The best marketers don’t excel in one single channel.

It’s not about being a t-shaped marketer, either.

And it’s also not about good taste, as the business media and influencers have been touting for the past six months.

What makes a good marketer is the ability to learn and adapt.

Let me explain.

Between 2015 and 2026, Meta ads became 5-10x more expensive, and AI killed 90% of organic website traffic from Google.

But it doesn’t mean that paid social ads or content marketing no longer work.

Marketers just need to approach these channels differently.

Facebook and Instagram ads now require different ad formats, and higher-quality designs that communicate more, faster.

Content marketing, when done on a website, still requires a high domain authority and fast loading speeds. Your articles still need to rank in top Google 1-5 spots to be picked up by AI tools and listed in query replies. You just need to track the results differently.

But the truly efficient content marketing now happens in newsletters and social media posts.

This necessity to adapt (to new technologies and trends) also applies to early-stage brand, marketing, and growth.

The principles are 100% the same in 2026 as they were back in 2015.

So w/o further ado, here they are.

10 principles of brand, marketing, and growth for early-stage companies

After helping 50+ European tech startups with early-stage growth, here are the key learnings that I continuously bring to all new projects.

Brand:

1. Invest in strong (enough) brand early.
2. Understand your ICP (ideal customer profile).
3. Create what your ICP wants.

Marketing:

4. Focus on 2-3 marketing channels.
5. Copy what works for other brands.
6. Prioritise quality over quantity.
7. Multiply your marketing budget 5-10x.

Growth:

8. Build growth loops. 1 user » 1.5-2.5 users.
9. Run 2 experiments/month, minimum.
10. Don’t worry about monetisation (just yet).

Bonus: Hire top experts & excited beginners.

1. Invest in strong (enough) brand early

In my humble opinion, the biggest mistake that early-stage startups make is not investing in a strong brand.

This is especially true in Eastern Europe and the Baltics.

“It’s the product that people care about,” the practical mind says.

And I do agree. The product does have to be great. However, the same applies to your brand.

Why?

Imagine meeting a new person. You either like them or not.

It’s exactly what happens when you go to a company’s website (or App Store page) for the first time.

You either like the brand or you don’t.

As an early-stage company, you only have one chance to make a good first impression with each potential customer.

People don’t return to brands they didn’t like in the first place. (Either because of a cheap-looking brand or bad product experience.)

If I could do one thing differently in early-stage Taxify (now Bolt)…

Bolt now has a world-class brand.

In hindsight, I wish we’d invested in a high-quality brand that looks trustworthy to people in Western Europe, too.

But I can’t help but think that we’d grown much faster in London and Paris, had we launched there w/ a higher-quality brand.

2. Understand your ICP (ideal customer profile)

In order to build a successful product and brand, you need to understand your target audience.

Who is your ICP – ideal customer profile? Is there a clear understanding about it across the organisation?

The ICP is focused on your most valuable customers and prospects who are also most likely to buy.

When you google customer persona development guides, they often look like personal CVs.

This is not a sufficient way to define a customer persona.

You want to have a deeper understanding of their behavioural patterns, lifestyle, everyday struggles and needs, touchpoint marketing channels, etc.

Below is 1/10 of the ideal customer persona mapping sheet I use on early-stage brands.

3. Create what your ICP really wants

This is true for both your product features and marketing assets.

The not-so-nice truth about working w/ early-stage companies is watching many of them creating a product that nobody wants or needs.

On the marketing side, once you know your ICPs (ideal customer personas), you can develop value propositions that:

1. … are actually useful and relevant to them.
2. … you can truly deliver on.
3. … differentiate you from the competition.

Both your product and marketing should solve your ICP’s pain points.

And by pain points I mean a pain so great they’re willing to break the status quo and give your product a go.

For example, Wise knows their ICP’s main goal is to save money on transfers.

They’ve added a comparison of major banks right on their home page.

4. Focus on 2-3 marketing channels

… instead of doing 10+ channels badly.

I often have to negotiate w/ CEOs who’ve read some LinkedIn post about a new marketing channel X and think we need to try it.

“But why do you think it’s more efficient than our current channels that deliver positive ROAS?”

Silence.

Especially in early stage, when the founding team members’ time is your most valuable asset, it’s practical to focus on fewer marketing channels.

Choose 2-3 marketing channels that reach the maximum number of your ICPs.

In B2C, it could mean organic social media, and paid social (Meta) ads. Or an OOH marketing campaign. Or PR stunts. Or Reddit. Or building a content system that helps your product get referred by AI tools.

In B2B, LinkedIn (organic + paid), content marketing optimised for AI agents, and marketing-supported sales outreach work well. Partnerships and affiliate programmes also, when executed well, return a high ROI.

As a performance marketer who loves to experiment w/ ad designs, I usually start from paid social (Meta + LinkedIn) to launch user acquisition fast. Later, I add a few additional channels, depending on the ICP and product.

5. Copy what works for other brands

There’s no such thing as innovation or uniqueness in contemporary marketing. It’s all tried and tested tactics and channels.

What matters is how you approach each channel.

Research what’s working for other brands.

Don’t copy your competitors, but other brands who target your ICPs.

The easiest way is to check their website, social media channels, and paid ad libraries (Meta and LinkedIn).

See where they invest most.

Is it content, creators, partnerships, paid ads, organic social, live events, webinars, etc.? Is their sales team active on LinkedIn?

For example, a quick scroll through Clay’s LinkedIn ad examples tells me that they run lots of webinars w/ partners and creators, and publish in-depth industry reports.

6. Prioritise quality over quantity

“This marketing channel doesn’t work for us.”

Sounds familiar?

Sometimes, it’s fair to scrap a marketing channel (or experiment) and admit defeat.

More often, marketers say “it’s not working” after testing a channel for 72 hours.

Don’t scrap a marketing channel because of your own scrappy work.

Give it at least 30 days of hard work.

Another problem I often see during marketing audits is the low quality of marketing assets.

I’ve seen dozens of company blogs that have 50+ articles. But none of them is actually good… Nor ranks on the 1st page of Google search results.

By “actually good” I mean the best article that exists on the given subject.

For example, when compiling my free library of 95 marketing audit questions, I didn’t leave it at 15. I went all the way, creating the most extensive resource on the subject.

It’s the #1 search result for the Google query of “marketing audit questions.” And the first resource quoted in the AI summary.

(I tested in an incognito window to remove search bias. Do it whenever checking your own keyword rankings.)

Quality work pays off.

One thing that’s changed between 2015 and 2026 is the level of quality people expect from brands.

Nobody needs more low-quality slop. There’s already too much in the world.

On the other hand, it’s so easy to feel like you have to do something. Because, like other human beings, you encounter 100x more cool stuff daily than you used to five years ago.

Don’t fall into the good marketing anxiety trap.

Instead of despairing “there’s so much good stuff out there, how can I even compete?” take a step back from the noise.

Zone out. Book a 4-hour slot to think. And come up w/ something that’s valuable to your ICP that you can deliver.

That something probably isn’t something you can create in 10 minutes w/ an AI tool. If it is, it already exists.

It’s the slow, focused, demanding work that translates into high-quality marketing assets and campaigns.

I’m not saying “original” on purpose. I don’t believe that in 2026, originality matters as much as quality and craft.

