A while ago, I was talking to my friend Veronica from SPIN Ideas in Amsterdam about a way to collaborate professionally. We both own marketing agencies that help startups and SMBs with their digital marketing, so it felt only natural to team up.
About Vidalico Digital: Why did we start this journey?
When I was studying for my MBA, I connected with the startup scene in Helsinki and learned about the challenges most startups and small businesses face. Caught up in every aspect, including funding, product and service development, testing, and sales, marketing is often the last thing on the to-do list. Suddenly, you have a product and maybe one or two customers and yet nobody knows about you. I found there were other cases where the startup did not have the resources to hire a full time marketing manager. A bunch of us, students at the time, decided to start digital marketing as a service to help start-ups and small businesses with their marketing so they could focus on growing their business.
About SPIN Ideas: Veronica’s “why” for starting her journey
SPIN Ideas’ path is not too far off from Vidalico’s. A little over a year ago, Veronica decided to work for herself, because she wanted to create her own rules. She realized this applied to all entrepreneurs. They stopped working for big companies, because they wanted to break the pattern and create their own set of rules based on their own experience and stories. This is what SPIN Ideas does: helps entrepreneurs and startups create a marketing strategy based on their story.
SPIN Ideas and Vidalico Digital Collide
Even though we live and work in different countries, we are operating under the same conditions. The markets and the needs of our clients are similar and our services are somehow complementary. In 2018, we decided to create a series of videos where we talk about marketing and share our knowledge with our audiences.
Another reason for creating these videos is to help companies and individuals figure out how to take advantage of digital marketing to engage with their audience and tell their unique story. Maybe you have asked yourself if marketing is something your business should consider or not. Hopefully with these videos we are able to answer this question to some extent.
In fact, every time somebody asks me why they should spend any time and money on marketing, I often use the analogy of a pitching contest that takes place at a stadium. Everybody in the stadium wants to pitch his or her story. The judge needs to pick one company from the crowd that will then come up on the field and tell his or her story to the rest of the audience. Once selected, he or she can pitch their products or services to the rest of the audience for a short amount of time (our attention span is decreasing as the amount of available information increases). This contest has one condition: you and all the other participants (maybe 50,000, 100,000, perhaps more) have to shout the name of your company, product, or service at the exact same time, hoping you will get noticed.
Now pause for a moment and close your eyes (well not until you read everything) and try to imagine how thousands of individuals screaming at the same time might sound. Imagine you are the judge. What do you think you will hear? Most likely you will hear one BIG mumble-jumbled noise, unable to understand what anyone is saying.
This is why you should consider marketing.
You have your audience, and your goal is to grab their attention. Be aware: there are many others out there who are also trying to grab that same attention from your audience. Your story is unique to you and like in the contest example above you should use any and all means available to stand out and gain the attention of your audience.
Last but not least, we wanted to have fun doing these videos. This first video is an introduction to why we started doing this and why companies should consider marketing. Having said that, I hope you enjoy these videos and that the content we provide is useful to you.
Please let me know in the comments below what you would like to hear more about in our video series and what we should include in the future. Any feedback is welcome. If you find this video series useful, please help us spread the word so others can benefit, too.
