How To Create An Initial Outreach Strategy

In this episode of the PM versus PMM podcast, we discuss building an initial outreach strategy for a product with no users. We emphasize the importance of diversifying your beta testers, conducting organic marketing research, and considering paid marketing based on the right platforms. We also explore the challenges and strategies behind defining a brand that resonates with the target audience. The news topic covers the launch of Threads, a new app from Meta (formerly Facebook), designed to compete with Twitter. We highlight the app's rapid growth and potential implications for the social media landscape.

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

Aditi: Hello everyone. This is the PM versus PMM podcast, a podcast about products and product roles. My name is 

Arjun: Aditi. My name is Arjun Ahi. It is a beautiful summer day out here. We're absolutely loving the sun. Are you making sure to keep, get your sunscreen on? 

Aditi: Oh, I have to.

Even though my Indian skin tans so much faster than anything else, , but yeah, and it prevents burns, but I still have to make sure my sunscreen is on and I try to make sure that my face sunscreen, at least, is a part of my routine, regardless of what I'm 

Arjun: doing. For sure, yeah. I'm trying to put face sunscreen on every time I leave the house.

I've been like really dropping the ball on like sunscreen everywhere else. Especially my arms, like, because I'm usually wearing short sleeves, right? I should probably get on that. What do you do? I'm the same. 

Aditi: Last time I put body sunscreen on was when I was at the beach last weekend. 

Arjun: Yeah, that's same.

I only put it on the [00:01:00] beach. Well, today we're not talking about sunscreen. We're talking about how to build an initial outreach strategy. So when your product has absolutely no users and no idea kind of what you're doing, how are you going to strategize to start getting people in and most importantly start learning about, about how you're going to get them for our news topic.

Today we're talking about how Instagram launched threads last week and it has been blowing up. Aditi, let's get into our main topic. So here's my problem, right? I am building out a company. The product is like kind of ready to go. I've got some initial users. They're all from my network and like word of mouth.

And I need to and I'm starting to look here and I'm like, Hey, okay, if I want to really, like, get scale and, like, start growing this thing, I'm going to need some type of marketing [00:02:00] strategy. But I don't have no idea like, what my brand is. Even I have no idea. What like, what the, the ways that I'm going to go about and attract people.

I don't know what my advertising creatives are going to look like or anything. So this is something I think, like, is this a pretty relatable problem with the theme? What do you think? 

Aditi: It's a problem everyone has to deal with in the beginning. Have you ever seen the show Silicon Valley? 

Arjun: I have, I know of it, but in Canada, it's on Crave, and I am not bothered to pay for another media streaming, so I have not seen it yet.

Okay. 

Aditi: So, I just rewatched Silicon Valley recently, and when they first launched their platform in that show, the first poem that they, Even after a successful beta is that no one is using , their platform. So, [00:03:00] and the reason they didn't find out why they're no one's using their platform is there is that their platform is too complicated for their target audience.

So what that means for them is that when they did a successful beta in their eyes, they sent it out to people who they knew. So they were engineers, they sent it out to other engineers. And when they sent out the beta, everyone sent out like great feedback and everyone loved it. Everyone knew exactly how to use it.

But when they sent it out, an initial launch to the general public, no one knew how to use it. So this is a problem that a lot of companies actually end up facing is that when they do a beta, they do with people they know or connections. And that group of people can be a very specific niche of the kind of people that are going to be using your program.

And when you actually do a official launch, you realize, Oh, my users are so different or their knowledge base is so different and they're expecting [00:04:00] something a lot different.

 And as a result, you face this problem where you're, when you do an initial launch, you actually end up like either doing a mediocre release or you actually end up failing and an interesting way to deal with this. Is when you do a beta, you do it with people, you know, but you also do it with people you don't know.

And to be able to do that, , it's hard to be able to do that. But one way to do it is either do it through focus groups or be able to do like, maybe you've built out an email list for your possible users or something through advertising before you've done a beta. Right. And start sending that out to more people other than the people that you already know.

Arjun: That way, there's a larger sample in that initial group. So that way, when we start to turn on a marketing function, it's not like completely lost. Yeah. If 

Aditi: you do your marketing based on just the people, you know, there are chances that you'll end up doing the marketing in the wrong way, [00:05:00] because you're not getting the right kind of information about who your users are.