Spend more time on creating quality marketing assets (articles, landing pages, ad creatives, PR stunts, newsletters, etc.) rather than launching semi-good ones.

Read more: Dismantling the AI Marketing Mammoth

7. Multiply your marketing budget 5-10x

Hot take, I know.

Isn’t an early-stage startup supposed to be… FRUGAL?

Well, yeah.

But the thing it needs to be frugal about is not money. It’s time.

Each month that your company fails to grow exponentially, you’re burning your funding on team salaries, office rent, software licenses, etc.

I’ve seen so many startups die slowly while playing it safe.

And so have you.

The whole point of having an investment (vs bootstrapping) is to grow fast.

Early-stage companies are like ice cream. : p

You either go all in or watch it melt through your fingers and stain the floor (your reputation).

Would you rather work w/ a second-time founder (or founding marketer) who…

a) Made bold early bets which didn’t work out, and failed in 12-24 months.

b) Kept the company barely functioning for 10 years, then folded.

I know which one I’d prefer.

A lot of the time, the best moat for tech companies is being the first to take the market.

Chances are that you’re underspending on marketing and expansion.

Here’s how I think about early-stage growth investment:

1. Spend cautiously until you’ve found your product market fit, positive marketing ROAS, and functioning growth loops.
2. Once you’re growing organically (word of mouth, referrals = people love your product), 5-10x your marketing budget and expand to new markets fast.

For example, here’s Klarna’s expansion timeline.

Note when profitability arrives. Source

8. Build growth loops. 1 user » 1.5-2.5 users

All successful tech companies have a growth loop built into their product.

A growth loop means that every new user you bring into your product will invite others.

It also means that if you spend €50 to bring in a new active user via paid ads, the CAC (customer acquisition cost) gets diluted once they bring other people into your product.

The most obvious growth loop is referrals. But there are many more.

Here’s an excellent article by Maja Voje on growth loops, including many examples.

9. Run 2 experiments/month, minimum

The best way to find things that work in the early stage is to experiment.

This applies to both marketing and product bets.

Rule #1 of experimentation: do it regularly and consistently.

In the past months, working on Roleo’s marketing and growth, I’ve run at least one Meta ads experiment every week.

There are weeks when the new ad creatives perform worse than the previous ones.

And then there are weeks when I discover a new creative that brings 2x as many new users at a 50% lower CAC.

In just three months, I tested over fifty different Meta ad designs.

Rule #2 of experimentation: prioritise the “highs.”

Often, low-effort ideas get prioritised over high-effort and high-impact.

Stay alert to this trap.

Also, give priority to high-confidence ideas.

You have a solid understanding of your ICPs and their pain points. Trust your gut feeling. When in doubt, validate any new idea by talking to your users (and non-users).

My take on user interviews:

You want to talk to people who use and love your product.

But more importantly, you should talk to your ICPs who are not using your product to understand what you need to build and improve.

10. Don’t worry about monetisation (just yet)

Another controversial view, I’m aware.

“If people aren’t willing to pay for our product, there’s no product-market fit,” you might argue.

Yes, I agree to some extent.

But I’ve seen too many early-stage startups limit their early-stage growth with a bad monetisation model.

By “bad” I mean a pricing model that stops new customers from trying the product and stalls both supply and demand.

In the early stage, use your funding to grow, not to make back 0.1% of your potential future earnings.

In order to monetise a market, you first need to take it.

For example, when entering a new market, Bolt burned millions on rider discounts and driver bonuses before reversing the profitability chart.

If you think about fast-growth AI companies in 2026, they subsidise computing power, tokens, and software features.

Or they give consumers free agentic products that, in the background, cost them millions of €$£ in computing bills.

These companies will become profitable in 2 or 5 or 10 years.

But first, they focus on fast growth and taking the market. To build the moat that makes it nearly impossible for any new players to enter.

Next steps

Scroll back to the numbered list of 10 early-stage company marketing rules.

Take 10 minutes to reflect on them.

1. Which ones do you already check?
2. Are there any that might help you grow faster?
3. Do you have the right team to implement them?

If you feel like talking to a marketing and growth expert, I’m open to 1-2 new consulting projects. Read more here.

The post 10 Rules of Early-stage Brand, Marketing, Growth appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

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What are the biggest marketing trends in 2024? 

Such questions, however fickle, help us plan better, get more results, and be prepared when change happens.

Coming up are my top five predictions on how marketing will change – or continue shifting – in 2024, from macro-level changes to specific topics close to my heart. I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts and feedback, feel free to DM me on LinkedIn.

TOP 5 marketing trends in 2024:

1. Gen Z social media is now a must-have
2. Creator marketing & UGC keep growing
3. The AI hype will calm down
4. Results & quality beat scalability
5. Real sustainability over greenwashing

But first, a few words about 2023. Because, as they say, to understand the future we must look to the past.

In 2023, I worked with several tech companies, both B2C and B2B, on their growth strategies and marketing campaigns. One thing I noticed is that it’s become a lot harder to get results at a high ROI. That is, it is hard to get those good results if you rely on the best practices that worked five years ago.

I also gave an interview to TULI where I spoke at length about work-life balance and greenwashing in marketing. And launched a weekly marketing newsletter to share my thoughts & experience.

For years, there have been so many small brands popping up, investing mostly in digital ads, and competing for social media users’ attention without being original or innovative. There is also so much more noise in general: more of everything (publications, news, films, TV series, products, and so on…). 

So how to survive in 2024 as a brand? How to maintain a positive marketing ROI? 

In 2024, marketers will keep shifting their efforts towards brand marketing instead of digital performance ads that have become up to 10x more expensive than back in 2020.

In parallel, new social media opportunities keep popping up like fungi after rain. 🍄

Keep reading to learn how to navigate the biggest marketing trends of 2024 and keep growing your user base and revenue.

1.  Gen Z social media is now a must-have

In 2023, all social media giants – Meta, TikTok, and YouTube – released plenty of new formats and features to boost brands’ sales and profits.

Most of these updates were not for the ad products but organic social platforms (and ways of driving purchases through organic engagement). Meta launched Threads, TikTok added an integration with Amazon – and these are just two examples out of tens of updates.

And the changes paid off: an increasing number of young consumers are changing their browsing and purchasing habits.

For example, 57% of Gen Z users say that they prefer to use TikTok as a search engine, not Google: the social media platform’s more relatable and personal.

In their 2024 trend report, TikTok predicts that there will be a shift towards greater brand-led social change and transparency. Users want to see brands living up to their words and promises. 

A fun example of this in 2023 was the Northface campaign on TikTok. 

Meta launched Threads in July 2023 and the platform has already 100 million monthly users. Brands have been slow to move to the platform. However, even if you’re not ready to commit to posting on Threads, it would be smart to register your brand’s presence there to secure a good user name and handle.

If you’re not in B2C marketing but B2B, a similar approach applies to LinkedIn marketing. There was a huge shift in 2023 towards audience-building on LinkedIn. However, note that you should not try to build your company’s LinkedIn account but your team’s accounts. That’s because personal LinkedIn accounts’ posts have a lot higher organic reach. 

And even on LinkedIn, the less-traditional formats like carousel posts and video perform the best. You cannot rely on static images and blog post shares anymore.

When it comes to new social media features, the fastest movers and first adopters will reap the highest benefits, growth, and profit. The same applies to reacting to daily trends and viral content.

