Barbra Gago: recommendation

Transcript context

…For founders who are listening to this and they're just like, "Oh, this sounds interesting. I want to try to think about a new category maybe for my product." Can you just talk about the mechanics of going through this process of trying to decide what category it should be called, how to roll it out, anything you could share by just the tactics of creating a category? The main thing which we've talked a little bit about already is really understanding your customers and their pain points and how they talk about things. All of my best marketing and positioning literally comes from having a million conversations with customers and listening to how they solve problems and how our system helps them solve problems and what they're doing and how they talk about stuff. I think that's step one, is really understanding who those buyers are, how they talk about the product, what's the unique differentiator and selling points? One thing that's really important in category creation as well is actually PR. You need to get this category and positioning out there at a high level in order to test it out and see if it makes sense and if it's resonating. And then the other piece is really those directory sites, which the analysts like Gartner and Forrester and all these guys, at least in B2B and enterprise, they really shape for customers what the categories are. And you need to build relationships with them. You need to work with them to create your category as well. So with the visual collaboration, for example, we weren't ranking, we weren't categorized in visual collaboration on G2 Crowd, and we had to meet with them and explain what it was and talk to them about the differentiation of this category versus other categories in terms of features and all of that stuff so that they could understand how they would differentiate this category from another category. So I think those are really good channels to look at. And then tactically, it's a lot of content marketing and a lot of thought leadership. When you're building a category, you need to make sure that there is a category that's validated by analysts and directory sites and things like that. But also, you want to have a lot of traction in terms of thought leadership like why is this the category? What are the unique value propositions of this particular thing? What are the pain points it solves? And then of course, getting a lot of content around because when you're generating a new category, you're also needing to educate buyers that there is a category that they can now budget for and why they should allocate budget for that. Sounds like a hell of a lot of work.…

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