Read This First
Getting your marketing engine churning is no easy task. It takes a lot time, effort, and dedication for marketing to make an impact on your business. For technologists like us, marketing is an entirely different ball game that takes us outside of things that we know how to do well. By acknowledging this, we needed a process to systematically level up our marketing efforts.
Plain and simple we think of marketing as a way to provide value to people – nothing else. The big idea here is to not think of marketing as selling. Even when companies provide swag (like USB sticks, t-shirts, and etc.) they are providing something useful for people. We have the ability to create and provide a wealth of knowledge that can help others and that should be the vehicle that drives our marketing efforts.
This is our living guide to our marketing at Bottega8. We needed a way to keep us accountable for our marketing plan and this is why we’ve made it public. As we learn more about how our marketing affects our business we will be sure to update this guide to reflect what is working and what is not for us. Let this be a resource that will benefit you as well as us.
Explore What Content to Create
Here at Bottega8, we like creating and putting things out in the world. So on our blog, you’ll see written posts when we get inspired or announcements about tiny products/apps we build. We’ll start with these two types of pieces to publish because it’s the most natural to us.
Also, it’s important to find what you want to share and play to your strengths. If you’re a developer, post code samples. If you’re a baker, post recipes like Chelssweets who has done an amazingly sweet job of showcasing her recipes with photos. Basically post anything related to your interests. The way we see it, everyone has something to share that others can learn from. It just takes time and effort to create.
Create 10 Pieces of Content
It’s imperative to spend time upfront to create content before you publish anything. We’re okay with spending more time in the beginning to create content in order to have a backlog to publish later. We learned this the hard way when we tried publishing posts before. We felt the pressure to create content because we didn’t have a backlog and that led to not publishing anything for a couple months because client work took precedence.
This time around we want to have 5 months of content scheduled and planned out which requires more investment upfront. We want to shoot for 10 pieces of content which is 5 months of content being published twice a month. We will then be able to create content once a month and feed the backlog resulting in a content machine of awesome posts!
Before posting this guide we had the following posts ready to publish and in the backlog:
- The Consulting Guide to Marketing
- The final no bs complete ultimate guide to nil?, empty?, and blank? (with absolutely no guarantees)
- Ruby quizzes. Test and retain your skills.
- When the Rails Magic Stops. Cookies, Storage, and Sessions.
- Running Our Business like We Run Client Projects
- Focus on Small Wins that Compound on Each Other
- Revisiting QuickRake – What We Learned
- What SaaS Companies Can Learn From Customers at the Mall
- How to Capture Moments of Motivation
- A Closer Look at How We Build Software
The above is what you have to look forward to in coming months.
Set Up Your Outlets & Channels
For us, we want to focus on being consistent with a few channels to do our outreach on. We want to err on the side of making sure we are listening and communicating on these channels. By focusing our efforts on a few channels we’ll be able to effectively measure our performance.
We are going to focus on these channels:
- Email Mailing List
- Personal Network
Think About Context
We highly suggest reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s latest book, Jab Jab Right Hook before publishing anything online. It’ll give you a well rounded synopsis of what the landscape looks like and how to utilize online channels for your business. That’s where most of our online marketing tactics will be coming from. One thing that we will be thinking about while we implement our strategy is understanding the context of the platform we’re active on.
For example, when we share our Ruby Programming Quiz mini-app we’ll create a graphic like the one below and attach that as the image to our tweet. Now that Twitter defaults to displaying in-stream images people have been seeing increased engagement with their tweets. We see that using images as another means to communicate with people.
One thing to note is that any creative that we create, will always have our Bottega8 logo somewhere like in the lower left corner in the image above. In JJRH, Gary explained this idea to be critical in order to build brand awareness. Ultimately, we want people to associate us by the value that we offer them.
It’s important to note that this isn’t an end all, be all, guideline for us. This is just a baseline strategy that we are going to start with. As we learn and do more we’ll evaluate and adapt our strategy to make it our own.
Populate Your Email List
Before we publish anything one thing that we can do is add contacts to our email lists. For now, we asked our friends and family if they wanted to be on our mailing list. Everyone said, yes. Again, we needed to start somewhere so the number of email addresses isn’t important. It’s about being consistent with sending emails to the people that have subscribed.
We’re thankful to everyone who wants to hear our story and read updates about our company no matter what size of audience is listening.
Contact Your Contacts
Reach out to your own network individually when you publish anything. Let people know that you wrote about a particular topic that you think they might be interested in or show them what you built. Being able to share what you’ve been up to to your friends and family is great place to start.
In Summary
Our goal is to get our marketing at a point where it’s consistent and of quality. Therefore, we are not going for quantity because we see creating valuable, informative, and interesting content or projects as a long term game. We understand that it’s going to be marathon and perfectly are fine with that.
You can expect us to publish some type of content or release a mini-application at least twice a month.
We are excited to hear your thoughts, feedback, and comments on what we have to share in the next couple months! If you don’t want to miss anything feel free to subscribe to our mailing list below.
