Choose your next markets based on data

As shared in grit. podcast episode with Karola Karlson, a freelance marketer and ex-Head of Global Marketing at Bolt, entering a new market isn’t just about ambition, it's about the fit. It also depends on the product and your marketing budget. Before investing in localization, paid ads, or partnerships, look at the market dynamics as a whole:

1. Identify your competitors' numbers in the target market. If your competitor is succeeding at your potential target market – it’s a good sign that you should enter too.
2. Create a spreadsheet about data points that would help compare the cities or markets to one another.
3. Choose 10 relevant aspects for the markets you are comparing. So that you can see the bigger picture and the patterns among them.

As Karola summarized, “Imagine you want to create an Airbnb-like company and you have to choose your first market. You have to understand who the competitors are, if people actually need your service or product, and for example, what’s the average hotel price in the city? You can even create your own metrics for that: average night at a hotel divided by average Starbucks coffee price. And then with your own chosen metrics compare the different markets.”

Making data-informed decisions can save thousands in failed campaigns and ensure your brand launches with real traction.

Focus on 1-2 channels and make them work

In the episode with Katana’s ex-CMO Oliver Vesi, one essential insight was that you should focus on 1-2 main marketing channels that are successful and work for you. As Oliver described, they built their marketing around “Estonian’s peasant mentality” meaning keeping it as simple as possible and focusing on people who are already in-market.

“Use a few channels and use them remarkably well. Choose a few channels and excel at them. Test new ones one at a time and integrate successful ones into your main strategy”

For Katana at that time, the SEO game was the winner. When doing SEO, he advises asking people about how they found you if they say “Google”, it’s important to find out what keywords they used to find you. Moreover, as Oliver described, “When you see a blog-lookalike Top Software list posts on the internet, like lists from recommended products or companies. The ones who pay the most are at the top. We have a strategy to be everywhere where our competitors aren’t ”.

Then it all comes down to how much you are willing to pay for a click. It’s like a bidding system and it has been rewarding: the higher you are on the Top list, the more people click and buy the service. It creates the spillover effect in marketing: where one piece of content indirectly impacts another piece of your company’s marketing. Search your relevant keywords in Google and compare yourself to the companies that come up in the Top 3. Find out what they do differently. It helps to lead the way.

When it comes to B2B, talk about people and with people

In the very first grit. podcast episode, an experienced Visiting CMO Annika Ljaš-Eilat shared her tips on doing marketing with a small budget.

When she starts working with a new startup, she always asks three questions: “What has worked before? Why did it work? Is it worth repeating?”. When it comes to B2B marketing, the formula for success is often sharing seemingly boring, specific information and visuals about your product or service relevant to your target audience.

“I believe in three mediums. Firstly, your niche and value in the content you create – and then reaching the clients through LinkedIn and emails where B2B booms.”

More useful tips from Annika’s episode:

1. Experiment with B2B social selling. LinkedIn is the place for it, and it works great because of its high organic reach. Especially the founders should try it out for potential leads and partners when tagging people, commenting, and writing about relevant topics. As Annika described, “It feels like professional flirting”.
2. Ask the clients what they want. One way to do it is with forms and surveys. “You can get insights from 300 or 400 people from Google Forms; it’s beneficial to share and boost the Forms post on Facebook, where people are used to seeing different invitations, events, and surveys,” shared Annika.
3. A marketing budget base rule – 1/4 should be spent on content creation, and 3/4 should be spent on how to reach your target audience.

Annika Ljaš-Eilat. Photo: Pilleriin Kivisikk

Building a strong brand is an investment

From Bolt’s Creative Director Liisa Ennuste’s episode, the most popular episode in grit. podcast’s history, a powerful truth emerged: 93% of purchases are made from brands people know. In B2B, it is extremely relevant because creating trust is a long process.

“If you’re a brand, you want people to know about you – especially when they’re about to make a purchasing decision. The role of brand marketing is to widen the top of the funnel and move people into the consideration phase.“

It’s not about choosing between brand and performance marketing; they need to work hand in hand. This is especially clear when expanding internationally. For example, when expanding to international markets, Bolt initially used the same acquisition ads that had worked brilliantly in Estonia, where brand awareness was high. But in new markets, the same ads didn’t work at all – and that’s when the team realized they had to start investing in brand marketing too.

P.S. Liisa’s boss Maksymilian Malicki, Head of Brand at Bolt, will be speaking at the upcoming grit. conference about how they built their brand globally. He will also talk about the launch of Bolt’s new brand platform in Europe.