When working in a small marketing team, committing hours each day on chasing social media trends might seem like a huge waste of time. To hack the system, follow brands with active social media teams and lots of viral content to keep your hand on the pulse.

Another thing you could do is outsource your social media content creation to people who do it daily and on a professional level: content creators.

Actionable takeaways:

1. Get serious about organic social media marketing. Test new formats on top platforms.
2. Find the best-performing social channel (Reels, TikTok, LinkedIn) and post new content 3x or more per week.
3. Create less social media content but with higher virality potential. Put more effort into scrappy videos over static posts.

2. Creator marketing & UGC keep growing

Not everyone is great at filming 5 video clips per day and one of them going viral. But some people really are. 

In 2024, influencer collaborations on social media are no longer about paying €€€ for a single post or promotion. 

Rather, the leading brands are securing long-term collaborations with content creators who become something in-between a brand ambassador and a freelance content-creating team member.

Long-term content collaborations work better for many reasons:

• Creators become familiar with your product and audience, and as they what content performs best, they create more of it.
• Creators have a long-term interest in delivering results to continue the collaboration.
• You only need to brief the creators once a month, not every time you hire another influencer.

There has also been a shift towards UGC-style ads in paid digital advertising. So many Meta ads now look like selfie videos, telling how “this product changed my life.” And they actually work. So here’s also a tip for paid ads: try UGC-style video ads.

Actionable takeaways:

1. If you haven’t already, sign 2-3 TikTok, YouTube, or Reels content creators to collaborate on video content for your brand.
2. Get serious about measuring your creator collaborations’ performance and creating clear and detailed briefs for these partners.
3. Test creating UGC-style videos for social media and ads in-house with your marketing team to build that increasingly critical creative skill in your own team.

3. The AI hype will calm down

If you had to sell chocolate chip cookies, you would not use a marketing slogan saying “These cookies are made of wheat.”

However, it doesn’t seem to be a problem for marketers and founders to say that the greatest benefit of their product is: “This product is built with AI.”

In the 2nd half of 2023, I heard many stories of startup founders who talked about creating a product with AI. What product? They didn’t know – it didn’t matter as long as there was AI. I found it funny every time I heard another founder telling me that. Of course, they were bound to fail, building an AI-using product for something that already functions without it.

But this doesn’t mean that all AI-powered innovations from 2023 and beyond are useless.

It’s all about finding the right balance. 

And, in my opinion, in 2024 this balance will shift towards less AI, not more AI. As we move into the next year, everyone has an AI hangover. Even the LinkedIn influencers who grew their audience on posting about Chat GPT hacks have fallen silent. People are full of AI hacks, and still doubtful of whether it actually helps them. 

Personally – and I think using AI is a highly personal choice – I do not use AI-powered tools for content ideation, writing, nor designing creatives. Even though Canva and especially Adobe have launched advanced AI design tools, I want to have more control over my designs.

As someone said: AI’s not going to take your job. But someone who knows how to use it will. I’ll add a caveat: Neither will someone who’s completely reliant on AI ever take your job.

The main selling proposition of AI tools is “Save time.” But for what are you exactly saving that time? For watching Netflix? For using another AI tool?

There are many bad tradeoffs in using AI-powered marketing tools in order to “save time” or “accelerate results” or “personalize marketing” or “optimize smarter.”  

• You may save time with AI-powered copywriting or design tools but the results are always worse than when done by a skilled human. You also have less control over output.
• Using AI, you lose in originality. You also lose a lot of control over what’s happening in the background, being unable to tell if you’re actually getting better results or not.

And, most importantly, I never use AI for ideation or writing. Why? For the simple reason that I do not want to outsource my capability to think with my own head.

I sometimes like to use Chat GPT to suggest rephrasing in some sentences I’ve already written. I also like to use it for official emails, recommendation letters, etc. so it tells me what the format should be. I always rewrite all the text provided by the AI to make it more creative, professional, and in my own style.

Actionable takeaways:

1. If you haven’t tried the popular AI-powered marketing tools yet, give them a go: Jasper AI, Grammarly, Canva, Chat GPT itself, Userbot, Howler, etc. 
2. See if the AI tools actually save you time and give original ideas. If yes, keep it going. If not, you’ll know this was all another hype cycle.
3. Ask yourself if you’re just using the AI tools out of sheer laziness or because of the hype. It might be convenient but will also hurt your own writing, thinking, and marketing skills.

4. Results & quality beat scalability

Between 2019-2022, most brands enjoyed fast-paced growth, often from digital strategies. And the easier it seemed to launch and grow new businesses on social media, the more there appeared.

However, already in 2023, I saw many marketers struggle with keeping up the high ROI at previous scale. The ad platforms simply did not deliver as well anymore: the price went up and the ROAS (return on ad spend) dropped.

The hangover period is going to persist for at least the first half of 2024: it will be continuously hard to grow with low effort and at a high scale.

However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t grow at all. My prediction for 2024 is that the marketing teams who work hard on high-quality campaigns will get the highest results.

Less is more, again. Instead of posting 5 times a week on social media and getting 0 engagement, craft 1-2 videos per week, but make sure they have the potential to get high reach and engagement. 

The shift in Bolt’s social media strategy is a good example of keeping up with the times: back in 2019, we used to do iPhone giveaways on social media. In 2024, giveaways are passé, now it’s about quality video content, brand building, and creator collaborations.

Even the brands that have historically relied on digital performance ads are turning towards brand campaigns. Nest Commerce’s analysis of their clients’ ad spend in 2023 showed a trend towards higher brand investment.

Instead of a bit of everything, make bold bets on high-quality brand campaigns and social media posts with virality potential.

No well-performing marketing campaigns come to life in a few hours. It takes time to come up with good ideas and make them happen. Therefore, create an annual and quarterly marketing plan that helps you stay on track.

Read more about seasonal marketing planning.

Last not least, the quality-originality-authority approach also applies to content marketing and SEO. Publishing blog artiles written by AI will not get you ranking on Google.

Google’s EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) framework gives priority to content coming from long-term experts on a subject, providing original information not available anywhere else (like other blogs).

Actionable takeaways:

1. In 2024, aim for quality over quantity, results over scale. It is alright to grow slightly slower if the alternative would be not growing at all.
2. Consider shifting resources from performance to brand building, and make sure your content and creatives are aligned with this change.
3. For the first time, try planning ahead for the entire year. Understand the seasonality in your business and invest more during high-demand periods.

5. Real sustainability over greenwashing

Consumers are increasingly interested in supporting socially responsible brands.

However, if back in 2022 you could get away with saying “We’ll plant one tree for each purchase,” in 2024 people will recognize this as greenwashing.

In fact, careless tree planting does more harm than good:

• Many service providers that offer tree planting do it poorly, planting monocultures. The planting of only one tree species overlooks the complex network of interactions present in the old-growth forest ecosystems. 
• Planting a tree does not undo the carbon footprint of the product you’ve purchased. It only makes you feel better about yourself.

The only green thing to do is to not purchase new products.

However, this is not how the world works. Even though I believe in degrowth, I realize that people need jobs.

So the least you can do in 2024 is to be genuine about your sustainability efforts. Instead of outsourcing tree-planting or buying carbon credits, think about how to actually improve your production pipeline, as well as the carbon footprint of product delivery.

