How we built Atomicwork's 'marketing MVP' and launched its GTM

A follow-up to last week's essay on getting your startup's marketing basics right

Earlier this month, I wrote about my concept of the marketing MVP in the newsletter. I immediately got mails and messages from a couple of founders that they found it very useful. I also received some actionable feedback.

Which is why I’m writing this mid-week edition. Let’s get to it.

Think of this as your marketing MVP as macro part of your marketing: Your marketing strategy, content strategy, positioning, your brand, your design and visual language, and so on. From there, you can get to the marketing IPs: Your blog, your newsletter, and so on. This is your marketing MVP.

For example, at Atomicwork, our IPs are a podcast, a blog, a report, a newsletter, our events, and so on.

One question I received was why I had picked this particular mix for Atomicwork.
Let’s break that process down.

Atomicwork’s marketing MVP

At Atomicwork, our ICPs are CIOs, IT Directors, and CXOs. This meant that the bar for content was immediately higher than average. Our positioning of modern service management for the fed-up-of-bad-ITSM-software teams meant that we had to talk a lot about what this modern actually meant. Next, we had to figure out where our ICPs were hanging out and build a presence there, so we could distribute whatever content we were producing. And then we had to figure out our cadence, and keep repeating it.

Atomicwork’s IPs

So that broke down to:

1. A blog, in which we wrote about what we were building, how we were building it, and why (Writing is where you have to start anyway. When you write, a lot of things clarify themselves, and when you don’t have anything substantial to say, the writing will show that up too).

2. A podcast, in which we interviewed senior IT leaders. The reason: When we put up an interview with one IT leader, her friends in the industry will notice, and our brand spreads. I’m not concerned that much with the number of listens or downloads here. It’s the spread in that particular niche that matters. We named the podcast Atomic Conversations.

3. We published a report called the State of AI in IT, on how CIOs were thinking about investing in AI and what it would bring to the domain. It was the central piece of content that set off our enterprise marketing. It was so good that well established, decades-older competition literally copied it, including our design, proof that we had got it right.

4. We send out a newsletter on AI and IT to prospects as well as folks who have signed up, an effort we are expanding in the next year.

5. And finally, we were there at every large IT event in the last year, showing off and talking about what we were bringing to the ITSM landscape. We’ve slowed this down a bit, as our deployments take centre stage. But we will get to them again. They are important brand investments.

Measurement and Distribution

Apart from this, we keep putting out well structured and well optimised web pages that rank for ITSM searches. How many do we do? In Q3, which just ended, we must have produced more than 50 unique pieces of long form content that is. This does not include social media distribution, which we execute and measure separately.

In terms of distribution, what has really worked for us is also that our leadership has taken a lot of initiative in building strong networks of CIOs and IT leaders. Which means that our content always has a steady readership, and easily gets invaluable ICP eyeballs.

Marketing is repetition

And finally, our secret sauce: Repetition. Now that our IPs are in place, all we need to do as a marketing team is to make sure we don’t break the content streak. We keep producing high quality content and make sure our content calendars are full. Does that work all the time? No, we still miss deadlines and the calendar at times doesn’t keep up. But as a marketing fundamental, it keeps us focused and clear on what next week’s, or next month’s work is. The simplicity is the genius. All we need to do is show up.

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I hope this was useful to the readers who wrote back and asked questions.

If it was, please do share the newsletter on LinkedIn, or among your friends and colleagues who might be interested. That would help the newsletter a lot, and help me keep my own streak going!

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