Intercom on Marketing

There’s a common misconception about marketing at a startup. People think marketing means doing things like signing up on Product Hunt, writing a few blog posts about what’s wrong with your industry, cold-blasting a bunch of journalists with a press release, and then hoping for the best. There’s nothing wrong with doing those things – they are decent starting points – but marketing is significantly more challenging than following a playbook.What you’ll hear in this series is a collection of lessons about marketing we at Intercom have learned the hard, expensive, messy way. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The most important tasks for any early-stage startup are to write code and talk to users. The latter represents your very first marketing opportunity, whether that's asking prospects to try your product over email, meeting them at conferences, responding to them in blog comments, or talking to them on Hacker News.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

No matter how good your product is, if you can’t tell a cohesive, compelling story about it, you’re going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when you actually do take it to market. At Intercom, our approach to crafting a story begins with asking, “Why?” Why are you building this product, and why does it matter?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Despite the mountain of contradicting evidence, the mantra of “if you build it, they will come” is still extremely prevalent among product-first companies. Don’t delay aligning your product and marketing teams. If you do, you’ll live to regret it.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There’s a misconception that word of mouth is a mystical force that’s out of your control. Sure, you can’t control what words come out of whose mouths, but you can encourage people to say the right words about your product.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The usual content marketing approach is to make people want to read the things you’ve already written. We knew writing things that potential customers already wanted to read would be easier, and we scaled that strategy by building an editorial team. If you want to adopt the same approach, this chapter makes the case for it – and gives tips to get started.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When you’re just starting up, other than knocking on someone’s front door, events are the most targeted, proactive and personal way you can meet the people you need to meet. Do them well, and you turn those meetings into lasting relationships. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A lot of businesses fail because they’re simply not good at acquiring and retaining customers. That's where demand generation comes into play. Here's our guide to getting started.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thanks to SaaS, there are more features to talk about on a constant cadence. The challenge then becomes, which things do you shout about? With more opportunities, it’s tempting to shout about each and every one of them. Do that, and people will stop listening to you. As a result, here's how we prioritize our product announcements.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Product launches are exciting – culminating with the rush of joy and fear as you finally share your creation with the world. More importantly, launches are one of your best opportunities to drive brand awareness, and ultimately generate new customers. It’s worth taking the time to get them right.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When you ask people what product marketing is, the first thing that comes to mind is usually product launches. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of product marketing. Launches are the beginning of a process, not the end. Only after launch do you learn what’s working, what’s not and how you can iterate quickly from there.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It’s easy to have a highly data-driven view of everything you do and overlook hard to measure things like brand. This leads to a tunnel-vision focus on optimizing funnels and growth hacking button colors, and ignores investing time in equally important tasks. Most notably, creating emotional connections with your customers. In this chapter, we share a few principles about branding that will point any startup in the right direction.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Every business should have an active interest in why people buy their products and the situations people find themselves in before they become customers. Do that, and you'll understand why you need marketing that caters to all of them.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Too often we blow the marketing budget on acquiring new customers – only to ignore them as soon as they sign up. In reality, the best marketing strategies drive not just sales, but also long-term customer success. That all starts with product education.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.