304. Thin air 🧞
How to create marketing launches with a mix of repackaging and creative thinking
Hi there 👋
Marketing launches are some of my favorite events, right up there with birthday parties and Super Bowls.
As such, I’m constantly trying to find ways to get more of them into my life, and I find that again and again I run into one rather significant roadblock:
The launching of new things hinges on the building of new things.
Put another way, if your marketing launch calendar relies on a product launch cadence, then you’ll have a pretty considerable constraint on how often you can launch.
Fortunately (there’s always a fortunately, yay!), we marketers have a number of options to work with:
1 - The size of marketing launch does not need to equal the scope of the product work. For instance, a product feature that takes one week to build may be something hugely valuable that is a new innovation to attract customers. A P1 marketing launch could be a few lines of code.
We marketers can assess new product features for their perceived impact and uniqueness, rather than the scope of the build. This often helps accelerate some launch timing and lets us launch more things more often. Here’s more about this framework:
2 - Marketing launches can be campaign-driven. This might sound extremely obvious, depending on how you think about campaigns. Yes, marketing launches of new products are campaigns. But so are launches for all sorts of other things. You can think about campaigns as an organized, strategized, time-bound effort to promote a specific message — this expands the mind to think about so many more things as “launch-able,” be it new brand messages, seasonal promotions, trendhopping, etc.
And now for #3 (and the title of this email) …
3 - We marketers can launch out of thin air.
I’ll admit this sounds very risky and superficial when I say it like this. Allow me to explain.
Software products create value for a customer, and this value is not always experienced through a product’s new features. We tend to over-index on “new” when we can also index on value attributes like:
Faster
More reliable
More accurate
Safer
At Buffer, we underwent a software architecture project that did a bunch of smart technical things I did not fully understand but ultimately meant incredibly reliable uptime for our customers. The marketing “launch” in that case could have been: Buffer’s Always-On, No-Fear Scheduling Promise (it could use some wordsmithing).
At Oyster, a huge part of our business is the number of countries you can hire in, how fast you can make those hires, and how accurately we can facilitate payment for employees on our platform. None of those things are “features” per se. So anytime we improve one of those levers, we have new reasons to launch: Hire From Anywhere, Now in South Africa. Talent to Your (Virtual) Door in as Little as Six Hours. Payment Accuracy as Good as Gold.
When you’re creating a launch out of thin air, it’s never truly “thin air.” More often, it’s a collection of small improvements that you can bundle together, or it’s a repackaging of existing features into a new name or a new value prop.
Here’s a real-life example from Webflow …
Notice the words they use? Not “new,” but “better … faster … stronger.”
(This could very well have been a dedicated product launch, but it seems like it could also have been a “thin air” packaging of a bunch of small improvements.)
I love us marketers because we’re a creative, cool bunch of forward-thinking innovators, and it’s empowering and exciting to dream big about how we can launch new things. Sometimes out of thin air. Always with a big party to follow.
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
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About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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