5 marketing questions keeping me up at night
A brief portrait of the marketing challenges I'm thinking about in 2024
This wasn’t actually the topic I wanted to start 2024 with.
I had written an entirely different piece, which I have now shelved as it needs a bit more research. But as January went by quickly, dunked in work, I realised I was coming back to a few marketing questions over and over again. So I decided to write them out first. This is the first post of 2024, then, in which I lay out what has been keeping me so busy I can’t even find time to write this newsletter.
Here goes:
What acquisition channel have I not thought about yet?
4 years ago, I wrote a piece arguing that with software getting easier and easier to build, and with CACs getting higher as a result, the only moat would be brand.
I was right, as any marketer around will tell you. But other moats still exist, other acquisition channels still exist. It’s just that they are harder to find, and extremely difficult to scale. I’m finding this out at Atomicwork, and this is one of my questions of the year: What acquisition channel out there is underrated for my domain, that no one is looking at yet? I want to find that answer.
How can I do SEO better?
AI is changing content production and SEO. We are already seeing a bunch of programmatic SEO experiments and results. A few of them have been touted as successes, and then have rapidly been pointed out as failures, because the tactics employed seem to make the content less useful, and over time, that kind of SEO doesn’t work.
But what kind of SEO does? I’m not sure, but I’m sure some kind does. I want to find that answer for Atomicwork, and execute it.
How can I do better activation?
How do you grab attention among your target market without being interruptive or obnoxious or arrogant? What I mean is that I want to grab attention by the genuine usefulness of the product and its ability to solve problems, rather than by gimmickry.
But is that possible, or even smart, when some kind of marketing stunt can lead to quick eyeballs, especially at the stage we are in: Very early. We also need to use this kind of marketing to take some pressure off demand gen teams. How does one do this? I need to figure this out.
How do I make marketing hiring better?
How to get to the right candidates for an early stage team that has limited budgets? Especially when your standards are high. You definitely don’t want to pay anyone less than market value, but you also have to keep an eye out on the numbers.
I’ve also gathered that this is a big problem in Indian startups right now, especially at the early stages. All my friends are hiring, and a lot of young people seem to be looking for jobs. But skill sets aren’t matching what recruiters and marketing leaders want, and the slowdown means that every team is now spending less on talent. There is a gap, but how do you bridge it?
How do I prioritise things in a small team with a lot to do?
At this point of time, I have about 3 things I need to do by today, all of them are related to demand generation. I have managed to crack open TOFU traffic, but need to scale it. I have work to do yet on some technical SEO and distribution. My next big challenge is MOFU, I want to figure out if the messaging that Atomicwork is putting out is clear enough to the target audience. And this is just one layer of things I need to do.
This is common in a startup, this profusion of challenges. But as the lead of a small team, my job also is to prioritise and deprioritise constantly - what should we do now, what should we do next, and what should we do later?
This, and all the rest, are on my mind as the first month of the quarter ends, and my numbers loom larger than ever.
As part of attempting to solve the gap between folks looking to hire and candidates looking for jobs, I’m thinking about organising a hour-long session for content marketers on how to land their first jobs. Please let me know if you’d be interested in something like this, so I can gauge participation. This will be a free session. The idea is to help early stage content marketers apply and break into startup jobs. You can reach me at sairamkrishnan@outlook.com if you want to join.
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