Building a Marketing-Purposed Product

I joined Everpress in its infancy, when major product decisions could still be made. They would ultimately shape our future ability to monetize. Accordingly, I took the opportunity to apply previous marketing knowledge and use it for product development prioritization. At the time, our MVP site lacked a breadth of features that would allow the brand to be competitive within a maturing landscape. I stepped into a role of planning for growth whereabout I defined which technical resources would be most cost effective at different points in our growth cycle.

From day 1, our brand positioning was premium against affiliate-hungry competitors. The monetization strategy needed to account for an intrinsic viral potential of our sellers, balanced against the bottom line impact of growing campaign-specific sales.

Though my primary role spanned marketing planning and decision making, I led all product development in a manner of prioritizing monetization features.

From a purely product perspective, the following is an overview of the features built under my lead:

Scaling backend processes:

  • A multi-touchpoint CRM system on both the seller and buyer side of our business.
  • A dynamically adjusting seller profit margin calculation whose focus was to incentivise sellers to fuel viral growth.
  • Optimised in-house logistics, setting up an automated printing supplier logistics supply chain.
  • Hired one of the top five USA algorithm scientists to extract necessary artwork specific information. 
  • Scoped all partner API's for developers and executed accordingly.

International expansion:

  • Scoped and built multi-currency support on both the seller and buyer side of the business.
  • Automated and outsourced leadgen across segmented international demographics.

SEO intrinsic product:

  • Defined and implemented a link sharing / distribution strategy for our sellers.
  • Scoped auto-generating dynamic landing pages per seller category.
  • Defined keyword formula structures for schema.org rich snippets & dynamic meta tags.
  • Changed url structure from subdomains to subfolders to support a more scaleable SEO strategy.
  • Dynamically generating vertical-specific landing pages.
 

TWO TYPES OF ACQUISITION EFFORTS

Everpress had a fairly binary source of new site visitors.

 

Acquisition efforts could be either focused on capturing additional sellers, or capturing additional buyers for existing sellers. While buyers were the business' ultimate revenue generators, scaling campaign buyers in no way grew further Everpress campaigns. 

The viral nature of the business was most-felt through acquiring additional sellers. As such, nearly all acquisition efforts, financial models, and marketing budget was focused on capturing additional sellers.

Cast a net
 

210 MILLION LEADS

The business was largely dependent on our ability to find individuals who would naturally fit with our product offering. We began hiring an in-house sales team to find and convert leads, but quickly realised that the unscalable bottleneck was lead sourcing. 

I undertook an initiative to segment our perviously converted leads, and structured a data mining plan to capture a "lifetime supply" of prequalified clients that would be within our reach to close.

Because our competitors may read my writing, at this time I won't disclose where I sourced the leads, but I'm happy to discuss the process I undertook:

  1. Ask: where do our target market users (sellers) go to connect with their community (buyers)?
  2. Is their hangout spot scaleable? If online, does that place have a sitemap?
  3. Data mine what's available. Structure a way to use API's and data-mining processes to capture ALL of similar users. Segment and filter.
  4. Structure a way to reach the most qualified leads at scale for a first interaction. Outsourcing this is OK.
  5. Bring warm leads immediately back in-house to convert.
  6. Allow for internal CRM to re-convert into subsequent sellers.
  7. As long as this process is scaleable, run your acquisition efforts on an LTV basis that supports these efforts.

We tested this process and managed to eventually uncover a perfect market fit. Of the 210,000,000 leads sourced, 500,000 leads were carved out as high-value, ripe for our in-house outreach team to follow up with. To scale this further, we built a mechanism to outsource initial reach-out, allowing in-house salespeople to only communicate directly with warm-leads that showed an interest in our product offering.

 

CAPTURE LONG-TAIL USERS THROUGH SEM

While our sales team was converting warm leads from our leadgen efforts, a long tail of keywords remained to be converted.

Removing the human element of leadgen closing, our platform was pre-built with the thought of converting one-off sellers through the scaleable means of optimised SEM. In a vertical where few believed in the scaleability of SEM, we built an AdWords strategy with over 300,000 long-tail keywords.

Key to paid search success was segmentation. Our initial target of "influencers with a following" was divided into 9 categories of types of sellers. According to this, a vertical-specific approach with repetitive keyword variations was the baseline for a paid search keyword structure that captured any leads missed by our sales team.

 

COMPETITIVE, MULTI-TOUCHPOINT CRM

Every aspect of a premium brand's touch-points need to be 100% intentional. Users were placed at the forefront.

Though our acquisition efforts were focused on gathering additional sellers, it was important that subsequent buyers would experience equivalently thoughtful premium brand touchpoints that initially brought their campaign creator to us.

My team built a bespoke CRM system that was a few features shy of an ERP solution. Sellers were prompted when to reach out to their buyers, and buyers were told when to reach out to their social media friends. The result effect was a self-fulfilling viral growth trajectory.

Some of the thought that went into our CRM build:

Sellers:

  • When should sellers first reach out to their social media following?
  • How often should sellers reach out to their following in order to maximize their monetization potential?
  • How can we incentivize sellers to reach higher levels of sales using the same audience?
  • What is the LTV of a particular seller within a certain vertical, and how does this flow into our monetization model?
  • How can we prove our platform's value to a seller, such that they relaunch campaigns in the future?

Buyers:

  • How do we prompt individuals who are members of communities, to share similar likes with their community?
  • In order to manage a single buyers' expectations, what can be done to over-communicate their needs?
  • How can we transition buyers into future campaign sellers?
 

Everpress experienced an incredible growth trajectory.  Starting from absolute zero, we beat our competition to working with some of the most influential people worldwide, built an infinitely scaleable platform, and created relationships with customers in 60+ countries worldwide.

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT
PREMIUM BRAND MARKETING

  • Get shit done. It's the only thing that is tangible.
  • Market fit is everything. It defines your positioning.
  • Unrelenting attention to detail sets you apart.
  • Manage your expectations realistically, and manage others' consistently.
  • Failing often and fast is great. But to win you must succeed more frequently than you fail.
  • Your competition is likely building the same thing you are, so ship yours faster.
  • Integrate with like-minded organisations.

TECHNOLOGY USED

PersistIQ, Kickbox.io, Jira, Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Quantcast, Optimizely, Facebok Ad Exchange, Trello, Bitbucket, Google AdWords, Zendesk, Pipedrive, Mailchimp, Mandrill

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