Arjun: Okay, so that makes sense. So step one is our beta needs to have a decent diversity of people, not just people from our network. What's step two of, of defining our outreach strategy? So 

Aditi: the second is a great way to figure out who your users are is do organic marketing. It's a cheap way and a useful way of figuring out where your users are.

So you do a beta or you do like pre launch, you put it out there and you either like you advertise organically on like LinkedIn, you do it on Instagram, you do it on TikTok, wherever your users do. think they are and a few places where you don't think they are and see where you're getting the best responses because sometimes you might get the best responses from places that you Don't think. You can realize that where you thought, maybe you thought your users are on [00:06:00] LinkedIn, but you find out that your users are on TikTok or the other way around. 

Arjun: But doesn't that have the same, like, network problem, right? If we're doing organic, then it matters where your network is.

Well, 

Aditi: see you evaluate it ratio wise. So what you do... Is for organic, especially if as, as a marketer or as an influencer in the field or a thought leader in the field, you have created a certain level of following or you have created a brand presence for your company. Right, right. At the point where you are where that you want to do a pre launch.

So, you have that presence in multiple different platforms and when you put out advertising organically you can see. get a rough idea of what kind of responses you're getting. It's a cheap way to figure out what the ratios are and then you can go about it through paid and get more specific 

Arjun: results.

Yeah, that makes sense. So that works well [00:07:00] when you like already have a little bit, being a marketer, you already have like a bit of diversity in your, in your

Aditi: yeah, like for example, I am a b2b marketer and I know that most of my audience is on LinkedIn So I have created a following of over 4 000 people on my LinkedIn right now.

So when I do a post It reaches more people of the That I want it to get to yep You create a following for whatever product or whatever service that you're providing But this requires a lot of extensive research in the back end From a marketer and from a if you're doing social media specifically a social media marketer Yeah Knowledge of the platforms to be able to understand.

Okay, tiktok is for this kind of a audience this kind of a Idea linkedin is this and so on 

Arjun: and that's just comes from like previous knowledge like [00:08:00] No, you can 

Aditi: do a lot of research around it. Like you, when we go onto LinkedIn, we know a basic idea of like, it's a work oriented platform, but you can do more research on, okay, so what kind of people are most active on LinkedIn?

Who are the people that I want to connect to and stuff like that. So you can figure out how to create your presence on LinkedIn, that it will be most helpful for you. So like, for example, I'm a marketer on LinkedIn, so I connect with mostly marketers. And influencers in the field. Because that's the kind of people I want seeing the posts that I make.

Mm hmm. And you do the same thing on TikTok. But if you're, like, building out a B2C app, like, what you're trying to do with Feel Good. Yeah, you're trying to catch a broader audience. So you're probably going to be going for something like Instagram, or TikTok.

And you're trying to you want to figure out what are the best ways for me to, whether you want to do the research around like hashtags that work or kinds of content that works, maybe posts [00:09:00] work better than reels for you or reels work better. Whichever one 

Arjun: and that and that's just testing like you're, I'm like creating content and doing tests or is it like, what do you mean when you say research?

So it's, 

Aditi: it's testing one, but before that you have to do just a demographic research of who is on the platform and what kind of research, what kind of grass and not just who is on, like, who's reacting to the content, but who is already on there. So, like, what other companies, if there are competitors or.

People who are like you or something like that. You want to figure out what companies are doing what. So this is something related to the competitive research episode that we did, where look into competitors and understand what they're doing. So if they're doing advertising in a certain way, you want to understand why they're doing it the way they are.

So if they're doing Google ads or they're doing tech talk reels, why are they doing that and what are they [00:10:00] getting? The engagement that they need, and if they are, it's probably something that you should be doing. 

Arjun: And, and then also improving on it, right? Like, okay, they're doing it, but it's for the slightly other audience.

If we change this up, it could be for us or something. 

Aditi: Yeah, and influencer. Marketing is getting bigger and bigger, especially for B2C products right now, and you can understand, you can, with the research, you can find what influencers have the right demographic or the right audience for you, and you can see if you can partner with these influencers.

