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.
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.
Dear Fallon, I saw on the website that you’re the head of customer harmony and happiness so thought it would be best to email you… Read More »RE: Awakened Almonds
They pop their shirt collars high like it means something. In an end-of-world apocalypse scenario this is what they’ll be doing when they die. Or,… Read More »Jump Cut to Venice, CA
I can’t write about loneliness, because it’s a cliche to lament about darkness to other privileged people. Let’s say I’m at a coffee kiosk. Let’s… Read More »Robots Get Lonely Too
It looks like we’re on Mars. The sky is orange and smoke is nice for cocktails but maybe not so much for breathing. The burners… Read More »More Fires On The West Coast
We regret to inform you that due to unfortunate weather conditions, Pundit Mountain will be closed this week. We typically keep our rides open when… Read More »Pundit Mountain Is Closed This Week
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.
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
When the apocalypse comes we’ll still be on a conference call. Across town, someone will be in the middle of writing a guest post about… Read More »The Great Pause
Ripples of fear run deep through a virus-infected city Torn, terrified, twisted by the news rolling in like a second fog, We crumble more easily… Read More »Pandemic Blues
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
The parrots first arrived in August. The boyfriend says it was a sign. She says all they did was put seed outside — like they… Read More »Wild Parrots
Today was the best of days, whether Maggie consciously knew it or not. This morning she woke in a sliver patch of sunlight and realized… Read More »San Francisco Apocalypse
New York City. He’d heard about it from another paisan who talked about it with reverence, like the Big Apple was the friggin’ holy land.… Read More »Big City Dreams Turn Mortals Into Icons
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.
2004, the old Cinespace on Hollywood Boulevard one wet Tuesday night in April – who can forget! How the traffic backed all the way down… Read More »Los Angeles, Then
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.
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.)
Read More »The Battle Of Brand Awareness & Performance Marketing
It may sound like a no-brainer, but all memorable brands have good brand architecture behind them. Think Tesla or Apple, Uber or Thinx. Brand DNA… Read More »Fingerprints, Then DNA