lessons | Samantha Lordi

So you want to grow your company? But maybe you’re not completely sure how to market it. What works? What doesn’t work? And what’s the most effective use of your resources, and perhaps most importantly, your money? Enter Carolyn McRae and Sara Bendetson, a couple of marketing gurus from some fast growing Boston startups who are here to help.

Carolyn McRae is the Marketing Manager at Blueleaf.com, an online financial software company that aims to “make managing assets simple” by bringing together all your savings and investment accounts into one place. The company was founded in 2010 and the current product has been live for 18 months. Since the beginning of this year, Blueleaf leads have increased well over 300%.

Sara Bendetson is the Community Manager at CO Everywhere, a hyper-local mobile app designed to let you “go anywhere” by aggregating social activity based on location, and letting you see what’s happening anywhere in the world you choose. The company was founded in 2012 and the app recently launched this past August. In a short period of time, the company has already acquired over 50,000 twitter followers across its numerous twitter handles and has seen rapid downloads of its recently released mobile app.

Carolyn and Sara both know what it takes to market fast growing companies. Based on their experiences, we’ve compiled these 7 valuable marketing lessons:

1. Do: Jump on the “Inbound” bandwagon

Hubspot, the company that’s turned this concept into a very successful business defines Inbound Marketing as “the best way to turn strangers into customers and promoters of your business.” So what does that entail? According to Hubspot, “Instead of the old outbound marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and praying for leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be.” Both Sara and Carolyn have utilized the power of inbound marketing to help their companies grow. Carolyn stressed that Blueleaf is completely inbound, with the salary of its marketing person serving as its only marketing expense. She said that, “There is very little comparison between slowly, organically getting people to know you versus paying a lot of money to get all these people that may not be interested or may come on board and then leave.”

2. Do: Identify which social media channel is best for your business and leverage its power

Social media can be one of the best inbound marketing tactics to utilize, especially for a fast growing company trying to expand its reach. The challenge is in identifying which (if any) of the many social networks will benefit your business, and then leveraging its power as best as you can. For CO Everywhere, Twitter has proven to be by far and away not only its most effective social media channel, but also its most effective marketing channel. According to Sara, Twitter has been huge in helping the company build up its user base and grow the reach of the CO Everywhere brand. She considers Twitter to be a quick and easy way to connect with people and says it’s “100% open on her screen at all times.” According to Carolyn, meanwhile, Blueleaf, which is catering to a much different audience than CO Everywhere has found LinkedIn to be its most effective social media channel. Utilize as many networks as you can but really leverage the one that best targets your audience and most effectively allows them to interact and engage with your brand.

3. Don’t: Be afraid to change direction

With growth often comes change, and while it can be scary and a bit uncertain, shifting gears could be the best thing for your company. CO Everywhere is proof that changing direction can work. Originally created in 2012 as BlockAvenue, the company initially focused on the hyper-local aspect of real estate. As the company evolved and began to grow, it realized that the hyper-local concept could appeal to a much wider audience. It subsequently changed its name, modified its product, expanded its target market, and went through an entire re-branding. Despite spending a year branding itself as BlockAvenue and only months branding itself as CO Everywhere, Sara said, “It wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. It was like going from childhood to adulthood.” As a result of its successful re-brand, CO Everywhere was able to target “tons more people” than it could before, while still maintaining all of its previous BlockAvenue followers.

4. Do: Build a relationship with your audience

One of the benefits of inbound marketing is that it allows you to cultivate a relationship with people that are interested in your brand and your content. Be aware of that and make a conscious effort to foster both broad and individual relationships with your target audience. According to Carolyn, Blueleaf “aims to be the friend that you go to for the best, most relevant advice. We want to solve problems that customers are facing in simple ways. We feel their pain and help them through it.”

5. Don’t: Push content just for the sake of getting it out there

Focus on delivering quality content to people that want it. Despite working for very different companies, both Sara and Carolyn felt the biggest marketing mistake a fast growing company could make would be pushing content just for the sake of getting it out there. For Sara, that meant making sure CO Everywhere didn’t distribute anything that wasn’t thought out from start to finish. She said that over-using social media and saturating their audience with content that wasn’t deemed valuable could cause that content to be perceived as “spam.” For Carolyn and Blueleaf, it meant not buying email lists and pushing content to people that don’t want it. She said doing so would be “unnatural” and could hurt the brand.

6. Do: Use measurable strategies

The more you can attach concrete data to your marketing, the more you’ll be able to measure the success of your strategies, which is critical in a high growth stage. With a heavy focus on Twitter, CO Everywhere has found Twitter analytics to be extremely helpful with regards to measuring everything from how many people follow or unfollow them on a given day to the number of times they’re favorited, retweeted or replied to. Blueleaf has an enormous focus on data and analytics. According to Carolyn, the company “only puts time and effort into strategies that are proven to drive business.”

