Stay Zen!

On Monday, the lovely folks at Zopim came down to give us a talk about growth hacking and insights about startup life, both of which are seminal to our growth here in the class itself. 

Marketing is easy work, as I've observed from my incredibly short month at a local startup, but successful marketing isn't so. The startup had set aside more than sufficient amounts to splurge on their marketing plans, as did they have enough connections to help spread the word. Yet till today, about 4 months since the first marketing intern was hired, they have barely reached 500 fans on their page.

It was the most interesting for me to both learn tips on growth and especially on how you don't require any money to get a startup up, running and great to go. Bjorn shared with us his personal - and very much invaluable - tips and I very nerdily took notes down, lest I ever get dementia and lose memory on that. Most of his tips were highly logical - like moving in early to get higher market dominance or getting automated ads to ease the marketer's load, but what should be taken away is that we should be mindful of these things, because they often are the ones that we tend to overlook.

It's great to know that we would call the "unethical" way of marketing has reaped so many rewards; from personal experience I've actually seen many Instagram users with huge followings made up of fake accounts. Surprisingly, Instagram came up with a session to purge these empty accounts and many users ended up with a whole lot less followers than they had previously seemed to have (as seen here). Even so, with a huge following it's way, way easier to gain more followers, so the way here to go is to just fake it till you make it.

On that note of Instagram - I've noticed that hashtags play a major role in marketing today - businesses are creating their own for marketing purposes, businesses are tapping into widely used or specific hashtags to target their existing and potential users. I'll illustrate with my favourite brand UO: in creating their own hashtag #UOonYou on Instagram, they invite fans to tag pictures of themselves wearing UO merchandise and feature their fans on their feed. Lesson #1 on marketing: It's a great brand identity and engagement of the customers, plus you get a huge repository of images relevant for your brand. #2: By getting featured you'll get tons of followers, in line with Bjorn's argument on why we should try to get our apps on listings - I know because I was once featured and doubled my following, which I regard as one of the most momentous moments of my life. And it's cool because these are the people you want to target! UO also uses (relatively) specific tags like #uoboston/#boston on their images depending on what it is, which I think is great as opposed to #northeast/#america/#thewholeworld, because you're actually zooming into a specific target group, rather than blindly joining a rapidly and always updating list of popular tags. So lesson #3: target your tags at the appropriate audience and don't go on a rampage in using hashtags on everything, I #mean #it, it's #extremely #annoying.

'Twas a brilliant talk! Loved every part of it and couldn't stop nodding my head to everything, but I'm the happiest about how it made me think about marketing fails and marketing aspects from everyday life too.

I'm not sure if I like writing too much or I have too many opinions, but I have more to say about Wenxiang's sharing session (which was actually what my graphic was based on) and my teams' progress in both the assignments and Saturday's workshop as well, so

till the next post!!!