Strategy & Sourdough

The marketing funnel is a useful tool for startup marketers. In this episode we explore what it is, how to customise it for your business, and how to use it to visualise and plan your marketing activities. We also explain the different steps of the marketing funnel, and provide examples of activities in each step, along with guidance on where to get started.

In this episode we speak with VJ Anand, Head of Creative at Vaynermedia APAC to discuss what it takes to stand out in a sea of sameness, and to get people to remember your brand. VJ speaks about the importance of having a personality for a challenger brand, and how to work with founders or owners to have a space to experiment and find their secret weapon.

Steven Kalifowitz shares lessons learned growing tech startups in New York and now globally from Hong Kong, why aligning your marketing to your product's adoption cycle is crucial, why no-one will help you without a good story, and the importance of reach and frequency for startup growth.

In this episode we talk about how to use messaging to bridge the gap between positioning and creative execution. We discuss the challenges of balancing long term, emotional, brand messaging with short term, functional, product messaging and introduce useful examples for figuring out what your messaging should look like.

How do you translate strategy into action? In this episode we discuss targeting, the importance of media neutrality, measuring return on investment, how to test & learn effectively and challenges with attribution.

What capabilities should startups build internally vs. outsource externally? What should you look for in early vs. later hires? How do you balance the tradeoff between time and cost? In this episode, we discuss the pros and cons of investing vs. spending on marketing growth at different stages of startup growth.

What's interesting about a frog? What do ninjas have to do with creativity? What did you and partner end up doing while in Mexico? In this episode, we discuss the importance of challenging existing assumptions and learning how to spot great ideas, share useful creative techniques such as forced connections, writing press releases and good old wishful thinking.

Bridging the gap between strategy and execution requires realistic, measurable and actionable goals. But how do you do that under uncertainty? In this episode we look at how to build the right habits for the long term while working your way back from commercial outcomes to realistic goals in the short term, the importance of writing down your goals, how to translate them effectively to into action, and how best to work with creative people.

Our special guest, Riku Vassinen shares his insights on what makes strategy good (or bad), why "being agile" is not really a strategy, his 4A framework for crafting winning strategies and the importance of setting guiding policies for startups.

Positioning helps to frame the conversation around and shape the perception of your brand. In this episode, we discuss great (and not very good) examples of positioning, what it means for startups to "pick an enemy", what makes a good positioning statement and whether Finnish or Swiss chocolate is better.