Sometimes these influencer deals can be based on usage. So usage of their codes or like affiliate marketing links. So, those links can be really helpful for you to be able to get a relatively cheaper way to get these influencers to get the word out. 

Arjun: Yeah. I'm still really unclear about this, Edithie, like, please help me.

How will I know that some influencer has the right audience for me?[00:11:00] 

Aditi: You can look at their audience, right? You can get in a general idea of what their audience is like. You can see who follows them. 

Arjun: Oh, like literally doing like, you can 

Aditi: look at the kind of reels they make and get the kind of content that they're usually going after and who their target demographic is like liking it.

Yeah, who's liking it who's engaging with the content and Specifically, like, are they creating the kind of content already that you want to support? So it's a lot of work. It is! It is a lot of work. It's a lot of research that goes into what kind of marketing you want to do, especially on social media.

It's why social media marketing is a completely different field. And... It can be, it can be incredibly influential, especially in B2C, and it also is a lot of work, like you said. 

Arjun: Yeah, for sure. So it makes sense that, like, we're looking at influencers because a lot of social media is, is from influencers.

What are other outreach strategies[00:12:00] that I should be doing research on? 

Aditi: So paid marketing is not dead. paid marketing is still a thing. Yeah. People like to think that paid marketing is going to go away sometime soon, but it's not, it's not going anywhere. Paid marketing is here to stay. And it's only getting more and more specific with how much data these companies are being able to collect with how we use the platforms.

Right. So paid marketing is a great way. To get the word out, but like I said before, do the organic research first, do figure out what platforms you want to be on first, and then do the paid. You don't want to, especially when you're starting out and you have a limited budget, you don't want to waste resources on a paid ad that's not going to get you anything.

Like, if your entire audience is on TikTok, you don't want to be doing paid ads on LinkedIn. Right. So, when you, but when you do do paid ads in the right place, they're going to get you incredible returns. 

Arjun: Right, right. But [00:13:00] you, doing organic first is a great way to, to like, figure that out.

Yeah, it's a 

Aditi: great budget friendly way to figure it out. 

Arjun: Right. Okay, cool. What, what other research do I should you be doing to create this initial outreach strategy when you have nothing? Like how, what about brand, for example? 

Aditi: So your brand should definitely be something that reflects who you are as a company, but also who your customers are, right?

So if you're, say you're reaching out to Gen Z specifically, then you wanna understand what does Gen Z care about? Where is Gen Z? and what sort of sentiments they respond to. So you want to understand, okay, so they are caring more about like climate change or they're caring more about inclusivity.

Right. Want to incorporate those ideas into your brand. And make sure that you're supporting that through not just your brand messaging, but the people you partner with. So your affiliate marketers [00:14:00] embrace that idea of inclusivity and climate change or one or the other, whichever one. And you also want to make sure that you're on the right platform.

So if Gen Z is majority on Tik TOK, then that's where you want to be. If you're targeting, maybe say millennials who are like Executive Millennials, then you're probably going to be going for LinkedIn, and you're going to be going for a more businessy brand, and you're going to be going for more logic oriented messaging rather than emotional messaging.

Arjun: Mm hmm. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And we can... learn all that we can do all that research based on actually just like our own networks, right? Like reaching out and having discussions with people and figuring out like, okay, what are the things that resonate? How would you go about?

Aditi: It's, you can do it with a beta launch first and figure out who your actual users are. Cause sometimes when we do our initial research, we're doing it [00:15:00] based on the little bubble that we're living in. And like the Silicon Valley example that I gave. They were all engineers. They all had this certain perspective on the product that they were making.

And when the platform actually got released to everyone out there, they realized that the average person did not understand what their platform was or how to use it. Right. So the same thing can happen to you. You can do all the research in the world, but because of that bubble that you're living in when you do an initial beta or you do a pre launch you realize, oh, my audience is completely different or there's certain things about my product that I need to change before I do a real launch that can change your marketing strategy completely.

It can, your marketing strategy changes throughout your like company lifecycle. We've seen, we've seen the rebrand at the company we were at before where they went from small businesses to enterprise. And that was because they went from one series to another, and when you do an initial launch, it's [00:16:00] similar, like you're doing it first for peers, because that's usually who you can reach out to, but when you general public, you realize, Oh, these are the different things that I need to care about that, that I didn't realize in the beginning and you change your marketing or you change your approach based on that.