From sustainable packaging to minimized returns and shipping in bulk, you can make your product lifecycle greener. Offer free product repairs, sell products that are made to last long in the first place – there is so much that can be improved.

I called this 2024 marketing trend “Genuine Green” because I see honesty as a key here. Do not talk about environmental topics or make social posts on World Environment Day if for the rest of the year, you’ve done nothing to live up to your words.

Good example: IKEA creating toys out of recycled plastic and launching a cute social media campaign about it.

Bad example: Dubai Electricity and Water Authority changing the color of its logo to green without any real shift towards sustainability.

When it comes to sustainability in marketing, actions speak louder than words.

As a marketer, it is part of your job to be critical of the brand messages you put out there. 

Question the slogans and campaign ideas suggested by agencies and people ranking above you. Keep your ethics and morals high, and demand that others do the same.

Actionable takeaways:

1. If you’re still doing tree-planting and other low-commitment greenwashing campaigns (like carbon offsetting) in marketing, stop it.
2. Look for meaningful ways to make your company or products more sustainable. Then do it. And only after it’s done, talk about it.
3. If your company is not willing to contribute to social responsibility, accept it and find another marketing angle.

—

Et voilà! These were my predictions on 2024 marketing trends. As always, I’d love to hear your feedback. 

If you’d like to be notified about new blog articles and get actionable marketing tips, subscribe to my weekly (Friday) newsletter.

The post 2024 Marketing Trends & Predictions appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

This article is based on a keynote titled 5 Mistakes and Cures for Low-traction Startups that I presented at the Growth Marketing Summit in August 2022.

The room was packed with marketers. The screen was lit up with stupid (or, arguably, lovely) cat and raccoon GIFs. The air was filled with painful truths and aha-moments.

Essentially, everyone had gathered to find the answer to a burning question, albeit simplified: 

Are we making any mistakes in our marketing, brand, or product strategy? And how to fix it? 

Are you spending your marketing $$$ the right way or throwing them straight in flames? 💸🔥🚒

How I imagine the CMOs and CEOs must feel…

Taking a step further, it’s important to realize that marketing, brand, and product are intertwined. You can’t grow if one key aspect of your company is dysfunctional.

So instead of focusing on tiny mistakes like using on the wrong Facebook ad campaign structure or missing out on email marketing automation, I asked everyone to take the macro-level view.

Zoom out of your everyday work and consider your company from the birds-eye level.

Now, you’ll begin to notice the actual problems. And once you see them, you’ll be able to fix them.

But before we jump to the TOP 5 mistakes of low-traction businesses, I suppose I should briefly comment on why I am even the right person to talk about this topic…

20+ Marketing audits later…

For the past 1.5 years I’ve been freelancing as a marketing consultant, working with both B2C and B2B brands.

I’ve had the opportunity to speak to 60+ businesses and work with 20+ of them.

My favorite marketing collabs

Quite often, I begin a new marketing consultation project with a 360-degree marketing audit.

What is a marketing audit?

Read more: 80 Marketing Audit Questions – Free Checklist

The goal of a marketing audit is to understand how the company is doing in all aspects and channels of marketing and growth. 

It might also arise from burning questions like: 

“Marketing isn’t working. What are we doing wrong?”

Or…

“Are we using the full potential of all marketing channels?”

To compile a marketing audit, I request access to the company’s marketing reports, ad accounts, etc. I always set up calls with relevant team members to get their insights.

Once I have all the requested information, I’ll get to work…

Ultra busy checking ad accounts…

It usually takes ca 1.5 weeks to compile a marketing audit…

Typing down the 100th recommendation

In the end, I and my client end up with 60-70 pages’ worth of a Google Doc. It includes an overview of all the marketing channels. 

I also look into the onboarding process and product retention as it’s just as important a contributor to a company’s growth as new user acquisition. 

Below is a quick overview of the marketing audit sections that I generally cover.

Marketing audits cover more than just paid ads

In regards to each of the above topics, I share my advice on: 

🔍 The current state

🔍 Opportunities

🔍 Suggestions

We then meet with the marketing team – often the CEO joins as well – and discuss the key takeaways and, most importantly, how to go forward.

💫 Goals

💫 Action plan

💫 Work

As a result of a marketing audit, the company will have a clear understanding of how each of their marketing teams/channels/actions performs and how to improve it.

Now the real work begins!

Alright, sounds sort of legit… 

But what are the BIGGEST mistakes and priorities?

Let’s get right down to it!

Read more: 55+ Marketing Trends for 2025

🔥 Mistake #1: No clear goals

The first things in a marketing audit that I check are the company’s marketing KPI and growth reports.

I mean… 80% of the time I don’t check them as they do not exist. Rather, what’s been happening is the CEO or CMO saying:

“Let’s run some ads and find out who our customer is.”

 Or…

“We’ll find out the ROI and CPA once we start with marketing.”

Um… No you don’t!

You (the CEO or CMO in this case) should know the company’s growth forecast for the next 6-12 months. 

You should know where that growth is supposed to come from. And at what CPA, ROI, and payback period. How else do you intend to ever make your startup or early-stage business profitable?

Without clear growth goals, there won’t be a clear action plan.

The best a marketing team can do at such poorly-guided companies is to try to get “some” results. Without a long-term vision, this tends to result in wasting time on poor-quality social media posts or blog articles that nobody will actually read. 

Working 9 to 5… 🎵🎵🎵

Doing marketing without a clear understanding of the goals amounts to being busy for the sake of being busy.

If you don’t know where you want to go, you can’t get there.

If this sounds like your company, here’s a not-so-easy (and yet unavoidable) solution. You’ve got to demand clearer input from the top management.

The only fix to Mistake #1 is getting clear input from the CEO

Top management needs to know the goals

When consulting various companies in growth and marketing, I always begin by establishing a detailed Marketing KPI Tracking sheet. Together, we fill in the past 3 months to see if there’s any past data on the LTV and CPA per lead and paying customer.

Up next, I collaborate with the CEO or CMO to understand the next 6 months’ revenue goals and work down to other growth and marketing projections based on revenue expectations, churn, LTV, and expected CPAs. 

All this leads to having…

🗝️ A clear 6-month plan

🗝️ Alignment of marketing & product

🗝️ No gut-feeling-based surprises

… on the high level. And on the marketing team level, you’ll have…

💫 Clear expectations (numbers)

💫 Revenue, ROI, LTV

💫 KPIs and measurement

Ready for the takeoff

Once we know all this, we can proceed to implement the planned marketing activities and campaigns.

Moreover, as you know the expected KPIs, you can compare whether your results match the projections and make quick adjustments (e.g. channel & budget allocation) if needed.

🔥 Mistake #2: Amazing product, bad packaging

Remember that quote used in startup blogs and books around the 2000s? 

“If you build it, they will come.”

Well, as it turned out as I googled it, the words come from a movie titled Field of Dreams.

When talking to various businesses – both B2B and B2C – I’ve realized that many of them have a very strong product and there’s a high potential for finding product-market fit.

However, their website and ads looked like out of an early aughts’ financial scam.

Great products need great packaging

Around 10y ago it was still possible to build a breakthrough product and get people using it via engaging the early adopters and betting on word-of-mouth.

In 2022, this is no longer the case. Almost all business verticals are saturated with tens of businesses building a similar product. 

