Have you ever felt the rush of adrenaline when a marketing campaign you've meticulously crafted takes off, propelling your project to new heights? Picture this: you're sitting at your desk, refreshing your browser, and suddenly, the numbers start climbing—views, likes, shares—all soaring like a rocket into the digital stratosphere.
That is 100% a dopamine rush when you do it the first times. Works even better with sales numbers, trust me on that.
But beyond the thrill of success lies a deeper curiosity: How do other startups and companies navigate the tumultuous waters of business development? Why do they pivot their messaging or alter campaign styles? What are the costs and outcomes of these strategic manoeuvres? Yes, I'm potentially obsessed with building, refining, and scaling ideas from the ground up.
Self Starter Reality
For large brands like Nike, a product launch is a massive undertaking. It involves months of preparation and spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions, on branding and content creation. The level of detail involved, like orchestrating a 20-second video shoot with Roger Federer after three months of meticulous planning is incredible.
Launching your first product or business, in contrast, often means having little to no budget. You might use social medias and maybe YouTube, for example. You can start a channel for free using just your phone or laptop camera. As a self-starter, well, we gotta be a bit more creative.
And I love that. That not purely marketing thinking, but that intersection between business development and marketing, you have that especially in startups, early-stage companies, and scale-ups. Scale-ups have more money so they usually do the noteworthy creative stunts. And they work.
So it is this blank page (Taylor Swift pun not intended) that gets gradually filled with sticky notes containing questionable ideas and nonsensical thoughts being played around with.
It is there where you find that something, that idea no one else does.
Put enough time into research
For instance, we are in one of the most boring industries ever. B2B Real Estate.
No offense, but it is dry.
It is usually some ads, a boring landing page, and the rest are sales. The marketing team does mainly content such as blogs, some flyers, ads, and occasionally a video or digital campaign.
First, we checked what everyone else does, namely our competitors, and then our potential customers.
That took a while. The ads were obvious, so we did focus a bit on that. As in, what keywords do they use? What about videos? Open graph images? Where do the ads lead to? Are they personalized, and so on.
I created a list to find the blind spots the competitors (and we) had. Then we reworked some ads. Not all at once, step by step to keep the budget low. We created various short-form videos, as most ads were text with a few having images.
That went really well. Then we redid thumbnails for almost every single indexed page and so on. That took a ton of time, but our ads now are pretty darn good for the amount of money we spend.
What do others not do?
Further, we checked for what no one else does to target specific clients. And I saw that noone does physical marketing in our industry. Not like handing out flyers, the equivalent of free food samples at the train station that everybody forgets after 7 seconds.
Targeted, physical marketing. Like, pre-internet-style marketing. Sending your enemy a bottle of poison. Sort of.
For instance, we have some dream clients I wanted to win. But, who are the right targets that need to hear our value proposition?
Well, instead of starting using a sales software or LinkedIn to warm up the people, we created various mini-campaigns that targeted the people that worked in that company, so that they would talk about us and recognize our brand.
For one mini-campaign, I rented a large van, printed the side and parked it outside their building.
It was not even the purpose to sell them anything at that stage. We planted the idea of working with us. Now it was up to the sales team. Which was also me, but that's the reality in a startup :D
Also, we could repurpose literally everything for social media, which is great. Also, chances are, some newspaper features this so, free publicity.
(Don't overdo it with the stunts though, you can also damage your reputation)
The same could apply for videos as well though, or pictures, LinkedIn posts and so on.
Creative giveaways at conventions.
The giveaways are usually dead-ass boring as well. Pens, sugar thingies, and that's about it.
So we went the extra mile.
The first question I asked myself was: what is the physical representation of our brand?
That is a really hard question to answer for a lot of brands.
But, depending on what you want the customer to feel, it can be many things. We work with solar and energy system providers. Thus, little solar planes you can build yourself work as giveaways.
We took the same concept and gave people little branded stress balls because we help reduce stress with our software.
For one convention, we then also made large gym balls people can sit upon.
I also like to spread sensory items, such as spicy chewing gum and other similar giveaways and other things that created sensory responses that are different from the visual stuff because people have a visual overload when visiting these massive events and seeing hundreds of booths. This stuff is not even particularly expensive at all.
Yet, the effect can be overwhelmingly positive.
Some things work, some won't
I believe that some creativity can make a massive difference, particularly if you are in a niche, where other players are not too active.
With software, good chances you can outmarket the majority of your competitors in some sorts - even if you don't have an ads budget. I guarantee you, that some stuff will be really bad. We spends hundreds on sending letters to our target group, that led to ultimately 0 conversions. At least we got some hatemail back that we framed and have it now hanging in the office.
Time to have fun with our marketing.