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Happy New Year!
This year we wish you sweet and fruitful work with lots of clients,
And an abundance of Round A, B, and C investments.
Looking forward to journeying together and Building a Marketing Foundation for Growth.
שנה טובה
From the Cognis team

Earlier this year, Twitter announced several new features in the testing stages, aiming to reshape the look and environment of their platform. In line with their efforts to be more transparent, Twitter has taken to publicize their new features during the development stages to receive feedback from users.

A new feature that caught our attention was the ability to unmention yourself from a conversation. The feature was originally exposed to the public by @Dominic Camozzi, a Privacy Designer @Twitter, on June 15th.

According to Dominic, the goal is to create “concepts that could help control unwanted attention on Twitter,” which as anyone who managed a professional Twitter account knows – is a real and pervasive issue.

Other features in development to support this goal include notification when someone you don’t follow @mentions you, restricting certain accounts from @mentioning you, proactively controlling mentions (with options for 1, 3, or 7 days) and notifications when you receive a lot of mentions, among other.

NB: All Tweets on Twitter are still public. Any mentions you receive are from a post that other users created. Currently, there is no feature that allows you to completely remove @mentions from the platform created by others.

Although the end goal is understandable, along the way, Twitter is taking more and more control away from the writer and placing it with the subject of the conversation.

Why should you care?

Social media captivates the public because of the ability to publicly state ones opinion on anything, not despite it. This complete transparency lets users know that when they search for an honest opinion – they get it.

We are a generation of users who have grown up with social media and product reviews. We are jaded: we have learned to disregard comments that appear to be written by a person having a bad day, a competitor, or someone who is just plain sour.

Through our work at Cognis, a company specializing in marketing for High-Tech Startups, an essential part of our social media work is to monitor chatter and sentiment towards our clients’ social media activity.

We sure are familiar with people that go online to write mean or untrue comments about a Startup. We see trolls often in our line of work – it comes with the territory. Do we sometimes wish we could delete an untrue or detrimental comment? Sure. But what would the online world look like if you can’t trust the voice of the people?

Perhaps there is a middle path: only being allowed to delete a certain amount of mentions or banning a certain number of accounts from mentioning you. Almost like analyzing a trimmed mean (excuse us from using a statistical term), it gives the viewers an honest picture overall while placing elements of control in the hand of the subject.

Sara Haider, director of product management at Twitter, said on the Engadget CES 2019 stage, “We have a platform that the world uses to speak their mind; why not use that as part of our development process?” Concisely put. Twitter allows users to speak their minds, won’t restricting this power go against the very nature of Twitter itself?

By: Tal Harel

Recently I saw a Google AdsOnAir podcast with the Brand Manager for Next Insurance talked about quantifying the effectiveness of branding. Next took out the big guns – the Google and Facebook brand lift features. These tools, however, are for large campaigns with vast audiences, running advertising budgets in the tens of thousands of dollars (and a dedicated data analyst for each campaign). Since we are in the startup business, we’ll teach you how to test your brand’s effectiveness at no cost whatsover.

Once you’ve completed your brand frame, as we talked about in the last post, it’s time to test its effectiveness. But we’ll do it with qualitative, not quantitative. Let’s see how we test each brand deliverable.

Testing the Elevator Pitch

Run the pitch through people you meet, in the elevator, of course, at the Friday dinner tables, or with other startups in your rental office. They should, as a result, understand what you are doing, maybe with one or two clarifications. In addition, they should find it interesting, like in “ah, that’s a good idea.”

You can – and should – run the elevator pitch by people in your industry, but not exclusively. You need the nonprofessional’s point of view because your end customers, future partners, and co-workers will lack your technical and industrial background.

Testing the Vision and Mission Statements

It’s more or less the same here, except that now you should extend your test group to potential employees and hear from your HR guy about their input. Again, the vision and mission statement need to capture their imagination, at least to the point where they ask additional questions such as the company’s goals, where and why they originate, and how we plan to get to their goals.

Testing Your Market Analysis

When you hire that first Sales Manager/Sales Development Representatives/Success Manager – this is a working tool for them, so listen carefully to what they have to say. If they are seasoned professionals, they should tell you straight away if your market analysis makes sense.

If they do not have a lot of experience, within two weeks of contacting and speaking to potential customers, they will provide much-valued input on whether you got the buying persona right.

Determining whether more macro-level assumptions are correct (such as your target market segment) could take a quarter or two, but no more than that. Your sales arm is your ongoing litmus test on whether your market assumptions are correct or need to change.

Testing Your Unique Selling Proposition

This is one of the most important pieces of feedback you can get from your sales team: Is our messaging, based on our perceived USPs, working? Are we providing the great benefit that we thought we do? Too often, the CEO will often think it’s the messenger that is getting it wrong, and the product fits perfectly to its market. Don’t be one of those CEOs.

One Final Note

Once your brand, including your visual brand, is out there – through social media and outbound and inbound marketing efforts, you could listen to social media chatter to see what people are saying.

You can do it rudimentarily through tools like Hootsuite, which gathers responses and mentions from all social media platforms. You can also use online tracking tools. But in the early stages of a B2B startup, it might not be worth the effort and cost. In any case, you’ll be running on data sets that are too small to be statistically significant.

Going back to the Google AdsOnAir podcast with Next Insurance, one of the telling things the Next brand manager said was that you cannot measure a brand’s performance in real-time.