Arjun: Right, cool. That makes sense. And that's like, essentially, it could be a marketing pivot or anything, depending on how much 

Aditi: marketing pivots are incredibly common. They happen all the time. And they should happen all the time. 

Arjun: Because how bad are they? Like, don't your user, like your existing people who have like seen your ads, won't they get all like, wait, what the hell?

Aditi: Well, it depends on how often you're doing it. You don't want to be doing it every week, but if you're doing it every year or every couple of years. Or maybe even in the beginning, every six months, then that's not a big deal because your audience is changing that quickly, just like I said, with the rebrand [00:17:00] that we saw are the audience of that company changed.

So they had to change their messaging accordingly. They weren't, they weren't reaching out to smaller companies anymore. They were reaching out to enterprise. So they had to change the marketing to target enterprise. 

Arjun: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Damn it. There's a lot here. There's so much to learn. Okay.

I have another question. So we all know about like the marketing funnel, right? Top of the funnel. It's like people getting people interested middle of the funnel is like warming them up. And then the bottom of the funnel is like converting them. When you're thinking about the initial outreach strategy and like, Hmm, what am I going to do to start getting users?

And it's still like, you're still in a very much a learning mode. Like you're, you're doing a lot of research. You might be testing a little bit through organic or maybe some very cheap advertising. Do you even consider the three steps of the funnel at this stage? Or are you really only [00:18:00] thinking about top of the funnel maybe?

Or like how does the, how does that. What do you think about that? 

Aditi: I think you should be thinking about all three stages regardless of what stage your company's at, but what stage you focus on a little bit more changes. So in the beginning, you're obviously going to be trying to attract more customers because you don't have customers yet, right?

Right. You're going to be doing tofu more than, so tofu is top of funnel. Bottom of funnel and most of us middle of funnel. Yeah. So you're going to be doing tofu more than the other two, because you're trying to get more and more people to become aware of who you are. Right. Creating that awareness, you're creating just that presence for yourself in the market that you're going into.

So obviously, you're going to be doing a lot of thought leadership, you're going to be doing a lot of strategy content, your advertisements are probably going to be starting off with tofu content more The other two, 

Arjun: right? So if you were a new product marketer at a very early stage company [00:19:00] and you made like a report to the CEO of like, okay, this is like what our tofu is going to be you'd or or actually what all 3 of them are going to be.

It would obviously be very heavy towards the tofu, but it would be in a lot of detail. All three stages would be a lot of detail of how you're gonna even though it's early stage. That doesn't seem right to me. Like, it doesn't seem right that. You're going to put so much detail effort into things when you're still like doing initial outreach and still learning a lot.

So the thing 

Aditi: is when you do a paid marketing life cycle. Yeah, it's usually around six months where you do tofu for a couple. Mofu for a couple and then Bofu for a couple based on how people are reacting to your ads. And, what the point of it is, is that you're nurturing people through the funnel.

You're, you're engaging them at Tofu, then. getting them more [00:20:00] informed at MoFu and then closing them at BoFu, whether it's them to get them on a free trial or getting them onto a sales call. And that whole process on average is around six months, but depending on your app, it can be shorter or longer.

And that's why when you're first starting out, you're going to be focusing on the tofu more because that is the stage that most of your customers are going to be on. You haven't started that cycle yet, so you're obviously going to be starting 

Arjun: You're at the start of the cycle, which is tofu.

Yeah, that makes sense. Well, this was a really awesome discussion. We're out of time. Audience, listeners, if you're interested in learning more about this and have more questions, please send them in. We're going to do our best to answer and we're going to figure out how to help you build out a initial outreach strategy like I'm trying to do now.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely a difficult thing and Aditi you got all the answers. 

For our news topic, Aditi, have you been hearing about [00:21:00] Threads? Who hasn't? Who hasn't? A hundred million users as of today, they launched just last week. Threads is the new app from Meta.

 From Instagram specifically that is designed to be a Twitter competitor. It's actually, I think, is it, is it Meta's first new social media app in a while? I think it is. I 

Aditi: think so. Did you know that they beat their first million in 90 minutes? 

