analytics emits the same vibes. Imagine opening your GDPR data files on Netflix and seeing every tiny occasion you’ve interacted with Netflix:

Besides total privacy breach creepiness, you’d also be amazed by how magical this technology is, omnipotent even :)

Current omnichannel efforts are focused on building accurate data dashboards. The goal of these dashboards is to merge the funnel with the customer journey. At the top of the funnel, you’d have your brand awareness channels transitioning into acquisition and retention channels.

Omnichannel marketing is huge email marketing

Another way I like to describe omnichannel marketing is “email marketing gone big.” Because in email marketing, you have a sequence of automated emails based on the current funnel stage. In the trial stages, you’d be sending emails to convert into paid users. And then for paid users, you’d send emails to convert into retained users.

The same pattern occurs for omnichannel marketing. The difference is, the sequence is now made of messages across all channels. If you hit your acquisition goal on Google Display Ads, you can directly target on Facebook Ads to convert the acquired users into paid ones. Here’s a more detailed look at omnichannel marketing.

Omnichannel marketing limitations

Sadly, omnichannel marketing is limited in tracking brand awareness attribution. A typical way to measure brand awareness is by monitoring the monthly search queries of a brand keyword. Basically, how many times your business name has come up in Google searches. But you can’t attribute the growth of this metric to a specific channel. Moreover, search queries only represent a share of all people who are familiar with your brand.

A similar challenge occurs when performance marketing clashes with PR. You can count the views per article, but you can’t know precisely how many new people have learned about your brand’s existence. One way to deal with this is to stop obsessing about these numbers. Or embrace the probabilistic models.

Online privacy trends

Privacy vs marketing

It appears that tracking people for selling products to them is like being a stalker! It makes you think about “targetting” in a different light.

Indeed, CRMs like HubSpot enable us to track the web actions of a specific person. It’s just necessary to build that omnichannel marketing process. But it also allows these CRMs to become single points of privacy failure.

If only we could aggregate data without revealing identities, huh? Well then how would you build the account-based marketing flow? Or for that matter, any performance marketing in B2B?! Privacy regulations seem to disrupt performance and omnichannel marketing.

Google updates

Google Chrome is set to stop supporting third-party cookies soon. I am writing soon because this is their second time postponing this action. Blocking third-party cookies is a big deal because that’s what powers your Google Analytics and other adtech on the websites.

It turns out third-party cookies are actually one of many technologies to track users. The privacy updates are meant to enforce consent from a user, not remove tracking altogether.

Apple updates

Apple outran Google by at least 4 years now. Safari has started blocking 3rd party cookies since 2020. And iOS 14 has blocked acquisition attribution by blocking IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers). IDFA is used to identify devices.

Without IDFA, marketers need to rely on fingerprinting – gathering publicly available data on a mobile device to construct a single device data profile. But fingerprinting is just not as accurate as using IDFA.

Brave – crypto outsider

One outsider in particular has decided to reinvent the browser’s use for marketing – Brave. The browser is one of the old-school crypto projects emerging in 2016. The idea is to cut ad networks from monetizing websites. To do this, Brave has a built-in ad blocker.

Basically, advertisers purchase BAT tokens to spend them on ads inside Brave. The ad viewers then receive a part of these spent tokens. The users can then decide to reward frequently visited websites with token donations. I suppose in an act to say sorry for blocking your ads :)

Probability models instead of real data

Emerging trend: probabilistic models

Before technology or culture goes mainstream, it has to trend in a niche community. In our case, my bets are on mobile app marketing. In this space, apps rely on Mobile Measurement Partners (MMP). MMPs are attribution engines – they match acquired users with their source channel to improve campaigns’ ROI.

iOS 14 has made MMPs’ jobs more critical for performance marketers. Since it has become harder to identify a specific device, MMPs have started using probabilistic models. Probabilistic models use temporary data that becomes obsolete within a few hours:

• device info

• time of install

• time of click

For probabilistic algorithms, this data is enough to estimate the source of an install for a few hours after a click. The estimations are accurate enough to optimize campaigns based on the data.

Improving conversions based on model data

Probabilistic modeling also applies to conversion rates! MMPs analyze users who have consented to be shown personalized ads. Then, they extrapolate their post-install behavior to model aggregate user data. Basically, it’s suggesting data for opted-out users – based on data for opted-in users.

Somehow, this can also work for targeting opted-out users.