That’s one of the reasons that many startups don’t invest in branding (if I can’t see an immediate ROI, then why spend the money?). However, according to her, Next Insurance realized that branding is a long-term investment that is absolutely necessary if they want to get their company to the next stage – an A-level insurance company.

For Part 1 – Click here   For Part 2 – Click here

Last week we told you what branding is, why it’s essential, and what is a brand frame. This week we’ll show you how to create a brand frame (and what all this has to do with pickled herring).

The Elevator Pitch

We like to start with the elevator pitch. Remember that sui generis we mentioned in the last post? It should translate with mathematical precision into  X (you) does Y (what it is that your product/solution does) for Z (your particular customer) using a, b, c (your secret sauce).

On the face of it, creating an elevator pitch is straightforward. But, in reality, it is hard to distill everything you do into a single Y.  Yet weeding out everything that isn’t necessary, and determining your one overriding benefit to your customer, is essential not just for branding. It touches every aspect of your Company: where to put your R&D resources, what markets to develop, which customers to target.

Then there’s the a,b,c – which is often called “the secret sauce” in industry jargon.” And no, it should not be your technology. Instead, it should be what your technology accomplishes.

One last note: an elevator pitch is what it is – a description of what you do to a random passerby in the elevator. So it should be understandable to the layman.

One last note: you can also write your elevator pitch in the form of X (you) enables Z  (your customer) to achieve Y (what your product/solution does)  using a, b, c (your secret sauce).

The Vision and Mission Statement

So what’s the difference between them, you ask? They could be the same thing, but often they are not. Instead of explaining, let us show you some examples:

Vision Statement	Mission Statement
Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world. (*If you have a body, you are an athlete.).” – Nike	Create groundbreaking sports innovations, make our products sustainable, build a creative and diverse global team, and make a positive impact in communities where we live and work – Nike
To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy – Tesla	To create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world’s transition to electric vehicles – Tesla

 

Please don’t skip this part. Many Israeli startups will find vision and mission statements outlandish and unnecessary. They both, however, embody the spirit of your Company. The same spirit you try to convey to investors, customers, and no less important – potential employees. Once you capture that spirit in writing, you’ll have something truly exceptional and worthwhile to tell them.

Defining Your Market

In this process, you start with the macro and move into the micro:

• First, define your market: size (TAM, SAM, SOM, anybody?), maturity, players, competition. You should already have this prepared as part of your investor deck and business plan.
• Create a map of your echo system, including a competitive analysis of your direct competitors: their positioning, messaging, features, growth trajectory (if you can find it), and financing.
• Build your buying personas: your direct customer in the Company (there could be more than one). It should include a photo representing this person, their demographics, educational background, their boss and subordinates, how long they have been in the Company, how they are judged, their pain points, and their advancement trajectory.

Unique Selling Proposition

Now and only now – when you know what your competitors are saying and who your customers are – create a list of your unique selling propositions.

Do this now and not one minute earlier. Why? Because you do not want to be the only deli selling pickled herring in a neighborhood full of Russian ex-pats – but doesn’t know about it, so doesn’t advertise it. You’d be surprised how many of our customers went through a branding process, only to realize that they have exciting and unique offerings they didn’t foresee.

The Final Deliverable

The final deliverable – your brand frame – should be a PowerPoint presentation containing all the above. This document is the DNA for everything: from SDR scripts to marketing collateral to job postings. Now, take this presentation and find a design company. Finally, you’ve reached the fun and easy part of your branding process.

For Part 1 – click here

When you hear the term branding, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? Color pallets? A range of sleek images and logo designs? A glitzy website?

This is not branding, it is designing. The visual language you develop is part of a branding project. And while visual language is essential, it’s a by-product of the branding process, not the branding itself.

So What is Branding?

We like to use the description by Branding Magazine:

“Branding is the perpetual process of identifying, creating, and managing the cumulative assets and actions that shape the perception of a brand in stakeholders’ minds.”

In other words, it’s finding your SUI GENERIS – what’s unique about you, what is this new thing you are bringing to the world. Sounds pretentious? Not really. You’re creating a new entity – a company – so why are you doing this? What’s your goal?

Why is Branding important?

• Because it tells your unique story, the story that you tell your customers, your partners, your echo system, yourself. The story that sets you apart from your competition, not because you are better but because you are unique: you have brought something new into this world. With over 6,000 active startups in Israel alone, trust us when we say that in order to get an investment and those first customers – you need a good story. For a company to be successful, it has to be memorable, and for a company to be outstanding, it has to have a unique story.
• Because the process of distilling your unique offering to your customer and weeding out everything that isn’t necessary/superfluous/your competitors offer, helps you focus your scarce R&D and business efforts on the right market and the right strategy. for a startup, the focus is everything and a branding process brings you this focus and helps the whole organization stay focused.

The Brand Frame

The brand frame is the deliverable at the end of the branding process, which brings out your story and ensures consistency across all company communications (something that doesn’t seem important now, but once you get your first SDR and first sales manager – it will be). Consistency means that no matter from what angle a customer begins their journey with you – they will always receive that same riveting message that cuts to the core of their world.

Creating a Brand Frame

Creating a brand frame can take time and emotional energy, and it also sounds expensive. But a startup can do for a lot less and a lot faster. It simply requires the understanding that you need it,  and some resources; mainly the attention and time of the company leaders.

Stay tuned for next week- Part 2: What constitutes a brand frame