Even if your product is the best in the industry, you’ve got to earn the user’s trust. And nobody these days trusts a brand that looks low-quality.

People don’t buy from brands they don’t trust

Take this example of a well-known fintech company…

Here’s what their website home page looked like in 2012. (IDK how it didn’t look sketchy already down in 2012, but anyhow…)

Would you trust your money to this company in 2022? Hopefully not.

Of course, they know that design trends as well as website-development opportunities have changed over the past 10 years.

Today, the same company’s home page looks like this:

Looks 100x more legit, doesn’t it? 

It is told that your brand should be good enough not to get in the way of growth.

But how to tell whether your branding is good enough? I usually suggest a simple exercise:

Ensure your brand is at least as good as the competitors’.

But don’t just go with the gut feeling – your own baby will always look sweeter and smarter than those of others.

Ask three types of different audiences to evaluate your website / App Store listing and to grade its quality and trustworthiness.

🍪 Ask a brand/marketing expert

🍪 Ask your friends

🍪 Ask 10 neutral people

And what shall you do once you realize that your brand really isn’t as strong as it should be?

Hire a branding expert or agency to help you out.

Now, let’s get to the next mistake that’s the exact opposite of having a strong product and a low-quality brand.

🔥 Mistake #3: Amazing brand, no product-market fit

You can trick people on a date with your product…

… But they’re free to leave any time.

What this means is that you can spend a lot of money on paid advertising and other venues for customer acquisition.

However, if your product fails to deliver on its promises, the new customers will immediately churn.

I’ve often seen Product and Marketing teams fighting over this conundrum. Is it the fault of the product or marketing that you fail to attract new paying users with a high LTV?

Sometimes, as I ask during a marketing audit what the customers think about the product, I hear that all the users are huge fans and give positive feedback. 

“The feedback from 20 customers tells that the product is great…”

The problem with such easy-way-out customer surveys is that you might send an email asking for feedback to 1,000 users. But only the ones who like your brand will answer. 

The few fans would of course tell you almost anything you want to hear. But is it the information that you actually need?

Yes this is Dog I like the product

Here’s the problem…

People who are disappointed in your product do not bother to reply to your emails. Nor do they fill in the surveys.

So how can you get honest, relevant, unbiased feedback about your product?

By hiring a group of 10-20 random, neutral people who more or less fit your target audience group and getting them into a room or on a 1h call one-by-one. You can then ask them to test the product and to give honest feedback.

The goal here is to uncover the real issue. The most common issues include:

🔥 Solving an inexistent problem

🔥 Not the best way to solve a problem

🔥 Too expensive (time + money)

The solution to a non-existent product-market fit is, well, to find it. And it’s not going to be easy – you’re going to have to make substantial changes to the feature set, pricing model, or another product aspect. Or pivot completely.

P.S. By “improving your product” I do not mean building new cool features that seem like quick wins. This almost never works. A meaningful product change will probably take months, but will also be worth the effort.

Looks like we’re steering away from marketing and spending too much time on the product? Thing is, no marketing can make people use a bad product.

But let’s get back on the marketing track for now…

🔥 Mistake #4: Lack of focus

Most marketing teams are constantly on the lookout for new user acquisition and growth channels.

At one point, this will lead to your team of 1 or 20 – depending on the size of your company – working on many different channels at once.

Most of the time, focusing on so many marketing campaigns at once will lead to a big bold mess.

If this looked like your marketer, keep reading. Salvation is coming.

One of the most common suggestions I write down in marketing audits is this: Stop working on this marketing channel.

❌ There’s no point to post on social media if your posts are not original

❌ There’s no point to create another blog article on a topic that’s been covered 100x

❌ There’s no point to work with influencers if you don’t see measurable results

Consider all the marketing activities that you and your team spend time on and ask: Is this bringing us new customers and revenue? 

If the answer is no, stop working on that marketing channel.

Quite often, I recommend to my clients to focus only on paid advertising and automated emails for a while. 

If you can’t make paid ads work for you, the chances are low that you’ll find substantial growth opportunities in any other channels.

You can drag along for a year or more doing low-impact work. Or you could just spend the time and salary money on running 4 weeks of paid ads.

Instead of 12 months, you’ll find out in 1 month whether there’s a product-market fit / whether your brand is strong enough.

To explain this a little further, I’ll share a quick story from my Bolt years.

As one of Europe’s biggest mobile advertisers, we received a pitch from a new ad platform every week. They promised lower cost-per-install and lower cost-per-purchase prices than we had in Google or Facebook ads.

However, we always turned them down.

Why?

Because their platforms could reach only 1% of the people we could reach with our Facebook and Google ads. 

Why would we spend time on working on tiny marketing channels instead of funneling all our efforts into scaling and improving our top channels? 

Instead of wasting your team’s time on tiny marketing campaigns that promise low-cost results, focus on the activities that bring results on scale.

🥲 Kill your darlings and cute pet projects 

🥲 Focus on 3 high-potential growth channels

🥲 The same applies to product features

As a result, your team’s focus and output will improve. You’ll have to work less, but will yield better results.

To put this in Moomin terms: instead of reaping ten unripe green pumpkins, you’ll get one big juicy pumpkin.

Continuing on the subject of (vegetable) growth, we’re down to the last mistake…

🔥 Mistake #5: No growth loops

Whenever you bring a new user into your product, the first challenge is to keep them there for the first 3-5 minutes.

If you achieve that, you’ve likely got an excited user looking to explore your product further.

While it usually falls on the Product team to increase retention, reduce churn, and keep users happy over a long period of time, there are points in the in-product user journey that fall under the Marketing team’s radar. Such as…

• Post-signup retention newsletters that urge the user to complete their profile or try the product
• Post-onboarding requests to refer a friend
• Automated lifecycle marketing emails that keep bringing people back into the product/store

Know your retention stages – Image source

If you forget to think about user retention, you’ll be filling a water bucket with a hole in the bottom.

You might bring in 10,000 new users… But in 2 months only 20% keep using your product.

My friend where are tho?

Yup, that’s sad.

But there’s more than just retention marketing that you can do.

You can also build growth loops.

A playbook definition goes like this: “Growth Loops are systems designed to make every input to generate an output. That output is then reinvested as an input and, since this is a closed-loop system, the process repeats.

In more practical terms, the best-known growth loops are:

🍯 User-2-user referrals

🍯 User-generated content

🍯 Rewards programs

However, offering people €5 to invite a friend for another €5 promo code doesn’t quite cut it in 2022. You may need to find more attractive incentives.

For example, Revolut has upped their referral offering to €50 for every referred friend. On the other hand, they’ve also made it 5x more difficult to fulfill all the conditions.

Test various referral programs to turn one new customer into multiple new customers. By the time the first one leaves, their invitees are referring their own friends. 

The best time to ask for users to refer friends is while they’re excited about your product – either right after signup or after another successful engagement (e.g. ordering something from your store / unlocking a milestone inside the product).

🍩 Build in the initial surprise moment

🍩 Establish growth and retention loops

🍩 Keep people excited and engaged

Once you’ve figured out the biggest hurdles to your company’s growth, you’ll be able to fix the holes in your marketing and product buckets.

It’s only an uphill ride from there.

🍪 Thx for listening, thx for reading! If you’ve got an article/keynote topic you’d like me to cover next, drop me a line on LinkedIn.