Probabilistic modeling going worldwide

If probability modeling resolves privacy issues, it might become mainstream. But we’d still need a fair share of people who consent to share their data. Because that’s going to be the input for all our models. In this case, it’d be wise to incentivize opt-ins. Current incentives are only verbal and are based on brand trust:

• “You are in control of your data”

• “We’ll show you relevant ads”

It would be so odd and yet interesting to see Google Analytics showing confidence levels and approximate models, not real data. And HubSpot would show a probability percentage of a contact’s acquisition source.

Only time will tell if this trend becomes mainstream.

Marketing battlefield: science vs art

At this point in my life, I’ve become curious about binary mindsets: structure and chaos.

With structure, you think like a bugless algorithm. You keep answering the criteria and evaluation questions until you produce valuable thoughts. For example:

• what is the goal of this article?

• what are the ways to reach this goal?

• which way would better reach the goal?

• how would I compare these ways?

A structural mindset is manifested in marketing via frameworks like 5P, jobs to be done, personas, positioning, unit economics, and so on. The evolution of data analytics pushes this mindset even further. We are now concerned with building decomposed dashboards that connect metrics between the processes – all in hopes to detect a profitable correlation.

With chaos, your thoughts take you to random places. They might be exciting, but not as profitable. However, chaos is good for creativity and especially helpful for generating hypotheses and business vision. Creative people are not bound by step-by-step processes. Instead, they jump from one association to another without any rules or thoughts like “oh, this association might not be as relevant”.

I’ve seen both of these mindsets in my marketing experience. And I’ve learned that it’s best when a chaotic person sets the vision for a structured person to execute it. These mindsets are interdependent. Without creativity, a structured person would perfectly execute the strategy even if it may be irrelevant to the big picture. Likewise, a creative person cannot properly execute a strategy because they don’t want to be limited by frameworks.

Where does marketing fit in business?

Business owners have different expectations from marketing.
Some common points of view include:

1. A communication playbook: make your brand look appealing

2. ROI machine: set up multi-channel user acquisition and keep the costs below their lifetime value. In the general funnel view, marketing stays at the top to produce leads!

3. Growth engine: systematically validate business hypotheses by tracking the main metrics

Regardless of the focus, it’s important to make marketing an extension of business goals. For example, the main business goal is typically revenue. So marketing solves this by cascading into revenue flows, funnel stages, and unit economics.

As marketing matures in new industries, we see how the top martech companies identify effective tactics. This is what happened with HubSpot Academy and B2B space. When you learn these tactics, it feels like there’s nothing more to them. That’s why I like the growth process – it never gets stale. Instead of using the existing tactics, the growth concept invites you to participate in a tactic-making experience.

Product market fit is king

I like how marketing strategies differ by company life stage. When you’re in a startup, you can’t just launch paid campaigns and expect the users to flock in. In the early days, marketing solves entrepreneurial challenges. It scouts the market for a place by talking with first customers and letting them test your product.

In this beta phase, it’s important that a product finds the fit between its features and the people who need them. The introduction of product-market fit quantifies the success of a startup. There are 2 common approaches to measuring PMF:

• Tracking user retention by weekly or monthly cohorts

• Asking users this question – how much would you be upset if our product had to shut down? The share of people who’d be very upset is your PMF!

When you’re looking for PMF, it feels like all the marketing is experimental. You don’t get to build user acquisition processes until you test the basic idea behind them. Even when the company finds its PMF, the experiments should continue.

Another thing I like about the PMF approach is that it denies market entry to bad products. When a startup can’t improve PMF, it leaves no choice but to pivot and create a different product. It’s like an agile mindset that can drop the old beliefs to adopt the new ones – all in order to get unstuck and grow!

The sales root

At its core, marketing is actually sales. It’s all about showing the value and exchanging it for money. As time passed, a need for the bigger picture emerged. That’s when sales diverged into the modern definitions of “sales” and “marketing”.

Marketing has become a large-view sales operation:

• researching competitors and target audience

• creating the visual and communication style

• planning revenue at appropriate acquisition cost

There’s one mutual component between marketing and sales – communication. Marketing improves its campaign and product communication by getting insights from the sales team. In fact, marketers can attend sales calls for their research sessions. That’s why the most important marketing-sales alignment is about communicating product value.

Marketing as a communication framework

No matter how good your product is, someone needs to translate its features into the right words and pictures. This translation works only if it resonates with a listener’s deficit – they won’t buy it if they don’t need it.

In this sense, it’s important to help a customer imagine how they use your product. To do this, marketing uses things like:

• landing pages with product descriptions

• problem-solving articles describing their product as a tool-to-solve

• video reviews

But nothing beats “imagining” like actually using the product. That’s why simple UX and trials have become mainstream. They reduce the friction for people to start using the product. The UX then makes sure that a user experiences the value while using that product.

