Freestyle Marketing: the power to inspire and build relationships
As an entrepreneur with technical background, I’ve always been lead to believe (partly by others and partly by myself) that marketing is far from being my strong point. When asked “what you did for marketing”, the first instinct was always to say “nothing, we focused more on the technical part”.
Ironically I’m now writing this article about marketing. After a long time in which that “nothing” answer felt so wrong, I started understanding why. The main reason for this is the traditional / classic / conventional definition of marketing and not my technical background.
The world is changing, the web is changing and so are the products. Then why is marketing still the same?
I firmly believe that marketing shouldn’t be done by the book, but rather in what I call a “freestyle way”. This is more a kind of unconventional marketing that allows you to build relationships with and inspire people rather than treat them as numbers in campaign analytics.
Like it or not, we live in a world where products can be copied overnight. If we treat this competition as a race for features and boring marketing campaigns, we are more likely to get lost in the crowd. What’s the alternative you might be wondering. I name it “freestyle marketing”.
Freestyle marketing means focusing on inspiring people and building relationships.
The last product I’ve been working during the last 5 years is the Froala WYSIWYG Editor. I co-founded Froala, and in January 2014 we released the first public version. We were competing with products that were launched in 2002, so more than a decade head start over us.
We had to start small when they already had tons of advanced features. We were bootstrapped and only had resources to invest in the product itself and in sharing our vision with the world. They had an army of marketers and salespeople and were doing paid advertising, spending crazy amounts of money on specific keywords.
It seemed like an unfair battle, but despite this, right now we are the top choice WYSIWYG editor. Google’s definition of a WYSIWYG editor is the one from the Froala Editor website, and the first three Google search results are about Froala.
Vision
We had a vision about how our product should be and didn’t care about how other products are. We almost never looked at what the competition is doing. We shared our vision with everyone through our website, blog, social networks, support and any other channel we could find. The product itself represented our vision.
It’s easier to build a product that simply fits the market need rather than challenges habits. Or it seems mighty to disrupt a market rather than disrupting how people think.
Sometimes people know something is not okay, but they can’t pinpoint what. Sharing your vision will help them resonate with your way of thinking and with your product. In other words, you get to inspire people, build a product and a brand that is loved by customers.
I wanted customers to love our product and trust our brand. This type of relationship lasts for years, and it grows superfans. They are the people that spread the word and promote your brand even though you don’t compete over features and you don’t have all the features they need.
Spread the word
Word of mouth is, in my opinion, the strongest and most effective marketing ingredient and freestyle marketing allows you to tap into it.
I wouldn’t describe word of mouth as a marketing channel by itself, but rather as an element that has the power to boost the performance of almost any marketing channel. It can lead to exponential growth and increased conversion rates more than just applying traditional marketing knowledge.
It takes great effort to build and grow the healthy relationships needed for the word of mouth channel, but in the long run, there is more to win from it for both business success and personal satisfaction.
Authenticity
Today’s marketing is heavily based on manipulation and ways of influencing people to persuade them into making a purchase. Some campaigns are so good that you might not realize that the decision to invest in something was not yours.
I’ve seen firsthand how this feels, and the thought that puzzles me the most is: if I feel like I was fooled and felt terrible about it, then why apply the same type of “strategies” to my customers?
Honesty and authenticity are two very hard to find traits in a business, but they are the key to inspire people and build relationships. Freestyle marketing is a lot about being authentic: paying less attention to what you think people want to hear, and more attention to your company’s vision.
Think outside the box or should I say “think outside the book”
Books are the place where we all start, but they can also become a frame that limits our creativity. We end up thinking inside a frame instead of enjoying all the freedom that marketing has to offer.
While most of what we did was based on pure instinct and gut feeling, there are some good books that I read a few years later, and I managed to identify myself and my actions with some of the ideas described in these books.
Worth Every Penny is not quite a book for startups, but more for boutique businesses, but it is a great resource to create strong bonds with early adopters that might turn into true evangelists later.
Hooked by Nir Eyal helped me to understand better how people’s mind works, what cognitive effort means and how to create a website that will avoid cognitive dissonance (the psychological pain of conflicting ideas).
Start with Why is a book that kind of helped me understand why some of the things we did worked and how we managed to create a brand that is loved and appreciated by tens of thousands of developers or even more.
.. and of course, there’s the Traction book by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. This one is more into traditional marketing, but a good resource for setting up a foundation and understanding basic marketing principles. I left this the last because some of you might have already read it, but if not, I recommend you to go through it early on.
Freestyle marketing is a simple thing to do, yet so underrated and overlooked. Doing things that go hand in hand with our own identities and core values is something that we can naturally achieve if we are true to ourselves.
Is your business in a race with your competitors or is it inspiring and building superfans? Do you see a change that you can make in your business by applying freestyle marketing? Think about it and share your thoughts with us.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +383,380 people.
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