—

A quick note: 

I am back from my writing sabbatical and taking on new marketing consultation projects. 

While my schedule for the upcoming months is already 60% booked with confirmed projects, I am still open to 1-2 extra interesting projects starting from October/November 2022. 

Reach out at marketing@karolakarlson.com and tell me how I could help your marketing/growth team.

The post Top 5 Mistakes & Cures of Slow-growth Companies  appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

As there were so many great questions and a surprising variety of topics, it felt like a good idea to also document ‘em in this blog. I also reviewed the answers and added bits and pieces to give more context + suggest further reading.

Up next, you’ll find a mix of marketing advice, career confessions, and opinions on a range of marketing-related subjects, from how to get published in TOP marketing blogs to the “agencies vs in-house team” debate.

The Q&A is categorized under a few headlines, so feel free to navigate to the sections that interest you the most.

• Growth hacking
• Learning as a marketer
• Online advertising
• Reporting and measurement
• Rebranding (from Taxify) to Bolt
• Content marketing
• Career and work-life

P.S. if you have any additional questions, you can still submit these on the GrowthHackers AMA page.

One last thing… I’ve had a few people reach out to me and ask how did I get picked out by GrowthHackers for the AMA. I just wrote to them saying I’d like to do one. They said yes.

🚀 On growth hacking

Q1: Can you talk about an experiment that was a really big win or led to some breakthrough insights at Bolt? – Taavi Kalvi

When I joined Bolt in 2017, one of my first tasks was to come up with better creatives for our Facebook ad campaigns. So I figured what people care about most when ordering a ride… Duh, the cost of the ride, of course!

I created a new type of Facebook carousel ad that no other app in the industry was using yet. The carousel ad included 5 cards with popular routes in a city and showed the average cost of the specific ride (which was much lower than with regular taxis).

These ads picked up super well and are still one of our top performers. We even see some competitors using the same ad format now. 😄

Q2: What has been your number one learning/lesson from your entire marketing career? – Liis Laisaar

One of the things I learned early on is that you should always try to go a bit wild and test things that others haven’t tried yet. A lot of the best-performing marketing hacks/projects are not shared in marketing blogs.

So, you should make up your own.

For example, when working on content marketing and SEO in the project management software startup Scoro, I had an idea to compile a list of 50+ project management tools, include Scoro as #3, and thereby be listed as the first Google search result for the “best project management tools” keyword.

First, my manager was strongly against the idea: why would we promote our competitors?

However, I kept pushing to test out the idea and it worked: our listicle soon ranked as #1 result on Google and we got thousands of website visits and tens of new leads from there every month.

Today, Scoro has published more than ten similar list articles and these make up a huge part of their website’s organic traffic.

A good starting point for coming up with original ideas is to first define the goal you want to achieve. As you know the outcome, it’s much easier to figure out how to get there.

I also like browsing Facebook ad examples or graphic design galleries such as Behance, thinking how I would use some ideas I see on the brand I’m working for.

Q3: If you were giving a lecture at university to a group of MSc. students in a marketing/entrepreneurial class, what philosophies, tools or books would you share with them? – Taavi Kalvi

I recently wrote a blog article on how to learn marketing where I shared all the advice I wish someone had given me when finishing high school.

I’d say that the most crucial skills for every marketer are creative problem-solving and critical thinking, as well as writing skills and understanding the basic foundation on how human psychology works.

You can find the list of my all-time favorite marketing and branding books here: 49 Best Marketing Books – New and Classics

Q4: Have you ever a situation where you had been skeptical about some idea, but as a result, it proved a great move? What was that? – Maksymilian Plociennik

My manager at Bolt who taught me to be a lot more critical and always question the ROI of different projects. Whenever my team proposes something that I don’t think is a good idea, we talk it through and see if we can run a small-scale test to check the ROI.

For example, we tested animated Facebook ads some time ago and they performed worse than static ads. So we paused the ads and didn’t waste any more time scaling the video ads to additional Facebook campaigns.

Fast forward 6 months, we tried different a type of video ads (longer ones, another design) and they performed much better. So it’s always worth to test all ideas you think may bring results and even revisit some tests multiple times.

On the other hand, there have also been many cases where I’m skeptical about an idea but still agree with the team to run a test. Even if the test fails, it’s still a success in the sense that we’ll know it in the future and won’t do the same mistake twice.

NB, make sure to document your tests!

Read more: Facebook Ads A/B Testing – Why, What and How to Split Test

Q5: What do you recommend for someone getting started from scratch on building their personal brand? – Saura Johnston

Based on my experience, a good way to get started is by creating a blog and writing about the topic you want to be known for. This can also be some other channel, e.g. Instagram. Also, guest blogging and interacting with people on LinkedIn or closed Facebook groups doesn’t hurt.

For the past few years, I’ve received all my job offers via this blog or LinkedIn as people have read my blog or know me via a network of mutual marketer friends.

I recently started an Instagram account project about our houseplant hobby with a friend.

The key takeaway from this Instagram project is that it’s HARD to grow followership.

It takes a lot of persistence and continuity to build up an extensive following on the platform. To push through, you must be truly passionate about the topic you’re building your personal brand around.

Another good starting point is to look at the websites or social media profiles of people who have already made it. Scroll down to their very first posts and see how they got started and which parts of their content gained traction.

 ⭐ On building a marketing team

Q6: What has proven to be the key deciding factor when recruiting new people to your team? (Which qualities make the best team members and employees in marketing (e.g. experience, willingness to learn <– how to validate this, etc.?) – Liis Laisaar

Having interviewed tens and tens of people while growing the team in Bolt, I realized at some point that you will get the right feeling during the interview if a person is a good match to the team. There’s a kind of special connection and understanding that you get when meeting the right candidate to a position. Things like speaking at the same terms, understanding each others’ questions, having similar opinions on specific topics…

I always look for the proactive “let’s get things done” attitude and evaluate the candidate’s home task and previous work experience. I never look at a marketing candidate’s educational profile as this is not what matters (at least not in Bolt and most other successful tech companies).

I also like to hire people with good copywriting skills and a creative problem-solving-oriented mindset.

Additionally, I follow the rule of “If it’s not a YES!! it’s a no” when hiring. If a candidate doesn’t seem to be the perfect fit for the role, we’ll just keep looking rather than making the wrong hire.

Once you’ve hired someone, you’ll spend tens of hours onboarding and training that person. So you should only hire people if you think they are the very best person to fill the role.

Q7: How do you set up your team KPIs? Do you work with some framework, e.g. OKR? – Karolina Krolicka

The global marketing team at Bolt is currently using a quarterly OKRs approach. We make sure that all OKRs are measurable and directly linked to the projects that a particular team member is working on.

Which leads me to a book that everyone in a high-level management position I know recommends (so do I): High Output Management by A. Grove.

Q8: What is the ideal marketing team structure? – Vasyl Sergienko

There isn’t one single ideal marketing team structure that would fit all companies. But all marketing teams benefit from having clear ownership of projects, clear reporting structure, and team leads not having more than 8 direct reports.

Example team structure by CoSchedule– Image source

I personally like to keep the global marketing team functions centralized in the HQ rather than, for example, having a separate Facebook marketing function in every market.