Marketing communication is hard! Your potential users must interpret your information the way you meant it. On top of that, you also need to mirror your buyer persona: use their language and hero images. Luckily, customer development solves this challenge. The more you get to know a specific type of people, the more you start thinking like them.

And then there’s an issue of complexity vs simplicity. It’s like there are 2 schools of thought:

• If we say as much information as possible, we’ll show ourselves as complex and therefore smart. For example, government websites with long paragraphs without breaks.

• If we say as little information as possible, we’ll show ourselves as relevant and therefore needed — for example, this concise Spotify landing page.

I wonder how easy would it be to disrupt a corporation by using a simpler communication approach!

What is demand capture

Demand capture is about attracting people who want to fulfill their desire. When many people want something, they manifest their desire by searching the info about it. They go out on Google and type something like “how to send big files”.

The more people search for the same keyword, the more demand there is. Search queries show a model of potential demand

To capture demand, you have to get noticed by people who search for something.

Typical examples are

• taxi drivers at the airport entrance

• websites on Google

• restaurants near tourist attractions

Capturing demand is easier than generating it. The desire has already been formed, and you only have to address the people with clear intent.

How to capture demand

The easiest way to capture demand is to identify the top desires and channels. Then, you need to pick the right user acquisition tactics.

Consider an example of a financial app for business. To identify the top desires, you have to research keywords in search queries on Google.

You’d find things like:

• Financial cloud software

• How to manage EBITDA reports

• How to calculate P&L

The next step is to sort these keywords by volume and go from there. To attract people who search for these solutions, you need to create a web page that successfully addresses the intent of the query.

There are at least 2 tactics you could use on search queries:

• Search Engine Optimization

• Pay Per Click campaigns

From there, it’s all about conversion rate optimization. The mechanic of how you turn attracted people into your customers.

What is demand generation

Demand generation is about making people aware of a problem or a solution. This task is harder than capturing demand. Instead of monetizing on existing interest, you have to unearth desires from the consumer’s subconsciousness.

There’s even an old adage about this – the consumers don’t know what they want.

So where do you start then? I think it all comes down to the Jobs To Be Done framework. If you’re not creating an entirely new market, you disrupt an existing one with an innovative solution. Essentially, you’re capturing demand for existing solution and driving the demand for a new solution.

For example:

• Tesla tapped into a demand for driving cars. They offered an innovative solution that pitched to a different audience. Tesla took a share of “buy a car” queries and turned them into “buy an electric car”.

• Netflix tapped into a demand for renting a movie. By offering a cloud movie library, they started generating demand for a specific solution. From “rent a movie” to “best streaming services”.

• Apple tapped into a demand for communicating over a distance. They offered an innovative way of communication: simple web browsing and social apps. From “buy a phone” to “buy a smartphone”

  

How to generate demand

First things off, think about what are you generating demand for. Is it for pain awareness or for your company's services? This depends on the novelty and saturation of your market.

If you offer a new solution approach, you can publish content about the approach itself:

• blog articles

• videos

• social posts

If you’re not exactly in a blue ocean and the competition is high, you can re-invent the approach – call it a different name and promote it! HubSpot excelled in this strategy when they came up with “inbound marketing”.

Market leaders are defined by their ability to grow the demand for the whole market (TAM), not just their company.

If you understand this, the rest is straightforward:

1. Research consumer language they use to articulate their pains

2. Publish content assets with a clear value proposition

3. Optimize reader acquisition with marketing tactics

Now, if you need to drive demand specifically for your company, that’s a story of its own – brand awareness. Ultimately, it’s about showing content with a simple and precise message – [company name] – [UVP]. On top of that, it’s about building a media outlet inside your company.

Demand: Generating VS Capturing

I had no clue what hackathons were until I attended one.
In the back of my mind, I imagined diehard developers gathering to compete in teams.
Sort of video game tournaments where instead of games there’s software.

Looking back, damn was I delusional about this!
Actually participating in it has busted my personal myths:

• hackathons are only for developers

• hackathons are just contests

Turns out, hackathons are cradles for startups.
Nothing can simulate the startup experience as much as hackathons.
You get to pitch ideas, build teams, set up processes, and do a good presentation!

In a macro sense, that’s very alike to the first iterations of MVPs when it ends up in a presentation for investors.

I typically write about marketing and growth, but in this article, I’d like to share a different experience - how to win awards at hackathons. This one was specifically about my experience at the Talents On AI hackathon held in Kyiv on May 2023.

