The Golden Marketing Principle 🪄

And what The Grateful Dead and a SaaS Unicorn have in common

The Grateful Dead were one of the most prolific touring bands of all time. Incredibly, they did it all with only one song ever reaching the Top 40. Without radio to pump their melodies into the ears of the public, one key element catalyzed their phenomenal growth from playing small gigs to giant stadiums - word of mouth.

In Brian Halligan’s book “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead”, he describes the key insight that drove their marketing engine. You see, nearly all bands prohibit fans from recording or “bootlegging” concerts. But not the Dead. They encouraged fans to record and share their concerts. This policy birthed a community of tape trading that enabled the music to pass frictionlessly across the USA.

Here’s the lesson - in marketing you should give, give and give some more. Just keep giving. Help your target customers succeed and you will succeed. Help with videos, podcasts, articles, webinars, content, content and more content. Don’t ask for anything in return. Don’t gate your content. Remove all friction between you and the market.

And here’s the key insight that a lot of people overlook. Your content does not need to be directly associated with your product. Instead, it needs to be broadly relevant to your target customer. And by customer I don’t mean the corporation named on the account. I mean the actual people that will influence the decision to buy your product. After all, it’s people not companies that buy products.

A brilliant example of this is the marketing strategy at Drift. For those that aren’t familiar, Drift is one of the most successful web chat companies in the world.

As a web chat product, you might expect the majority of their content to focus on web chat efficacy - how to convert more leads, what words to use when chatting with customers, and so on. Sure there is some of that. But it’s the exception. Instead, they focused on anything that might be helpful or interesting to their target buyers (again, people not corporations). Here’s some of their podcast titles to give you the flavour:

• How to Say No to Meetings

• Servant Leadership

• Lessons From Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

• Time Management

• The Secret to Becoming a Learning Machine

Nothing about web chat and everything about how to help you grow as a leader, marketer, teammate, human.

Today’s best marketing companies are media companies in disguise. They produce media that people are energized to engage with. This leads to growth in brand equity, direct sales opportunities, and revenue. This can be employed at the organizational level in your marketing strategy and also at the individual level. If you’re in sales, or customer success, think about how you can give to your customers or prospects without asking for anything in return. Give to your manager, your teammates or even your friends without any expectation of reciprocity.

As Zig Ziglar famously said “you can have anything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want”.