Whoever said that Marketing is for people interested more in exact science such as math and analytics, was totally wrong. We had a great talk with the older version of a teenager passioned about arts, writing, and theatre, that became a marketing superhero, as Andrei Tiu called her in an episode they had together on the Marketing Innovation Show.

Jen Grant is the CEO of Appify - a young startup from Silicon Valley was the guest in our marketing podcast show and empowered the conversation with lots of knowledge and experience that she had during her times as a CMO, as a Product Marketing Manager, and also as a product marketing manager at Google. We are certain that we already have captured your attention and all you have to do is to get a pen and paper because there’s a lot to learn from this article! 

About Appify 

Appify is an agency specialized in developing mobile applications and digital platforms for businesses of all sizes. As Jen says about her brand, Appify is immediate - you can launch an app in days, it’s powerful because it creates powerful apps and also inspiring because it inspires people to be creative and to think differently. 

Build your positioning 

One of the best things we learned from Andrei’s conversation with Jen is the importance of positioning. Even in her times at Google, she learned that the best way to be successful is to have strong positioning- explaining why people should use your product. Here are some great examples we gathered from her experience: When Google was about to launch Google Book Search, it was a matter of time before they could get this service on the market without the risk of having authors and publishers suing them.

It was at that moment when Jen told us the results from this situation were to communicate simply and really grabbing people at the very clear reason why they should be interested in a particular product, in this case, it was so big, but even in every day marketing, these are critical skills to have to be able to say- How do I reach that person who may not agree with me, or maybe against what I'm saying and how do I reach them with something that makes them go- Oh, Oh, I get it. 

This level of positioning is the moment when a brand is trying to figure out the story it has, in order to be more than a service or a product that is fulfilling a need.

The other face of the coin when it comes to positioning is trying to figure out how you can position yourself in comparison to the competition, to what the people already know. When working for Box, Jen and her team came up with a simple and very clear positioning: secure sharing that IT End users love and adopt. With this phrase, they managed to cover 2 needs of their costumers, making them look like the better option, versus their competitors: Dropbox that was insecure, and SharePoint that was hard to use. And the results were beyond their expectations:

That very crystal clear, simple, and secure, put us right in between these two competitors. And later, I've met with folks who were in marketing at Dropbox and who come back and say- Man, you guys made it harder for us to launch our business product, because we just kept repeating it in every opportunity we could.

Find the Messaging Pillars 

The next step you need to do after positioning your brand in the market is finding the messaging pillars. The messaging pillars are the useful benefits that you can prove your service or product has. What does your business have in order to make your customers resonate with them? In Appify’s case, as we mentioned, things such as immediate, powerful, and inspiring were the keywords that help the customer reflect on this product and their need on the features that Appify has. 

And once you have those, then you basically have your kit. 

A great way to think about positioning and messaging pillars is to understand that position will fuel your pillars. From now on, the next thing to do is finding your tactics on how to implement those in the service you offer to your customers. The term inspiring used by the team from Appify is making people feel like they are using the apps they are building and feeling the benefits before they were actually using it. 

If you ever need some help with creating a strategy for your brand or anything related to digital marketing, book a 30 minute meeting and be sure we’ll help you scale your business!

This article is inspired by an episode of the Marketiu podcast - The Marketing Innovation Show.

To listen to the full version of the podcast episode, choose one of our streaming platforms, or watch it on YouTube: