Intercom on Marketing Intercom
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- Business
In this series Intercom takes you inside the marketing lessons we've learned the hard, expensive and messy way. We include the insights that helped us grow from zero customers to more than 20,000, but we’ve been careful to be honest and have worked hard to avoid the usual truisms. Instead, we’ve focused on actionable advice we think will benefit any early stage startup – from crafting early messaging, to managing a product launch, to keeping product and marketing aligned.
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Introducing Intercom on Marketing
There’s a common misconception about marketing at a startup. People think marketing means doing things like signing up on Product Hunt, writing a few blog posts about what’s wrong with your industry, cold-blasting a bunch of journalists with a press release, and then hoping for the best. There’s nothing wrong with doing those things – they are decent starting points – but marketing is significantly more challenging than following a playbook.
What you’ll hear in this series is a collection of lessons about marketing we at Intercom have learned the hard, expensive, messy way.
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Chapter 1: Marketing in year one
The most important tasks for any early-stage startup are to write code and talk to users. The latter represents your very first marketing opportunity, whether that's asking prospects to try your product over email, meeting them at conferences, responding to them in blog comments, or talking to them on Hacker News.
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Chapter 2: Getting your story right
No matter how good your product is, if you can’t tell a cohesive, compelling story about it, you’re going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when you actually do take it to market. At Intercom, our approach to crafting a story begins with asking, “Why?” Why are you building this product, and why does it matter?
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Chapter 3: Marketing at a product-first company
Despite the mountain of contradicting evidence, the mantra of “if you build it, they will come” is still extremely prevalent among product-first companies. Don’t delay aligning your product and marketing teams. If you do, you’ll live to regret it.
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Chapter 4: Getting word of mouth for your startup
There’s a misconception that word of mouth is a mystical force that’s out of your control. Sure, you can’t control what words come out of whose mouths, but you can encourage people to say the right words about your product.
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Chapter 5: Content, then marketing
The usual content marketing approach is to make people want to read the things you’ve already written. We knew writing things that potential customers already wanted to read would be easier, and we scaled that strategy by building an editorial team. If you want to adopt the same approach, this chapter makes the case for it – and gives tips to get started.
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