Also, I would rather build a central marketing team with clear ownership for every function. And only then start to split their resources per region as the company expands to more markets. Instead of building a fully functional marketing team for every different region.

Q9: I saw on Bolt’s website that you are currently hiring for marketing roles in 4 different countries. I’d love to hear more about your experience leading an internationally distributed team. What are some challenges you have faced? How do you handle communication and deliverables among many locations? – Hale Schneider

I’d say that the main challenge is always finding the best people, no matter where they’re located. Also, as our HQ marketing team is based in Tallinn, Estonia, it’s a bit harder to find people with international experience than, say, in London.

However, note my answer to the previous question: We still prefer to hire to the centralized team over building out regional marketing teams with all functions.

The good thing is that Bolt is a very international company and we have teams in 30+ countries around the world. So we have built up a strong information-sharing system that involves internal wikis, Slack channels, and regular all-hands meetings where the information is shared between everyone globally.

Markets where Bolt operates

I’ve gotten used to discussing things with people on Slack or via a call that having a team that’s based across multiple locations is a natural way of working.

We always set quarterly OKRs and focus for each team and give them relatively much freedom on achieving those results.

Q10: How to balance between creativity and data-driven culture? – Vasyl Sergienko

First of all, you can also be creative around the ways of interpreting the data.

Different people can look at the same data and come up with different takeaways. Also, you need to be creative to come up with new ideas to improve the results reflected through data. So I’d say that the data-driven and creative approaches go very much hand in hand in today’s marketing.

Q11: Agency or in-house? Why? – Liis Laisaar

I always prefer in-house marketing teams to agencies as the people’s motivation to grow the business, test new things and get results is times higher.

In-house people genuinely care about the company and go the extra mile to make things work. Having worked in and with agencies, I have seen projects often handed over to interns which can lead to low-quality work and poor results. It also takes a ton of time to onboard agency people and to keep communicating with them on a daily basis to approve ideas and changes.

In Bolt, we’re growing so fast and changing things up all the time, so we need to be able to get new campaigns live in less than 1-2h sometimes. This would never be possible when working with an advertising agency.

I do see a benefit to using local agencies if there’s a need for local contacts to execute a one-time marketing/PR campaign.

Agree with the PROs in this chart – Image source

💸 On online advertising

Q12: What’s the number one mistake people make when trying to improve the performance of their PPC campaigns? – Taavi Kalvi

This really depends on the campaign… But that’s not the answer you were hoping for. 😀

Usually, the biggest PPC mistake is looking at the wrong metrics and KPIs in the first place.

Let’s say your goal is to get new B2B clients for a SaaS tool. So you optimize your campaign on getting new leads. When trying to improve your campaign results, you want to increase the number of leads or lower the CPA (cost per acquisition) of leads. While optimizing on this, you may forget to look at the quality of the leads, so you may end up with more leads with lower quality. So always try to optimize your PPC campaign performance towards more revenue, not mid-funnel or vanity metrics.

Another mistake is always optimizing your PPC campaigns around the same thing.

For example, you want to optimize your Google Search PPC campaigns, so you add new keywords + negative keywords. Maybe, instead of working on this, you should test another channel (like Facebook/Instagram) or another campaign type instead. Or another target audience.

As I’m already ranting on the topic, I also often see Facebook marketers A/B testing small changes. It’s generally more efficient to run tests with variations that are clearly different (e.g. not the color of a CTA button but an entirely different creative vs the current one).

A/B test with visible changes in variations

Q13: Which do you prefer when entering a new market: a) start wide and get maximum exposure OR b) start with as specific targeting as possible and expand later based on already collected data? Why? – Liis Laisaar

It depends on the product and your marketing budget.

In Bolt, we’re marketing a consumer product relevant to most people, so we can use wide targeting in our online ads and let Facebook and Google algorithms to optimize our campaigns based on results.

If you’re marketing a niche product, I’d recommend starting narrower. If you already have a user base, I recommend using Facebook Lookalike audiences.

Q14: What is your approach to influencer marketing? How do you measure its success? – Ane Voje

We have a very data-driven approach to all marketing activities and influencer marketing is no different. We measure the CPA of new users acquired through our influencer marketing activities by counting the referrals made with each influencer’s unique referral code. We also check the reach and CPM of the influencers’ posts and compare it to our other online channels’ metrics.

Q15: What needs to be done to perfectly grow your business throughout the social channels? – Soner Alemdar

A: I’d say that the key thing to succeed in social channels is to constantly create value to your audience. This can mean sharing useful advice, giving away free stuff, informing people about special offers – whatever people can benefit from.

For example, Bolt shares relevant blog articles for drivers

Also, as the organic reach on Facebook is very low (as low as 2% of your page likes), you should always put some boosting budget behind each post.

You can find more social media marketing best practices here: 28 Facebook Ad Hacks for Social Media Growth

Q16: What would you do, if you have to lead a business in the grey market? You know, in a situation, where you can’t promote your brand on Facebook, Reddit, etc. – Maksymilian Plociennik

Tricky… And truth be told, I haven’t marketed such a product before. My first approach would be to find industry influencers and try working with them. Also, building virality to the product so it will pass from person to person. And testing out affiliate marketing.

Q17: Should a new company first focus on client acquisition only or should branding also start from the get-go? – Andreas Velling

You need to understand your brand’s mission and key value proposition from the get-go. But especially with new brands, earning some revenue and getting to the first 1000 paying users should be the priority, so I’d focus on acquisition campaigns first.

You don’t necessarily need to run brand-only marketing campaigns, but can integrate the branded message in acquisition ads.

🤓 On reporting and measurement

Q18: What do you think about marketing automation and who is responsible for that in the team? – Vasyl Sergienko

Marketing automation is a highly relevant project when working with a large scale of users. In Bolt, we have multiple teams working on automation, for example, our Lifecycle marketing team.

Q19: This is a very open-ended and more of a process question and how you go about things but with Bolt being in different markets, how are you able to work and adjust as best you can in creating and executing marketing plans for the different product offerings in each market? I can imagine what “success” or “failure” in one market can be totally different for another. You may have already covered a little bit of this with Mr. Hale Schneider’s question. – Kian Paras

We’re able to use quite a global approach when it comes to marketing in specific countries. Our product offering is not that different from market to market and we focus on promoting our main service above others.

However, we work with local teams to understand each market’s specifics. If you compare Bolt’s social media or blog to some of our competitors, we’re still much more local in our approach.

Q20: How do you approach branding/awareness? Is this just a “side-product” of having the right messages or do you have separate branding campaigns? – Andreas Velling

We do not run a lot of branding-only marketing campaigns as we’re a highly performance-driven company and like to work on things that we can measure.

However, we’ve set the key brand messages and all our performance marketing campaigns and most social media posts also revolve around those messages.

Recently, we launched a green initiative to make all Bolt rides in Europe carbon neutral. It’s a good combination of branding mixed with digital communication channels.

Social media post on the Green Plan

There’s another reason we don’t focus on branding campaigns: as our main brand asset is our product. As long as we’re providing the best ride-hailing experience in a city, we’ll get new users through word-of-mouth and keep the existing ones happy as well.

⚡ On rebranding (from Taxify) to Bolt

Q21: What was your approach for the launch campaign – which channels and assets did you find most valuable and why? – Kati Kuustik

As I set out to work on the first rebranding campaign I’d ever done, I was surprised by how little information about rebranding you can find online. There were literally no articles sharing usable know-how on how to rebrand a company. Only stuff on “how to pick your brand’s name” = useless.

