What's zero to one marketing?
Zero to one marketing is contradictory to traditional marketing. There is no brand identity and story to protect. It's getting foot in the door, often carelessly. Ingenuity matters, not quality.
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This weekend has been beyond lazy. It started off with a podcast recording. It is expected to be released in Jan, don’t know if I will cringe at myself 🙃.
Recently tensions have been high on the way I approach work, specifically, zero to one marketing. I put my foot down against traditional marketing methods. Simply because they don’t work for an upstart. They look good, they don’t perform. Period.
So, today we will talk about -
What’s zero to one marketing?
What you should not focus on?
Where should you focus?
Where should you invest?
How big should be the team?
Before we jump in, the benefits of non-traditional zero to one marketing approach is that
It’s focused on results (and hard metrics, read sales) - If we don’t see customers or interest, it is better to shut down the brand.
It’s fast - In about 3-4 months I know if something will work or not.
It’s frugal - We do not engage KOLs, brand ambassadors and expensive PR. Only basic social media, performance marketing and marketplace distribution.
#1 What’s zero to one marketing?
When you are starting out as a consumer brand (or B2B), you will employ zero to one marketing tactics. They help you get your first sales and then more. The first 3-6 months of a brand is all about zero to one.
Zero to one gets your acquisition engine running. At this stage, users with a specific pain-points start buying your products. They don’t care about quality, trust and reviews (well they do, but they are such pain that they ignore them).
Zero to one marketing depends if you are
Founder-led brands - Here founder means someone with at least 500K engaged fans. The authority of the founder matters. The founder story is the key.
Existing CPG group - A easy example is Unilever. However, there are tons of small CPG groups that do well in regional markets. Here, existing distribution network is the key.
Starting from scratch - Brands under this group do not have a famous founder or distribution network. They are new to market. They should have financial backing, at least 500K USD, in the bank.
#2 What should not be the focus?
Marketeers are strange folks. They are fussy over details. They are fussier than creative designers and artists. For zero to one marketing, the fuss needs to be thrown out.
Let’s look at 5 things traditional marketing teams worship.
Quality and details - Audio quality, video quality, product placement is “not right”, product “not in focus”, website banners are not looking good, product copies are not perfect, language needs to be “sharper” (🤯), lighting is “not proper”.
Consumers do not care about all of this. New brands are not perfect. Customers understand this and take risk with their purchase.Process - “All branding documents should be done by internal team”. “All manufacturing has to be done in-house”. “All marketing deliverables should be approved by brand manager and VP of marketing”. “We should make a presentation of marketing campaigns to the entire company and get their go ahead”. “We should not things last minute”.
Ditch process, focus on executing as many versions as possible. Prioritise learning over bureaucracy.Being right - “If I do this campaign in this way, it will be a success”. And then the person spends 4-6 weeks thinking about a 2 week campaign. They will then get everyone’s approval so that if it fails, they will not be blamed.
Automation - Marketing automation is a buzzword. People like to schedule social media posts (rightly so). Marketeers will ask - So, which tool do we use to automate our social media? Which tool will provide all the consolidated numbers at one place? (use your hands to extract data! 🤯)
Overthinking - The amount of mental masturbation (sorry 🙏) in meeting rooms with marketing teams is beyond frustrating. All campaigns are simple executions, until made complicated by overthinking and overestimating impact of things that could go wrong.
I have preached a lot till now. So it is rightful that I tell you how we did our zero to one marketing pan out.
Who were our first customers?
Xandro - Customers who already knew what NMN is. People wanted it but it was too expensive and out of reach. Most customers asked if the brand is made in Singapore. As soon as we said yes, a sale was made.
Same was the case with magnesium glycinate. People were looking for the product. We offered a good price and made in Singapore brand. Customers emptied our warehouse every few weeks.Cerm - This is relatively new brand. Our first few customers are the ones effected by eczema, rosacea and red skin. They ask if the product will help them. If the products work on sensitive skin. And boom, they make a purchase. When the pain point is big, most consumers don’t care about everything else.
#3 What should be the focus?
Let me divide this into two sections - KPI and actions.
KPI
Only 2 KPIs are important in the first 6 months. These help you decide if the business makes sense.
Product revenue - This will decide if your marketing is performing.
Unit sales - This will decide your inventory production plan. This is critical, since you do not want to go out of stock at peak of your sales
Beyond this, you should look at audience demography on GA4, browse behaviour on MS Clarity, and product funnel performance. However, these are secondary information. They help you improve.
Action
The focus is fast execution of ideas. Fast. Very fast⚡
“Content creators are talking about magnesium glycinate”. Reach out to 50 of them asap and plug your brand.
“Tiktok is launching a marketplace”. List on the marketplace asap.
“A new style of social media videos are doing well”. Try it out asap.
Yes, you will be running everyday to get things done. That’s okay. You are a new brand. You cannot chill.
Now let’s go through key actions in first 6 months.
Set up the distribution channels - This would be your website, marketplace stores and other distribution channels available.
Reach more of your target audience - Reaching people is key goal. As you start, you are training Facebook and Google algorithms who should visit the website. Same thing for Shopee or Amazon store - get users to start seeing your products and brand store.
Generate stories from users (create content) - Real people story matters a lot. Get hold of your friends or content creators and ask them to review your products. Pay them if needed. Generate stories on video and images.
Incentivize early users to review your products.Get feedback about the product (not design) - Let people call your number or office number. Give them your WhatsApp number to text to. Treat the users as your friends (even if they nag you). Let them tell you what do they care about? The label looks wrong? The bottle is difficult to use?
Customers have have sent detailed feedback about our products. That’s a gold mine. Ensure it keeps flowing.Learn and evolve every week - Finally, instead of trying to be perfect on day 1, evolve. Evolve every few days or weeks based on the feedback from the customer.
Customers complained about our Black Friday sale communication being misleading. So we changed it.
A brand takes at least 10 years to be built. Even then it is just an upstart. We should stop taking everything seriously and test as many ideas as possible. Even the most stupid ones.
It is criminal in zero to one marketing to sit on ideas instead of executing.
Thank you for reading till here. I will keep the next two sections will be short and sweet.
#4 Where should you invest?
Investing can take a few forms such as giving out free products, paying for ads and service, and sometimes gifts.
Content generation - Pay users, content creators and real people to talk about your product. Don’t pay the KOLs. Pay the ones who may become brand promoters.
Reviews - Find ingenious ways of getting people to review. 40-45% customer rate your products on marketplaces. Of these customer ratings, roughly 50% write reviews sharing their experience. The goal is to make customers write about their experience.
Events - Towards to the later part of zero to one marketing, find ways to meet your existing and prospective customers. I am not good at this, but I have seen it works wonders.
Run product led ads - This could be a simple social media post boost or a Facebook ad for a specific product. Keep the campaigns active for at least a month, tweak during the time.
Collaborators/partners - Find credible people in the space you are working and ask them for their honest opinion. If they endorse you, that becomes a new story for you.
Each product has unique ways of creating stories. For the Cold Plunge founders, it was installing the cold plunge in celebrity homes live on Facebook and Instagram.
#5 How big should the team be?
Keep it lean. I would say 3-5 people are best. You do not need too many opinions or egos to tend to. You need folks who work hard.
Most activities can be outsourced - social media content, performance marketing and fulfilment.
Keep customer service inhouse for the first 6 months. Later you can get a virtual assistant to help you.
That’s it. I realised that I had written another piece on “first 60 days marketing”. If you are curious, here is the link.
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