Dare to pitch your idea

Hackathons typically go like this:

1. Pitching ideas to the crowd

2. Joining teams

3. Building the product

4. Presenting the product demo

A week before the event, I came up with a product idea.
It was about an AI that trains soft skills.
So I prepared a 10-slide presentation selling this idea to the participants.

This was a marketing presentation about:

• market size

• user personas

• growth tactics

In retrospect, I think I’ve overdone it.
Because the rest of the pitchers didn’t have a presentation.
Regardless, my approach has worked well!

One of the content tactics I’ve used was providing a framework for choosing a project to work on:

I was practically educating our market, even though it was made up of hackathon participants. But it’s the same concept in actual markets with blog articles.

Doing a presentation has certainly helped with “inbound leads”.

A professional designer approached me after the presentation.
He’s shown his willingness to work together by introducing himself.
And he also connected me with a developer.

Instead of approaching people, they approach you.
I’ve met even more marketers and developers this way.

How do hackathon teams emerge

After the pitch stage, it’s a free for all. Everyone talks to each other to understand if they want to join up. And they have to consider a lot of things:

• participant’s expertise and experience

• participant’s communication style

• how good is the product idea

• who else is already on the team

One thing I would have done differently was actually ask people their winning criteria to join the team. Worst case scenario is a good opportunity for networking though. Even if your idea doesn’t fit their criteria, you can recommend a product team who might be a better fit. Win-Win.

In my case, it was a shitshow. I disappeared for 1.5 hours because of work meetings. Never do that. Even if you take the day off for hackathons, do not be disturbed by the work calls. Time is a resource there, make it count.

When I went back, the designer and developer were already sitting at another team’s table. I asked them if they decided to proceed with that product team and they said yes. I felt so embarrassed that I pushed them away when they approached me the second time during the work call.

And so I found the developer who talked to me before. He was sitting at the same table as an HR with a psychology background. Can you see now how diverse are people on hackathons?

Realizing that there aren’t as many people on the team, I thought about joining the AI psychology team. However, it was important for me to see my idea through, with sunk costs and all that.

10 minutes later the designer and developer came back to our table! Apparently, they didn’t align with their team and wanted to work with my idea. We were saved.

How to reduce the chaos

Here’s a recipe for disaster – do not align your teammates on the vision and processes. I didn’t take the initiative to approve the technical approach for everyone.

At first, I thought we agreed on the telegram chatbot. Turned out the designer pushed for a website. When we came back on the 2nd day, I thought we were working on a telegram chatbot. Turned out the developer worked until 3 AM on a website solution 😭

So much for a laissez-faire leadership style! Don’t expect people to take on a team sync task themselves. If you see chaos, frame it with an algorithmic process, even if it’s something out of your league like development in my case.

Management is universal.
It’s about building the perfect relationship between all teammates:

• When all concerns are voiced and addressed

• When everyone is on the same page

Good romantic relationships work alike. Except for that, you only need to sync 2 people. It’s interesting how this experience is universal among all types of relationships.

Another fuck-up case study was a remote marketer in our team. I’ve asked her to do a few tasks and then completely forgot about her involvement. When I realized that, it felt too weird. I didn’t text her, she didn’t text me.

Most importantly, I didn’t create a virtual task board for everyone. We were in our offline world, completely remote from her accommodations. Eventually, we had to part ways.

I took 3 lessons from this:

• consider which exact roles will you need for a project

• introduce remote teammates to the rest of the team

• create a mutual workspace for everyone

The product is more important than its demo

This thesis is only applicable to hackathons. Because in a Riskiest Assumption Test, you’d actually use a demo to measure the demand. Otherwise, you could have spent a lot of hours on an MVP with no commercial potential.

When we were ideating a product demo, we decided to make a presentation.
It would have been an overhauled version of my pitch, tailored to evaluation criteria.

However, the hackathon hosts made clear that they value the product itself above all.
We only had 3 minutes to make an impression.

So we changed our approach to this:

• Make one slide with a clear product positioning and UVP

• Allocate 30 seconds to intro

• Allocate 2:30 minutes to the actual demonstration

Hackathon winners

Making connections with mentors and judges is just as important.
If they don’t come to your table, go to theirs!

Mentors are useful for validating your product hypothesis. While they can’t determine the demand, they can tell their perception of product values. They can also give feedback on the interface.

The most important part of mentor interaction is their engagement with the product. The more you iterate according to their feedback, the more they will feel like being part of the success. Odds are, they might vote for products they engaged with the most.

The web app production went on until the very deadline.
Eventually, we had 2/3 of a product demo ready:

• ✅ onboarding

• ✅ simulated challenge feature

• ❌ skill XP dashboard

If the app failed on stage, I would have shown my mad skills of prompt engineering on chatGPT.

