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Julie

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She was a lanky woman who looked like an athlete and when she walked, especially fast, placed extra emphasis on the balls of her feet.

A family outcast since the day she was born, she moved through the world with a lofty air and a certain resignation—but things started to change right around the time she graduated from Cleveland State University with a degree in art history.

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Mind Monday

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The radio flipped itself on and a light buzz filled the room. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue” weaved between a lilting voice racing through the dailies.

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A.C.B.

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In the days after birth control was banned, some of us went wild with our hair. We added bright colors and patterns and lobbed off… Read More »A.C.B.

Campfire

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You came into the bedroom saying “it smells like campfire.” Naively I replied, “I like that smell. Reminds me of summer camp.” We left the… Read More »Campfire

The Zoom Room

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The green light came on. Two windows appeared, then four, six, eight. Someone tapped a microphone. Some attendees checked for food in their teeth, adjusted… Read More »The Zoom Room

Third Wave Coffee And Justice For All

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His eyes squint as he enters the tiny coffee shop and lips purse in response to the morning soundtrack – The Misfits – loud enough that the two opening baristas bellow at each other from across the dinky bar.

How User Personas Are Like Characters In A Movie

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Photo by Major Tom Agency on Unsplash

Photo by Major Tom Agency on Unsplash

 

User personas are a foundational building block to any successful marketing strategy. They help you identify your ideal customer and how to most effectively reach them. While researching and creating a series of nuanced user personas can sound daunting or like another dry assignment to check off the to-do list, the research can be eye-opening. It helps to inform your positioning, messaging, targeting, and even product development in significant ways over time.

User personas play into everything you create: from your brand messaging and visual identity, to a campaign strategy and content plan. They capture basic demographics like age, gender and location, and go a step further to capture your ideal customer’s background, interests, and character traits.

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The Battle Of Brand Awareness & Performance Marketing

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Photo by James Pond on Unsplash

One of the most valuable and satisfying experiences a performance marketer can have in their career is scaling a growth operation from scratch. At Matrix, we went from spending $0 to a number that represented positive, baseline growth for PowerWatch. As head of marketing, I can attest to how rewarding that experience was and how important the phase was in building foundational growth for our company.

There are all kinds of shortcuts on the road to growth. Shortcuts are by no means fatal, but they do step around the critical early stages where investment in performance marketing is key.

Companies will outsource marketing to an agency, or buy cheap traffic from non-core markets to prove out vanity metrics. They’ll hire a brand-focused CMO to build out a massive marketing team – and discount performance marketing completely. Again, these things aren’t fatal, but long-term growth ultimately means investing in a combination of areas that function together in order to scale a product to its maximum potential.

The growth trajectory for a startup typically looks something like this:

Over time, it looks more like this:

In the beginning, performance marketing acts as a flywheel to push the business from one stage to the next. Later, brand marketing comes in to serve the goals of the company as it begins to grow and mature. (for example, when LTV becomes equally important as conversion.)

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