During rebranding, our most valuable channels were those that helped us reach the highest number of our app users: PR, in-app messages, and emails.

We also used other marketing channels like online ads to communicate about the brand name change from Taxify to Bolt. Also, Google Search ads were very helpful in making sure that people will find our website and app store listing with both the old and new brand name.

I’ve found that there are quite many articles on how to do the rebranding / decide if you should rebrand, but very little information mostly on how to approach the launch of the new rebrand.

Q22: What goals did you set for the rebranding launch? – Kati Kuustik

Our main goal was not to lose users and the volume of rides not to drop. There were, of course, a set of lower-level goals that every involved team monitored.

Q23: If you had to do it again, what would you do differently? Or what were your biggest learnings? – Kati Kuustik

The thing with rebranding is that you probably (and hopefully) only get to do it once. 😅

If I had to help a company go through a rebranding again, I would focus on planning early on, having clear timelines, and making sure that all teams follow it. Which is what exactly happened in Bolt and why our rebranding went (almost) smoothly. Although there are always some last-minute surprises…

I’d also start preparing the new brand’s marketing assets and CVI (in case you want to change it) earlier and upload all new ad campaigns in advance. It took our 2-person advertising team weeks to replace all of our 5000+ online ad creatives.

🎡 On content marketing

Q24: What’s the biggest challenge for a B2C company related to content marketing strategy? – Eduarda Lemos

In my opinion, the biggest challenge for all brand blogs is understanding how to create extra value for your users that they can’t find elsewhere.

For example, at Bolt we focus on blog articles that share useful information to our drivers. This information is much harder to find compared to lifestyle-related advice for riders (as there are so many blogs and magazines already creating this type of content).

Q25: How do you manage the content production process understanding that each country has different personas/language, etc.? – Eduarda Lemos

We try to keep our blog content as evergreen and universal as possible and localize it to many languages. Sometimes, our local teams also write additional blog content targeted at their market specifically.

At some point I started to write English copy while thinking how it would sound in Estonian or French, to make sure everything is easy to localize to our 20+ languages.

Q26: Aside from your blog, I’ve read a lot of your guest posts in different blogs and platforms. I am a little biased towards the Copy Hackers one and KlientBoost as my favorites among your written guest posts but the Adespresso ones and Entrepreneur piece are up there too. What was your mindset like early on in figuring out which blog/publication/platform to pitch and how did you pitch to guest post or wrote for them? – Kian Paras

I started out pitching to 10+ marketing blogs, and it was very hard to get in initially. Once you already have a few strong articles in good blogs (in my case, HubSpot and AdEspresso) you can pitch to the next ones and will have proof of your writing quality to present.

You can read more about my guest blogging journey here: After Guest Blogging 50+ Articles, Here’s What I Learned

However, note that you won’t get much extra traffic to your blog from guest posting. For example, when I published an article in Entrepreneur, only nine readers looked up my profile and website.

The main value you’ll get from guest publishing is:

• additional blogging and podcast invitations
• job offers and help requests
• high-quality backlinks

🎢 On career and work-life

Q27: What’s an average workday look like for you? – Mary Green

My regular workday is always full of surprises, project managing some marketing campaigns, attending meetings & job interviews, discussing ideas with the team, and sharing information between teams.

But my favorite days are the ones where I disconnect from Slack and email for 4h or longer and focus on macro-level planning and improving the current team/reporting structure.

Q28: What is your biggest struggle currently? – Karolina Krolicka

When growing as fast as Bolt, you run into a lot of struggles.

I’d say the biggest challenge is understanding the business impact and ROI of all the different online and offline marketing activities that we’re doing.

We’re testing and learning something new every month, adding layers of data analytics to our campaign reporting and improving the attribution between different marketing channels.

Q29: How much of your life is dedicated to learning your craft and improvement? I love hearing how others invest in their craft. – Rob Fulton

I feel that I can learn the fastest through my work. Also, running a blog around Facebook advertising helps me stay aware of all the best practices and latest hacks.

I like to research what other top brands are doing and do a monthly review of their social media channels and blogs. Another great way to learn about new best practices is to talk to other marketers. You can even reach out on LinkedIn and propose to have a call and share your key learnings.

Also, whenever I’ve got time, I follow some industry newsletters and listen to podcasts.

I shared a long list of blogs, books, podcasts, and newsletters I like in this article, might be helpful: https://karolakarlson.com/2018-key-learnings-facebook-ads-marketing/

Q30: I remember reading your work and learning a little bit about your career profile while I was doing college internships and I only graduated in 2017. From the outside, it makes it seem like you “Bolt(ed)” upwards so quickly (jk, bad pun) or rose up relatively quickly but you may see it differently.

What is your work-life balance/integration prioritization or however you call it like, especially when you were just getting started!? Because you have Bolt, the blog, possibly other side hustles, and clients although you did mention you do not have the capacity at the moment, and possibly other hobbies and personal pursuits. You may have alluded to it with Ma’am Mary Green’s question but gosh it makes it look like you worked 24/7 to get where you are at. I personally think it’s super cool with all you’ve done so far and I can imagine some of your best work is yet to come. 🙂 – Kian Paras

About the work-life balance… I guess that early in my career I was so into marketing, looking at it as my job, hobby, relationship… (kidding about the last one :p)… But seriously, I think I easily worked at least 60h per week, also spending the Sundays working on either planning for Botl or writing to my blog.

By now, I’ve taken a step back and try to limit my workweek to 50h max. It’s become more about managing my time and focusing on the high-impact items only, removing meetings from my schedule, and learning to say “no” to more low-efficiency projects.

However, I believe that if you find a career you’re really passionate about, working the extra 20h per week doesn’t feel like a burden. Instead, you’ll be thrilled to learn by doing.

I would also say that I was very lucky to have the right opportunities to enter my life at the right time. E.g. I got an email from the CEO of Klientboost inviting me to freelance for their blog and Bolt reached out to me just as I was about to leave my past company. So it’s all about doing good work and noticing the good opportunities as they arise. You’ll be offered cool jobs only if you put yourself out there.

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Most marketing (and sales, and customer support, and…) teams aim for a 10% month-over-month growth in key metrics.

Let’s get 10% more leads, 10% more cold calls, a 10% improvement in feedback scores…

The problem with 10% growth goals is that they nearly always fail to inspire. 10% seems attainable without a huge effort, by improving the current processes. In the end, no big steps are taken to bring about a significant improvement.

Another issue with 10% is that when it fails, the difference is so small it doesn’t deserve further investigation. Achieving 0-5% growth instead of 10% every month means no growth in the long term.

What if you aimed for 10x growth in results every 3 months instead? ??

Ambitious long-term goals make us think out of the box and inspire to go through complicated changes with real impact.

Brands won’t redesign a poorly-performing website when aiming for a 10% growth in sales. They do it when aspiring to bigger goals.

Here’s a challenge: when thinking how you could improve your team’s results, instead of being “reasonable”, dream big.

Think what you’d do if you had to 10x the results in 3 months with an extra 100% budget.
Think how you’d run your team if their (& your) jobs depended on getting the 10x results.
You won’t discover new tricks when playing by the old rules. So, change the game.

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