While the presentation went fairly well, there was not enough time to load up anything beyond onboarding. Instead of actually sticking to the chatGPT plan B, I-…stalled time.

In the end, we didn’t win the top spots, but we got the award for best platform app usage. In our case, it translated into “best product that has used the hackathon hosts’ technology”.

While hackathon hosts aim for authentic from-scratch products, winners come from established teams. And if you really want to win, you might as well prepare the product before the hackathon. That’s not exactly authentic, but it can help you secure PR and prize awards for further product growth.

Key insights

• Hackathons are the best event types for finding business partners.
  Everyone here is just as ambitious and they can cover your weak spots.

• Hackathons are about proof of concepts. PoC of the team though, not necessarily a product. Product ideas will iterate and change, people not so much. You can use these opportunities to set up a “trial”: what’s it like working with your teammates.

• If you’re the one with ideas, prepare a pitch deck for your potential teammates. Educate them on how to choose the team to work with. And show them the potential of your idea with some market data. It’s also a good idea to state which specialists you’re looking for.

• Lead the team by constantly syncing on the same level of understanding.
  Set up quick meetings to define the next steps.

• Don’t leave remote teammates left out.
  Introduce them to the team and ask them to be self-accountable for their tasks.

Overall, I am very excited about what’s next in my professional career! A while ago, I felt stuck working in a subsidized startup. Having learned from those business mistakes, I will prevent them from happening in my own project.

It’s a marketing approach to acquire new customers without exposing their browser usage to ad networks. It’s actually one of principles of a wider concept – privacy-first marketing.

The web browsers have set the new trend to block third-party cookies.

Remember:

• Cookies are a technology for websites to remember your actions like signing into your account. When you clear cookies, you erase that action.

• A first-party cookie is a storage memory hosted by the website.

• A third-party cookie is hosted by the website partners like ad networks.

Cookies play an important role in attributing the source of a customer and their page behavior.

Why Cookieless Marketing is important

Ad networks can track users history, so long as users visit websites with cookies set by these networks. For example, Google Ads is an ad network business. To thrive, it needs to provide evidence of its performance to the business clients. For its search ads, reporting is pretty straightforward. But when it comes to display ads, things get tricky.

Website publishers need to use Google’s cookies in order for Google to correctly monitor the ad impressions. When a user visits websites where both of them have Google’s cookie, Google can stitch these website visits into one browser session, effectively recording the user’s history – but as long as the user visits websites with Google’s cookies.

It’s also common for ad networks to exchange data. Like when G2 collects its visitors’ cookies with a LinkedIn tag and sells it as a “LinkedIn audience” for you to target.

What Cookieless Marketing is Going to Change for Businesses

If you’re in the ad network business, you need to figure out new ways to track users across your publishers.

If you’re any other business, there are two main concerns: retargeting and unattributed traffic.

Retargeting is when you collect the audience of people who have visited your website, and you wish to show them ads on other websites. In this case, ad networks will have a hard time tracking this audience.

You may end up with more share of the direct traffic while your retargeting campaigns are live. That can happen when a user clicks on the banner ad, visits your website, and then comes back by typing the address directly. Without the third-party cookies to stitch those sessions, that user is attributed as “direct”.

I used to think that it would also impact traffic monitoring, like when you set up Google Analytics or HubSpot. But turns out, their tags actually instruct your domain to host your own cookies, making them first-party cookies.

Cookies are but one aspect of privacy-first marketing. There are still issues like UTM tag stripping and hiding IP addresses, so in the long run, you will need a technical solution like server-side tagging.

Cookieless Marketing Best Practices

Enact the demand gen attribution

1. Filter your direct leads by your branded landing pages: homepage, about, contact page.

2. Filter your search leads the same way and combine them with the direct leads above.

3. Run correlation analysis between your brand awareness campaigns and the count of demand gen leads.

4. If the connection is strong, run a regression analysis to figure out how many expenses are needed to generate one demand-gen lead.

Implement server-side tagging

1. Set up a cloud server like Google Cloud.

2. Create a new server-side container in your Google Tag Manager account.

3. In the container, configure tags for analytics services like GA or Facebook Pixel.

4. Link your website to the server-side container using the server URL from a cloud server.

5. Publish and test via the preview mode.

Experiment with contextual targeting

As ad networks will slowly phase out from cookie retargeting, it’s high time to test brand awareness ads based on topics alone. And if remarketing to an unconverted audience is that important to you, just turn them into a blog subscriber with lead magnets and send the personalized emails from there.