Arjun: That's insane. That shows the power 

Aditi: of Yeah, that's the metric that I was blown away by.

It's like the 100 million is crazy, but that 90 minute, 1 million in 90 minutes is just insane to me. 

Arjun: Absolutely. This is like the power of network effect and and what does, what's the word? Ecosystem building off of your ecosystem. But yeah, what, have you, have you gotten on the 

Aditi: product? I have not.

I'm living up to my name and not getting onto social media before it [00:22:00] becomes a real thing. 

Arjun: I I'm kind of anti Facebook, otherwise I'd be on this. They I just don't like their, their data sharing. Policies if you're in America and you're concerned about abortions, please do not use this product because they will steal all your data and sell it to the U.

S. government. So, that is a bad, a bad thing, but in other words, in, in other cool things that they're doing, they're, they're using the activity pub protocol, which is decentralized. So that means that. Other social media that are also using activity pub, like mastodon will be able to, like, see your posts.

And I think that's a really interesting direction, especially for Facebook, which is very, like, known to try to create this strong ecosystem. But with this, this activity pub protocol, you could technically, like, move all of your. A [00:23:00] social media account off of Threads and onto Mastodon or something.

Do you, do you have any opinions on decentralized social media? I 

Aditi: love decentralized social media. It makes it easier to have just one app and with everything in it, right? I, when I first came across Threads, it was the day it launched. And then a couple influencers that I follow on Instagram, they had like shared certain threads that they had created.

Yeah, you could just look at that on their story, you can click on the thread and you can see the discussion going on without having to ever download threads at all, which I thought was really cool. 

Arjun: It opened in the browser, 

Aditi: like you can open it in Instagram itself. Oh, yeah, it doesn't move out of Instagram or go on to browser or anything.

I mean, it's still in the ecosystem, so I guess that's a better integration than another one, but I really like that you don't have to have threads to be able to read the threads that you might be interested in. 

Arjun: Yeah, that's cool. One of the other things about it [00:24:00] is obviously that like, It's trying to be, it's trying to be Twitter, and Twitter, I, Instagram I think is for people who like, look really good, and Twitter is for people who like, have really smart, savvy things to say, and I, I, I feel like there's a complete disconnect between the two.

 Twitter is kind of that place that you go to like, yell into the void. And I don't know, that feels really weird to me. It feels weird that to connect the two of them. But obviously it worked from a product marketing perspective because, wow, 100 million people, so. 

Aditi: It's funny, one one podcast I listened to, and it the host, she describes Instagram as a place where everyone's happy and happy go lucky kind of attitude, and Twitter is where everyone is just 

Arjun: sad.

Absolutely. Absolutely just sad. It's preventing and crying about life and it's really weird to bring those two together. But, but I think it speaks [00:25:00] to the fact that threads might not... And probably will not have the same vibe as Twitter. It's going to have its own vibe. And I like maybe with a lot of.

user, like, like feedback, build, measure, learn feedback cycles, that new vibe of threads could be actually really cool. So we'll, we'll just have to kind of see if, if threads like sticks, you know, if people like that new vibe of threads, obviously they have the social graph of a hundred million people.

And so we'll just have to see. I 

feel 

Aditi: like they just like managed to get everyone on Instagram onto threads like immediately which was insane to me that people were just willing to be on this second social media app so easily. 

Arjun: Yeah, it is really weird. Because, because that's not an easy thing, right?

Like right now. It's not. Do you think it's because... Because it's from [00:26:00] Facebook and people have like a trust of Facebook? I don't 

Aditi: know. I feel like Facebook's been in more shit than any other social media. 

Arjun: Yeah, that's true. Maybe it's because Twitter's dying and and it's really like people want a Twitter and they're like, okay, this is easy.

Aditi: I also was thinking about it. I was like, it took Facebook really long to come up with a competitor for Twitter. I feel like this took a lot longer than it 

Arjun: should have. Then, Like 

Aditi: they came out with a competitor for snapchat with like disappearing, disappearing chats and disappearing stories and everything really quickly.