The latest outdoor campaign of Bolt. (photo source: Liisa Ennuste’s LinkedIn)

Leverage marketing automation to speed up growth

In an episode with Bo Britt Peet, Freelance Lifecycle Marketer, she talked more in depth about marketing automation and lifecycle marketing. Bo Britt has also helped build Bolt's lifecycle marketing and marketing automation.

How to understand that now is the right time to start automating your marketing and communication? As Bo Britt explained, “Usually you start thinking about automation when you notice one of these situations..

1. Your product has users, but not enough conversions

That’s often a sign your onboarding or follow-up flow isn’t enough. It’s all about creating the contact first. At this point, the conclusion is almost always reached that perhaps the existing contact base could be better optimized. If new users are better introduced to the product and the onboarding and welcome-flow process is made more convenient, more of them may become paying customers.

Welcome flows should always get the client to move towards something: it could be the first purchase or some steps that need to be done after the welcome email, like entering your bank account details etc.

2. Your team is spending too much time on repetitive communication

Manual follow-ups, reminders for potential customers drain too much time. When the volumes are high enough, automation seems like a logical next step. This ensures consistency and saves hours in work. This way, you can scale without hiring a massive team.

“The two easy things people tend to forget to do are welcome-flow emails and abandoned cart emails. But these are MUST HAVES to remind clients about yourself and give people more context.”

Build a growth mechanism into your product

Startups often focus on product-led growth. If existing users are bringing in new users, that’s the most sustainable way to grow. According to Eric Ries and his iconic “Lean Startup” book, there are three types of virality.

1. Inherent virality

Inherent virality happens when your users get value when other people sign up. “Here’s how we do it,” explained Kristin Kirštein, Chief Growth Officer at Xolo. “Our clients are mostly solo entrepreneurs who often work with other solo entrepreneurs. And for them to collaborate legally and properly, they need a contract.

We offer our clients the option to easily manage this: if they have a partner they want to work with, they can invite them to our platform, sign the agreement here, and everything is nice and legal. And of course, the partner who joins our platform through that invitation becomes a lead for us. Since we can be fairly certain they’re also a solo entrepreneur, we can begin the nurturing process: email flows, occasional special offers, maybe even free trials that help them better understand the value of the product before fully committing to paying for it.”

2. Word-of-mouth virality

Secondly, there’s word-of-mouth virality, which means that your product is so good that people keep telling their friends about it. Lightyear is a good example of it – their product is so outstanding that investors are recommending it to each other anyway. To support that word-of-mouth marketing, Lightyear has identified some influential members of their community and given them personal referral codes to give them even more motivation to spread the word.

3. Artificial virality

Finally, there’s artificial virality that’s done through games, competitions, rewards and referral programs. The very classic example is giving out referral codes like Bolt gave their users personal invite codes – and if somebody invited a friend, using that code, they got a free ride in return.

In Promoty, they gave every influencer a personal referral link – and if they invited new influencers to join, and the new influencer started doing collaborations throughout our platform, the inviter got a percentage of their income. Marelle Ellen later said that this way, they got 50,000 users with a zero marketing budget. Meaning… growth engines are effective.

Learn from other marketers

One of the common mistakes that marketers tend to make is trying to figure everything out by themselves, even though others have already done it before.

If you're struggling with something, ask a fellow marketer – chances are they've been through the same thing. If you're planning to enter the German market, find someone with experience in that market. If you're trying to level up your marketing, look at what similar companies are doing. grit. truly believes there's so much we can learn from each other, and there’s no need to start, build, or figure everything out on your own.

That’s exactly why there is grit. conference. The biggest value of the event is the people we'll bring together: the connections, offstage chats, and ideas shared. We have so much to learn from each other – and the whole event is designed to make those conversations happen. See here, here and here who else is attending!

grit. conference is a fresh, no-fluff marketing event about how to do marketing with a startup mindset – brought to you by the same people who used to run sTARTUp Day.

The conference program includes previous Marketing Managers from Booking.com, N26, and Printful; insights from your favorite brand team (it’s obviously Bolt’s), and lessons from someone who admitted that he has made mistakes “that probably cost us over $1M in revenue.”  

grit. promise is that buying the conference ticket is an investment with a positive ROI. That one ticket gives you access to six practical masterclasses from world-class marketers. You’ll learn to think more strategically, automate time-consuming tasks, and use your resources more efficiently. You’ll gain a clearer understanding of when and where to invest. grit. is 110% sure that if you apply what you learn at the conference, you’ll earn your ticket price back tenfold.

Get your ticket: www.gritconf.com