227. Flood and lightning ⛈
The category creation strategy for educating the masses
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Hi there 👋
This Thursday and Friday (July 14-15), we’re holding our biggest event of the year at Oyster: a fully virtual (fully free) conference. I’d love to invite you to drop by if you’re at all curious about the future of work. We’ll have speakers from Facebook, Gitlab, Quora, Elastic, Butter, GoPro and more.
It’s been fascinating to see this all come together. I should probably invite a teammate to come here and share all the ins and outs of virtual event planning in 2021 — from software (we’re using HopIn) to speakers to branding to amplification … there’s a lot!
I’ll be sure to share back any big learnings afterward, too. Should be a great week! Wishing you a great one as well,
Kevan
The Flood and Lightning approach to category creation
Category creation is the process of solving a new problem in a new way — and giving it a name (the category itself).
Sometimes the new problem is so new that it hasn’t been articulated. Sometimes the solution is so forward-thinking that the market doesn’t recognize it. In almost every case, the biggest alternative to the new category you’re creating isn’t your competitors; the biggest alternative is the status quo.
So what’s a category creator to do?
Education, en masse.
My favorite way to solve this is with content, content, content delivered strategically at scale. We did this at Buffer as we were building the social media management category. It’s a process I like to call Flood and Lightning.
Flood — You flood the market with mentions of your company and your category. You should show up in every relevant conversation about the category you’re creating. This is a volume play.
Lightning — You create major, unmissable events, launches, and campaigns that capture attention and inspire conversation around your category. These happen at a regular cadence, at least quarterly. And they are big moments: big enough to make the rest of the market stand up and take notice.
Another way of thinking of it (that’s less “natural disaster-y”):
Saturate
Punctuate
or
Drumbeat
Guitar solo
No matter what you call it, there are many tactics that make up these different flood and lightning approaches.
Here are a few that have worked well for me in the past:
Flood tactics
SEO — It’s very unlikely you’ll have much keyword volume for your category at first since it’s so brand new. But that isn’t to say that people aren’t searching for category-adjacent topics. For instance, at Buffer we had a huge long tail of searches for things like `ideal time to post on twitter` or `facebook cover photo`. We wrote content for each and every one of those, positioning ourselves as thought leaders in the space.
(It’s also a good signal to track the rise in keyword for your chosen category. If you’re establishing it properly, you’ll see searches rise.)
Social media — Social media is one of the highest-frequency marketing channels. You get many opportunities each day to get a message out to people. Use it as a way to start the conversation about your category: sharing content, creating hashtags, social listening and monitoring.
PR — One of the best ways to keep the drumbeat going is with PR because there is an economy of scale with the reach and variety of earned media. At Buffer, we did a combination of proactive PR and inbound PR. We performed our own data studies, which we pitched. We kept an eye out for incoming requests and on sites like Help A Reporter Out.
Co-marketing / Influencers— A category can’t really be a category without third-party validation. Co-marketing is one way to amplify your category messaging by finding adjacent companies willing to hop on webinars, social media takeovers, blog swaps … you name it.
(If you’re interested in more tactics, here’s a post I wrote about evaluating marketing channels.)
Lightning tactics
Product launches — One of my favorite examples of this is Mailchimp, which adheres to a regular, tentpole launch calendar of two major product launches each year. And these are the really big ones: like pivoting from an email tool to a small business tool.
Events — We’re doing an event at Oyster this week. These can be perfect moments for a lightning strike because you’ve got a captive audience eager to hear from you and you’ve got dedicated time on the calendar that you can plan for PR and amplification. The best lightning strikes are the ones with multiple pieces and parts. Just about every major category creator has an event as one of its key lightning moments.
Unconventional PR — Sometimes marketing needs to manufacture the lightning strike through unique campaigns and uncommon activities. We did this at Buffer with transparent salaries and buying back investors. Ideally you should align these to the category itself (transparent salaries were great for Buffer awareness, but less so for social media management).
And what’s the payoff for all this hard work?
Category kings are the explosive and enduring companies that create great value over time — Amazon, Salesforce, Facebook, Google. They do this by opening up a category with vast potential and set themselves up to take the most of the economics of the whole category. Category kings, the data show, usually eat up 70 percent to 80 percent of the category’s profits and market value.
About this newsletter …
Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy what’s in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.💙
About Kevan
I’m a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Polly (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer and Vox.
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