But with Twitter, it didn't, it wasn't until Twitter decided to fail for whatever, like what's whatever's going on over there. Did they come out with a competitor for it? So that's 

Arjun: so true, right? So I 

Aditi: wonder if the two CEOs had something going on over there. 

Arjun: Well, in the news, they're apparently going to have a cage match, so [00:27:00] we'll 

Aditi: see about before Elon Musk came on, so maybe they had like social media or Facebook.

Would it come out with a competitor for 

Arjun: Twitter? Yeah, like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg are friends. It's possible, 

Aditi: because I feel like a competitor for Twitter from Facebook seems like a very obvious choice for them to make.

Arjun: Another thing with threads is is, is how Facebook will handle content moderation. We saw Twitter take it. Well, the Twitter of the past, Twitter 1. 0 took it quite seriously and it was necessary for them to do so because, of course, like, the whole world news, like, broke on Twitter, right? Like, Twitter was A huge space for things happening.

And so they took content moderation very seriously. Facebook meta, however also takes content moderation very seriously, but like, in a very different [00:28:00] way where they don't really care about misinformation much at all. And so that is completely different. Content moderation policy between Twitter and, and threads.

So we'll have to see about how Meta handles that. 

Aditi: Yeah, I feel like Meta has always been like free for everyone kind of thing. Like, it doesn't matter who you are. You're allowed to say something. 

Arjun: Yep. Like, they're very much, They're very much a platform for everyone, right? And I think that's what made Twitter, like, so great, is that, yeah, it was for everyone too, like, you could go there and shout into the void, but it was also, like, a place of virality and a place, a place things happened.

You had content producers and you had, like, lurkers and followers and, and readers. The first 

Aditi: social media we saw real like celebrities themselves [00:29:00] being active on if I remember correctly Because Twitter's from before Instagram got really popular. 

Arjun: Yep So 

Aditi: that's the first time I remember feeling like getting that idea that you can follow celebrities and they are, you have this idea that they're the ones that are talking when you get a post from them rather than Facebook, where you don't really interact with celebrities as much, where it's just your inner circle or whatever your so called Facebook friends are.

So it was a very different vibe from Facebook to Twitter. And then Instagram came along, everyone became super active on Instagram, so. I feel like the idea of Twitter was very revolutionary 

Arjun: at the time. And now it's like, less so. Yeah. It's very true. Although there is a hundred million people there, I think it'll be pretty tough to create the right circumstances for those a hundred million [00:30:00] people and more to, like, find a home there, you know, especially piggybacking off of Instagram so much.

Well, that is interesting. We'll definitely have to see how, how Threads does. 

Let's move on to our fun facts. Adithi, what's your fun fact this week? Okay, 

Aditi: so my fun fact is about the word robot. I actually, I kind of knew this, but I also kind of didn't. But the word robot comes from the Czech word, word robo, which means forced labor or servitude.

Arjun: Wow, I'm sure iRobots don't like that very much. Hopefully they had emotions. Yeah, let's make sure no one knows the origin of robot. So if you're a robot listening to this, please don't forget. Don't be mad at us, please. Mine is also a word we got some wordy fun facts. this week. I was looking at the word emoji.

 It comes [00:31:00] from the Jap, two Japanese words, e meaning picture and moji meaning character. And which makes sense because emojis are picture characters. So emoji, there you go. That's how the word emoji came about and I had no idea it was Japanese at all. Me neither. Okay shall I read us out? Thank you so much for listening on this podcast. We want to talk about products. We're doing this to learn and express ourselves. We absolutely want to hear from you. If you loved our discussion on outreach strategy today, please reach out to us on LinkedIn. If you have any. Questions comments or ideas for future episodes.

My name is and I'm with the Patel. We would love to have you be a part of our. Podcasts. Aditi what are you doing for the rest of this week? Work for the 

Aditi: rest of the week, but I'm, I have plans to go to Six Flags this weekend, which I'm really 

Arjun: excited about. Fantastic. We all love Carnival.

Actually, I'm, I'm not too [00:32:00] big on it myself, personally. Never got into it. I'm a big roller 

Aditi: coaster junkie. I can't wait to go on a Kinga 

Arjun: Coff. Okay. Enjoy. Let us know how it is next week. See ya. Bye.