When It Comes To Earlystage Growth Marketing, Its Often Better To Imitate Than Innovate
When you look at Uber or Lyft from the beginning, they have been known to copy each other's offerings, features, and so on. A recent look at Instagram shows how in recent years they have added new features to their product to compete with competitors like Snapchat (Stories) and TikTok (Reels).
Here is the lesson. If you, as a startup, don't replicate what industry leaders are already doing in your sector, you'll be adding months and possibly years of unnecessary testing to your schedule. To be clear, I'm not saying you should copy your competitor's website design and print a verbatim copy. There's a fine line between copying exactly everything the competition does and using sidekicks while adding your own flavor; Make sure to do the latter.
But while the big players use imitation tactics strategically, imitation is even more important as a startup. Instagram is a multi-billion dollar company today and it still benefits from imitation. However, emulating startups is more important than established players because their pockets are not as deep.
In the first few years of trying to make it big, most of your time and attention should be focused on imitating successful marketing tactics.
To help you understand which launch curve to follow, I'm going to use the first triad and add a few examples from my days working on Postmates growth teams.
Triangular style i
The Triple I model has three pillars: Tradition, Iteration, and Innovation. You will be able to do all of these early on, but how you focus on each of them will be very important in the early stages.
In the first few years of trying to make it big, most of your time and attention should be focused on imitating successful marketing tactics. This means taking inspiration from your competitors in their ads and emails. In emails, websites and consumer touchpoints.
© Provided by TechCrunch. The types of message tests should change over timeThe types of message tests should change over time. Jonathan Martinez's photo
Iterations can occur in parallel with the benefit of successful imitation, and should be an ongoing process of improving metrics. If you think you have a great idea you'd like to try, go ahead. I'm not saying it shouldn't be upgraded. I did this while consulting for a small startup.
In the early years of trying to make it big, most of your time and attention should be focused on imitating successful marketing tactics.
What I'm saying is you earn a lot more by imitating early on, rather than spending a lot of resources on innovation uncertainty. No need to keep reinventing the wheel. Reserve your resources for high-probability testing of innovations that you want to test at different stages of your startup's life.
However, it must be kept in mind that this "home swing" should be reserved for times when there are sufficient resources for experimentation.
Paid purchase imitation
I spend a lot of my time at Postmates expanding our recruitment efforts. We have increased our expenses from $50,000 to $5 million per month. After raising $300 million in Series E, we have a lot of cash in hand as we launch our new paid channel. However, we still lack sufficient resources in terms of design. Our team must be good at modifying or copying designs released by DoorDash and other competitors. Personally, I track my competitors and their ad libraries every week to make sure we're catching any trends.When it comes to early-stage growth marketing, it's better to copy than to innovate early on, Walter Thompson posted on TechCrunch.
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