Page 8 - Intercom On Marketing
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Whenever you say “marketing,” someone will grab
a marker and head to the whiteboard to draw “Ye Olde Funnel of Stages and Tactics.” Usually at a startup they’ll begin at the left-hand side, the top
of the funnel. If they’re an experienced marketer, or love reading marketing blogs so they can pretend to be, they’ll call it “TOFU,” short for Top of the Funnel. We’re a real hoot, we marketers.
The Top of the Funnel, they’ll say, is your big problem: “You’ve got a world-class product; now you just need to tell people. Find yourself the deep and cheap keywords, and start bidding.” This is a truly fantastic way to ramp up your burn rate, or, in more blunt terms, piss away your cash.
In the very early days of Intercom’s marketing, we could have tried going heavy on demand generation, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on messaging that wasn’t tested or proven in the market. It’s hard to know what search terms to bid on and what adverts to run when you don’t really know what you’ve built, who is buying it, why they’re buying it or what language they use to describe it.
The first step in marketing at a startup is thinking about it from the inside out. That means you start
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