We were looking for online platforms where marketers connected professionally. But we wanted more than a hangout. We also needed a marketing channel. After all, it doesn’t work to show up in a place and shout, “Hey, give us your money!” Instead, we needed to identify a place of opportunity — an opportunity for us to listen, learn, and give value.
Here were the criteria we established for vetting viable marketing channels:
In order for the platform to be successful, there needed to be give and take. We needed to engage with potential customers, and they needed to be able to engage with us. This nudged us towards a platform with a social angle.
Back in 2008, “content marketing” wasn’t a thing. According to Google Trends, the term didn’t become a hot search item until 2011. (We founded KISSmetrics in 2008.)
The idea behind content marketing is giving value, ideally for free. That’s what we wanted to do with KISSmetrics. Our tool was designed to provide actionable metrics. Our marketing, then, needed to be valuable for marketers.
Most of the time, getting a high ROI requires spending little money. Usually, organic platforms require more time than money, and we were okay with that. As an early stage startup, we were cheap and scrappy.
As it was, analytics incumbents like Omniture were dominating paid search. For us to bid on relevant AdWords, we would have to spend more than $10 to get a single click! That wasn’t an option for us. We ruled out all contending marketing channels that required us to invest a large amount of cash upfront.
If you want your business to be scalable, your marketing has to be scalable, too. In fact, marketing scalability should be a primary consideration when considering business scalability as a whole.
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