7. Don’t: Think there is only one recipe for marketing success

If there’s only one thing to be learned it would be that marketing isn’t a one-size fits all approach. While the ultimate goal of marketing remains the same, the means by which to achieve that goal can vary immensely depending on the company, product, and target market. For instance, Blueleaf utilizes e-mail marketing and webinars regularly while CO Everywhere does not. CO Everywhere on the other hand regularly attends in-person events, oftentimes as a sponsor while Blueleaf does no in-person marketing. From blogging to social media, SEO, e-mail marketing, paid search, in-person events and more, there are so many different marketing techniques that can benefit a fast growing company. The key is figuring out the right combination for your company, and then putting that strategy in to action.

Ever since I graduated college and officially completed my gymnastics career, I’ve repeatedly had a desire to go back in the gym and play around. About two weeks ago I decided it had been long enough and I did gymnastics for the first time in about two years. Let me tell you, my mind and my body were not exactly in agreement, and lets just say my body was not happy!

It’s probably safe to say that physically, I’m not the athlete I once was. But mentally, I’ll always think like an athlete. Beginning a sport at a young age and participating in it for over 20 years instilled in me so many critical qualities and skills that will benefit me for the rest of my life. I’m sure most athletes would agree.

Following are 7 takeaways from being an athlete that have better prepared me for my professional career and my life:

1. Precision

Being a gymnast in particular, I had to be precise. If I was off one inch to the right on the beam, I would’ve been on my head. Rarely do such minute details matter so critically as in a sport like gymnastics, golf, or even baseball. It’s hard to convey that level of detail and precision to a young child, without doing it through sports. As a result, that attention to detail and acute precision is instilled at a very young age, and at least for me, has carried through the rest of my life.

2. Coachablility

Once again, it is hard to get a child to do what you tell them, except when it comes to sports. But if you tell a young gymnast to straighten her legs or point her toes, or you tell a baseball player to loosen up his stance, they do it, because they want to get better. Not only that, they see that by making the necessary corrections, they are able to achieve their desired result. Going forward, if their manager is giving them feedback about the way they’re doing their job, they’re more apt to listen and apply the critiques to achieve their desired outcome.

3. Competitiveness

Being competitive is a great quality to have. It means that you’re not complacent. You strive to be the best and you want to win. That’s a great attitude to have because it will get you further in your career and in life. Being competitive means you work hard and you don’t like to lose. That’s not a bad thing, even though the word competitive can sometimes have a negative connotation. Few successful people would have gotten to the level they are at in their careers without displaying a competitive spirit along the way.

4. Time Management

One thing most athletes learn at a very young age is time management. Often, they are balancing sports and school with some other things thrown in there as well. Their time is limited and so they need to make the most of it. This is an invaluable skill that will prove incredibly useful when balancing work, a family, etc. later in life.

5. Teamwork & Sportsmanship

Learning what it takes to be a part of a team at a young age is critical going forward. You will works in teams in your academic career and your professional career, and understanding that each team member plays a unique role and that all need to be supportive of one another is huge. To that end, being a good sport is never easy. To be honest, no one likes to lose. But when you fall off the beam and get a bad score, or your team falls a few points short of your opponent, you still need to be gracious in defeat. That skill will come in handy later in life if someone gets a promotion before you, or achieves something that you want.

6. Drive

I have to say this may be one of my greatest takeaways from being an athlete. You can’t have a successful athletic career without setting goals for yourself and being driven to achieve them. Whether it’s learning a new skill, moving up to the next level, or setting a goal of being an Olympian or professional athlete, the mindset that is needed just to set those goals is one that doesn’t just disappear after you stop playing sports, and the drive needed to achieve those goals doesn’t other.

7. Fearlessness

I tore my ACL my senior year of high school and was absolutely devastated. I was scared about having surgery, and scared about not getting to continue the sport I loved. But I was determined to overcome the injury and I did. The challenges I faced as a result only made me stronger and no longer afraid of other obstacles that might someday get in my way. If I could come back from that, I felt I could do anything, and to be honest, I’m actually glad I had that experience. It taught me more than few other things could at just 18 years old.

I might not still be able to flip around the gym like I once could, but gymnastics has forever instilled these principles and qualities in me, and I know I’m better for it.

And just for fun…here’s a little video for your enjoyment:

Samantha Lordi

Tag Archives: lessons

Once An Athlete, Always An Athlete