Work-in-progress – I should probably break this post into chunks based on what people search for. The shoemaker’s daughter, etc
I have some informal background doing a bit of marketing as a musician, I cover that elsewhere.
how i got hired
At the time, DR had been chatting with other founders of more established SaaS companies (I had no idea what SaaS was at the time) and decided that, in order for the business to get to the next level, it was necessary to invest in some inbound/content marketing type efforts. Particularly, to have someone manage the blog and social media efforts.
He had read my blog before (hey, this one!) and liked a couple of my blogposts, and asked me to meet for coffee around Dec 2012. (At the time I was newly married and was hoping to get a job as a flight steward, so that I’d be able to earn money and write in my downtime.) I didn’t get the job at SIA, so I messaged him. He asked if I could start the next day. (I couldn’t, I had some furniture to move… lol)
I was hired on February 4th 2013 to do “blog and social media” for ReferralCandy.
first days
At the time I was hired, there were 5 other people in the office. The two founders (both engineers), two other engineers, a marketing guy and a marketing intern. The marketing guy left shortly after I joined, so I was effectively the “first serious marketing hire”. The company had at this point already raised seed funding, and had already moved into our current office at Blk71. At the time we had weekly or fortnightly marketing meetings, where we’d update each other on what was done and how the stats were looking. I also had fortnightly 1-1s with DR.
On hindsight, it’s clear to me that having regular meetings is incredibly important. On my first day, I remember DR saying that he had a meeting– and it turned out that it was a 1-1 with ZC, his cofounder. I thought then that it was funny that he talked about it like it was some external meeting, but I realize now that there’s a huge wisdom to that– to establish norms well in advance.
The entire office had a very strong technical/engineering vibe. While the founders did try their best to learn as much marketing and sales as they could as necessary to achieve their ends, they were at the time not entirely sure what they were doing – so they were willing to hire me despite my inexperience. The idea was that we’d hire a more senior marketing person later on once it was clearer what was to be done.
Early on, we didn’t have any complicated tracking systems or all that. We kept track of traffic to the website and to the blog, and we kept track of signups. As a start, if we could increase traffic, and we could see that signups were going up, we thought that would be good enough.
Before I joined, we were paying freelancers to write posts for the blog– broad, general posts about SEO and ecommerce, without any coherent tone, formatting style, etc. Having some content was better than nothing, so that was the right thing to do.
We hired a couple of my friends as interns. We would spend time on ecommerce forums, and keep track of our engagement and outreach on those sites. We’d keep track of what we were doing on trello.
We also write some blogposts, but we didn’t really have a coherent strategy at the start. It was just “publish stuff” – because publishing stuff is better than not publishing stuff.
Our email marketing system was a bit of a mess– we had a product update email list and a “summary of latest blogposts” email list, but neither of those had a coherent strategy. Which was understandable– everyone else in the company was busy building and fixing the product.
I was familiar with wordpress and getting traffic, somewhat.
challenge 0: going pro
The first thing that was a challenge for me was simply adjusting to working life– having to be punctual, accountable, to communicate regularly, to do what I said I would do.
This is a non-issue for most normal people, but I’m a weirdo like that. More on that elsewhere. But to this day, my main challenges include managing my time effectively, figuring out how long it would take me to do something, etc etc.
challenge 1: transitioning from “writing for pleasure” to “writing with objectives”.
My early blogposts were opinion pieces– things like “sharing is learning” and “what is social media”. I carried with me the assumption that people like reading opinions and perspectives. I think that is still true, but I didn’t sufficiently think about what would be really useful to people.
On hindsight– what’s useful is examples, guides, things with meat that people can learn from, things that are accessible. A bitter truth is that nobody in the business/ecommerce world etc is interested in what you have to say until after you’re famous. So in the meantime, what you do is you say it using the words of others. (Come to think of it, Jason Silva is really good at this. He keeps quoting studies and poets and authors.) And after a while, people will be quoting Jason Silva. You gotta earn that.
That doesn’t mean you don’t have to have any personality or perspective, just that you ought to focus on what people really want.
search vs social
when we were starting out, we were very big on social. we spent a lot of time on twitter in particular. and I was very proud (I still am) of how much we slowly, organically developed our following, building real relationships with real people.
but search decimates social when it comes to business stuff. more people search than anything else. (Much more to be said here)
quantify your efforts as quickly and early as possible
it took me about three years before I started to measure the amount of time it took me to write a blogpost. I think this was because I had a “survival” mentality rather than a “resource management” mentality.