Go to Market Strategy for Software Startups

From the desk of Kaelan Moss

RE - Going to the Market as a software company.

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If you didn't know by know... Selling a product isn't easy.

It might look easy when the guru's get online and try to sell you their 5 step program.

But getting your product or service into the hands of people who care about you isn't an easy task.

That's why people who know how to sell products and find product market fit are so highly sought after.

There's a science to it.

And a HUGE art to it as well.

Everyday, the game is changing. Things that worked 2 years ago could be irrelevant today.

And things that people care about today could change tomorrow.

You have to be on your toes. You have to understand the market. And you have to really really understand the people that you serve.

If you're just making products without knowing who you're serving with the product, you'll fail everyday of the week.

That's why it's not simple to sell products and services.

Most people don't know the actual problem they're solving because they don't know the people they're serving.

Once you know the people you're serving like the back of your hand, it becomes easy to make a great product.

Getting to know people like the back of your hand comes from speaking with them. It doesn't come from selling to them.

And that's where most go to market srategists get it wrong. They try to sell right out the door rather than getting to know the people in the target market and their pains/desires.

These are things that you think you know because you read a book, took a course, or watched a youtube video.

But you don't really know how to create great products until you really try selling a product that doesn't have product market fit.

That's where we're at in the software company I'm working with right now.

We have a technology that connects the best restaurant owners and workers together.

But getting into the hands of restaurant decision makers isn't easy. And when you do speak with them, they don't have time to listen to you.

That goes for any business though. Especially when you're starting out. You're the little guy and most people don't care about the little guy. It's a humbling experience.

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The lessons i'm learning

I'm writing about the lessons I'm learning as the Head of Marketing at the software company.

These are things I'll look back on one day when we find product market fit and every restaurant / hospitality location in the world uses our software.

Here's everything that came off the top of my head that I'm learning.

I hope this helps someone who's working at a startup and is looking for product market fit.

THe notes below were after creating the script to a Facebook ad.

I quickly realized that in order to make a successful facebook (meta) ad, you need to know exactly who you're talking to and what their pain points are.

When you make an ad, the ad needs to be super specific. You need to call out your exact target market in the first 3 seconds to get their attention.

Then you need to use copywriting skills from "Copywriting Secrets" by Jim Edwards. Specifically the section about how to write an amazing sales letter fast.

If you follow that 13 step guide on creating amazing sales letters, you will capture your target audience's attention, speak to their pain, and offer a solution that helps their exact pain point. Everything needs to be specific. If you're too broad in your message, you won't land with anyone. You need to be specific. And in order to be specific about you who help and how you help them, you need to know them. That's where market research comes in. When you learn about people, a whole new world opens up. And that's what I jotted down off the top of my dome yesterday when I wrote the notes below.

So the notes below are a culimination of everything I've been learning.

Hope that gives you some context when you're reading this later.

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What I learned this week (brainstorming go to market notes)

What I've learned this week going to market making a facebook ad campaign

1. know your audience extremely well.

   1. Know how they identify themselves (what titles do they have), what words do they use to describe their pains.?

   
   

2. How do they describe their pain points.

   1. What's familiar to them?

   
   

3. How specific is your headline in your facebook ad?

   1. Does it speak to their job title or does it speak to their pain point?

   2. Why did you choose either option?

   
   

4. Are you AB testing the subject line in each ad set?

   
   

5. Are you separating ad sets based on target audience? Within each ad-set, are you testing hooks to see what lands with that target audience?

   
   

6. Are you keeping track of your metrics on your facebook ad campaign?

   
   

7. Do you know what metrics to track for your facebook ad campaign?

   
   

8. Do you know why those metrics matter for that specifric type of campaign?

   
   

9. What does the data tell you when you read the data?

   1. do you know how to interpret that data and improve your strategy?

   2. or do you not track data? even worse, do you track data, but you never look at it and you don't even know what the data is telling you to do.

      
      

10. Do you know what the data is telling you to do?

    1. If you don't have contingency plans for your campaigns, how will you succeed?

    2. you need to have a planned campaign that is empirically proven to work based on data (not based on a hunch or a good idea).

    3. You can incorporate your ideas, brand, and unique flavor to the campaign funnel, but you need a quality infrastructure to build your campaign on. It's like a building.

    4. You need to know the infrastructure of a quality campaign.

    5. Once you do, building your message on top of that becomes plug and play.

    6. It really becomes a series of questions that you ask yourself at each step of the funnel.

    7. When you get those answers (after brainstorming and doing market research), then you'll be aware of what to say in the campaign to convert people to the next step.

       
       

11. People think you can just find a facebook ads guy who knows how to click a few buttons, and all of a sudden they're going to bring you 100K per month in profit.

    1. That's not how it works.

    2. You can learn facebook ads in 2-4 weeks if you work on it everyday and you already have marketing or sales software/tech experience.

    3. the hard part is crafting a story that is worth following. its creating a reason for people to click and buy things.

    4. its copywriting. its video creation, its scripting, it's a lot of things.

    5. sure theres a bit of facebook technical setup in the meta ad account.

    6. but the majority of it is the writing, scripting, editing, brainstorming, revising, market research, videoing, data analysis, thats required to build an interesting campaign that get's people to want to click and convert.

       
       

12. If you want to know your target market, you need to go speak with them (a lot).

    1. and you need to really know what makes them tick. record every call if you can.

    2. learn as much as you can about them. see how they operate on a daily basis.

    3. its the same as companies like home depot and loves travel stops. those companies make their headquarter workers go into the shop one day per year to see what its like in the field working with the customers.

    4. The goal is to understand the customer better than the customer understands themselves.

    5. and yes, that is possible if you have enough conversations, listen intently, and take notes, and actually care to help them.

       
       

13. If you really have a desire to help the customer, then your product will be amazing and people will really have their problem solved.

    1. and they will tell their friends about you if they also have that problem.

    2. if the product is good and solves a real problem, then people will use it.

       
       

14. Make sure you have empirical data about what you're doing.

    1. if you're going to market, then what problem are you solving for?

    2. what is the metric that tells you that you are solving that problem?

    3. Is it the number of applicants who no-show interviews?

    4. is it the number of applicants who last at the restaurant 60 days or longer?

       
       

15. How do you know there's a big enough market demand for the solution you're proposing?

    1. Do you know how big the market is that you're targeting? Do you know the sub-niches within that market?

    2. Do you know the competitors in that market?

    3. Do you know how to differentiate yourself in that market?

    4. Are you making a product just to make money?

    5. Or do you know the pain/problem/issue/challenge that you want to solve for.

       
       

16. Unless the customer says something, everything else is just guessing.

    1. if the customer doesn't say it, then it doesnt matter.

    2. the ideal customer is the only person who's opinion we want to hear.

    3. your friends, family, acquaintances, all don't matter when it comes to the effectiveness of your product or your go to market strategy and tactics.

    4. In order to make an effective Meta ad, you need to know what your target market says about their problem.

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PS - these are marketing lessons. Not just facebook (meta) ad lessons.

If you're a go to market strategist, head or marketing, CMO, you need to think about these things. Your market is all that matters when it comes to the message you speak. Know them and provide a quality product and your business will be the natural solution to their problem.

Kaelan Moss - MinuteAdmin Out. ✌🏽

PPS - Lets connect on LinkedIn if this letter meant something to you or helped in any way.

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When you're ready, here's how I can help:

The Marketing Cloud Career Development Program:

Every new Marketing Cloud project I do gets added into this program.

It grows with time (so you can grow your marketing career with it).