Nine marketing tips from the Aussie CTO of star shopping startup Checkmate

Available as a mobile app and laptop extension, Checkmate is a free tool that gathers the best deals from users’ email and the web, automatically applying them at checkout to help shoppers snag bargains. The US-based startup, founded by three Australians, raised $5 million of seed funding in 2022. Rory Garton-Smith is the co-founder and chief technology officer.

As Checkmate becomes one of the most followed fintech products of all time, here’s the nine things we’ve learned about marketing:

1. Marketing is demographic-specific. If you want to market to a new demo, make a new page for that demo.

We take this to the maximum — we have separate accounts for guys and girls, and then 7 different accounts for different value props.

Proof = Our two main TikTok pages have almost NO overlap. One has 422k followers and one has 300k followers, but fewer than 3k people follow both pages. They address different demos with different organics and actors, but the same paid-value proposition.

2. Grow organic followers first before running ads. We had over 200k followers across our accounts before running our first ad, you need to build that audience first and grow a group of people who will resonate with the value proposition.

3. It’s a quantity-over-quality game on both paid and organic campaigns. We run over 240 videos per month. Don’t try to over-think what scripts will go viral, just release a decent quantity and let the audience dictate which ones blow up.

4. Running organics and running paid is very different. Organics grow your brand and follower count but don’t directly convert into users. Paid will grow your product but won’t necessarily get you followers. You need to run *both*. Organics should be interesting content growing your brand — paid should be a core value proposition.

5. If the core value propsition in your paid campaigns doesn’t resonate — you need to fix your product, not the script. Don’t overthink this.

6. Don’t be overly clever in your marketing or messaging. Spell out what you do in the clearest terms possible.

7. If a paid ad is finding low CAC — run a dozen variations of it with slightly different elements (change what the person is wearing, change the background, make them hold a banana instead of a microphone and so on).

8. TikTok has more users but a worse targeting engine. Instagram has a better targeting engine but less traffic. Use both.

9. Be consistent.

This post was first published on LinkedIn.