“I like to think of successful branding as creating a company where customers would be annoyed to part with their identity,” growth marketing expert Julian Shapiro told us earlier this week. “For example, they would stop being the man with Slack stickers on his laptop. Or the woman who no longer wears Nike shoes every day. And that annoys you. “
Shapiro has a technical background as a recurring startup founder and open source web developer. But as a co-founder of the growth company Demand Curve and the startup growth agency Bell Curve, these days he advocates telling your story by speaking from the heart. We interviewed him earlier this week to learn more about how he sees marketing in 2021.
Elsewhere on TechCrunch and Extra Crunch this week we published guest columns on the use of influencers in early-stage brands, the global trend towards retail media spend, and spoke to Growth Folks, a growth marketing organization based in India.
But first, here are some of the latest recommendations from founders in our startup growth marketers survey. (If there’s a growth marketer you’d like to work with, please let us know here.)
Marketer: Bili Sule, alGROWithm
Recommended by: Femi Aiki, food locker
Experience report: “Bili has a proven track record of driving growth as a former vice president of growth marketing at Jumia Nigeria and as senior growth advisor for Founders Factory Africa. She is able to break through the technical jargon / vanity metrics and has found a way to shape our growth consistently and reliably. The unique thing about Bili’s approach is that their strategy goes beyond pure marketing. It is data-driven and takes an iterative experimental approach to unlock growth in various business pillars, from marketing to product to operation. “
Marketer: Jack Abramowitz
Recommended by: Marwen Refaat, GameFi
Transcript: “Jack is incredibly talented at both growth hacking and building an automated growth engine. He has helped our team tremendously. “
Building a Growth Community in India with Ayush Srivastava from Growth Folks: India is spawning a huge, well-funded new generation of startups and the increasing sophistication of growth marketing is one reason. “Companies have recognized the importance of having a fully functional growth team and they have begun to recognize their only important metric,” Srivastava said in a recent interview. “The growth marketers have also started to set up a lot of experiments and solve a problem in a data-driven manner. Now I see a lot of startups getting out of the box and trying to find new ways of acquiring. You didn’t limit them to getting users the traditional way, and that’s why you see so many ideas go viral so easily. “
(Extra Crunch) Early-stage brands should also unleash the power of influencers: Jonathan Martinez, a seasoned growth marketer, is building influencer marketing. Martinez notes, “When you approach influencers, it’s a numbers game to get their attention and showcase your brand, but there are tons of ways to increase response conversion.”
(Extra Crunch) What’s Driving the Global Rise in Retail Media Spending? Cynthia Luo, Marketing Director at Epsilo, explains what modern marketing will be in 2021. Luo also talks about how companies had to adapt during the COVID-19 pandemic. Luo says, “As e-commerce becomes a dream marketing channel, it is only possible to take advantage of retail marketing if the marketplace provides brands with the right tools and data sets.”
The Art of Startup Storytelling with Julian Shapiro: Eric Eldon, Editor-in-Chief of Extra Crunch, spoke to Julian Shapiro about how companies communicate with the public. Shapiro gave insights from his experience as an angel investor: “I’m interested in companies with product-oriented growth, brand-related trenches and which are more difficult to compete with the larger companies.”
(Extra Crunch) Growth Tactics That Will Give Your Customer Base A Boost: Jenny Wang, Principal Investor at Neo, shares insights into the challenges startups are now facing in order to build their customer base and shares some tactics to help them do so. In this article, Wang explains what the playbook looked like five years ago and says, “… it has never been so difficult to capture eyeballs and achieve a breakthrough adoption pathway.”
Salesforce State of Marketing: Salesforce released a marketing report using data from a double-blind survey they conducted. The survey consists of five main chapters: “Marketers are optimistic about change”, “Customers are going digital, marketing is getting more intense”, “Collaboration is driving the era of the market from everywhere”, “Marketing is spelled data” and “Metrics and KPIs are becoming Continuing to evolve. “Looking at digital channels, they said,” Even the digital channels that have seen emerging in recent years are enjoying massive adoption. For example, mobile messaging is used by 69% of marketers and nearly two-thirds of businesses use audio media such as podcasts and streaming ads. ”The report lists the five“ Most Valuable Marketing Metrics / KPIs ”and looks at“ Digital Marketing Tactics ”.
Is there a startup growth marketing expert you’d like us to know about? Let us know by completing our survey.