03 August 2023 | Marketing
How to get more reach on your product launch posts 📈
By
Hacking distribution as a smaller startup (with an example)
I was scrolling Twitter (still not calling it X yet) earlier this morning and I saw this post I love from a brand called Creative OS:
It’s a video, so it might be helpful to click through to watch (I know, telling you to click off of my newsletter… blasphemous).
I wanted to highlight this post because it’s not from a major corporate brand with massive brand recognition or some influencer-backed startup with insane built-in distribution.
There’s value to learning from such companies (like the McDonald’s case study we did last week), but those campaigns aren’t always the most relatable. This post is.
Ok, so let’s break it down.
Creative OS is a product targeting ecommerce marketers and founders.
And there’s a sub-pocket of Twitter called ‘DTC Twitter’ where a lot of them hang out. I spend way too much time there. It’s literally my job, but still.
Anyway, there are a lot of marketers and creators in that corner of the internet that you maybe wouldn’t consider ‘influencers’ in the traditional sense, but have distribution in that specific niche.
The team at Creative OS collaborated with a handful of them for this product, and did a great job of incorporating them into the launch.
They:
- Collaborated directly on the product. It wasn’t just a pay-per-post thing to get influencers to pump content. They were deeply involved in the product itself.
- Featured the influencers in the launch video. Because they were involved in the product, this feels native and authentic.
- Tagged the influencers in the post — maybe not needed, but doesn’t hurt.
- The influencers themselves actually posted the video natively to their own accounts. This is super underrated.
TAKEAWAY #1) Distribution is everything. Get creative with how you source it for your company.
I don’t care what industry you’re in. You have ‘influencers’ you can tap into. They don’t need to have thousands, or millions of followers. In fact, the more niche they are, the better.
Find ways to partner with them on products and ways to integrate them seamlessly into the social activation for it.
Incorporate them into the creative. Tag them directly. Have them amplify (retweet, post to their story, repost on LinkedIn).
A simple example of getting scrappy to amplify content:
Say you run social for a B2B a tech startup, and you have a product feature dropping. You’re probably posting it on Twitter.
If one of your investors has an audience on the platform, you could tap them to engage and distribute your post (or even write something up for them to post natively).
There are so many ways to get creative with hacking distribution as a small startup, and this post is a great example of that.
Quick one today — but for that reason, this post is going in my Swipe File. I use these types of prompts all the time with my clients (personal and brand accounts).
By the way, if you want to grab my exact Swipe File template I use to keep track of inspiration and never run out of content ideas, check it out here.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Productivity Systems for Social Media Managers
Missed the LIVE session this morning with 205+ marketers? I got you 🤝
Alex Hao (SMM at Notion) and I broke down:
- How to prioritize channels (not every channel needs a strategy!)
- How to deny content requests without being an a$$shole
- How to build a content calendar that’s actually useful
- How to build a system for creative ideation
Watch the full replay, for free, right here.
[Also, if you want to grab the templates I use for my productivity systems, check out my Social Media Toolkit]