When I’m watching a movie and the stupid character jumps into the fight without a strategy, I know they’ll regret it and regroup to devise one. Everyone understands that such an action will accomplish nothing.
However, this is actual life.
So, if you make a mistake, you may not get a second chance to “regroup and devise a strategy.” Fortunately, we aren’t so dumb to build a firm and begin promoting it without a great startup marketing strategy. Here are some foundations you need to know to start creating your startup marketing strategies.
Understanding Startup Marketing Strategies
Startup marketing strategies are marketing plans that are tailored to a startup’s restricted budget and promise faster growth than typical marketing tactics. Depending on whether you need quick results or a strong foundation to build your firm on, this plan may incorporate some growth hacking or growth marketing.
Foundation for Startup Marketing Strategies
A sturdy foundation is required before you begin laying bricks. The same logic underpins a successful startup marketing approach. Before marketing your company, make sure you’ve covered the following bases.
Choosing a Market
It’s tempting for company entrepreneurs to imagine that their goods will be loved by everyone on the planet. After all, founders live, breathe, and consume their goods. The truth is that your product is only of interest to a small percentage of the population.
You will squander both time and money if you try to sell your company to everyone. The idea is to select a specialized target market and aggressively pursue market share.
How do you pick a market? There are four major considerations:
- Market Size – Are you aiming for a certain demographic? Male? Children? Determine the number of prospective buyers in your target market.
- Market Wealth – Does this market have the financial means to purchase your product?
- Is the market saturated in terms of competition? As in, how many competitors do they have?
- Value Proposition – Is your value proposition distinct enough to stand out from the crowd?
Defining Keywords
With a well-defined market, you can start compiling a keyword list. The keyword list will be mostly used for blogging, social networking, and your primary marketing site. Essentially, you want to create a list of highly relevant terms or phrases to your brand.
Consider this: What would a potential customer enter into Google to reach your startup‘s website?
Begin with a list of basic keywords. This is a list of three to five keywords that fully describe what your business does. Your value proposition should determine your primary keyword list. What services do you provide to customers?
You should now broaden your core keyword list to include secondary keywords. Secondary keywords are more targeted. For example the keyword, “content marketing.” Secondary keywords might include things like corporate blogging, blogging best practices, email marketing how-to, and so on.
Defining Success
Every startup’s success is unique. Startup A may define success as 500 new signups per month, but Startup B defines success as $50,000 in revenue per month. Whatever your definition of success is, define it early and clearly. Make a note of it or share it with the entire team. Just make sure everyone you work with understands your definition of success and is willing to strive toward it.
Make an effort to maintain consistency. It makes no difference if you define success in terms of signups, sales, profit, or anything else you can think of. What matters is that it is linked to genuine progress (no ego boosts) and that it is monitored consistently each month. For example, success should not be defined as 500 new signups one month and $50,000 in income the next. Choose one definition and stick to it.
Setting Core Metrics
Vanity metrics should be avoided in the same way that vanity success should be avoided. While vanity metrics are appealing if only to your ego, they are useless. They are unrelated to actual growth, which means you won’t know if your business is a smashing success or a terrible disaster until it’s much too late.
Make certain that your essential metrics are precisely quantifiable and specific. Assume your definition of success is 500 new signups each month. You may calculate the conversion rate of three sign-up calls. The concept is to have a few very important KPIs that are dependent on activities made across the client acquisition funnel (e.g. signups, newsletter subscriptions, eBook downloads). Don’t attempt to quantify everything. Concentrate on the important success indicators.
Estimating a Conversion Rate
The following step is to determine conversion rates and values. Consider newsletter subscriptions. If your conversion rate is 20%, 100 new newsletter signups each month might represent fantastic growth. That is if 20% of your email readers convert to paying clients. If your conversion rate is less than 1%, 100 newsletter signups may be negligible.
Estimate your lead conversion rate (using previous data). Do the same thing to assess a customer’s lifetime value. You may attach values to goal completions such as email signups if you know how many of your leads convert and how much those conversions earn for your business. A monthly income of $2,500 from your newsletter is far more indicative of success than 100 new email signups.
Setting a Budget
It all boils down to money at the end of the day. How much money can you spend on your startup’s marketing strategy? While inbound marketing leads are 61% less expensive than outbound marketing leads, they are not free. Set a budget early on and accept that constraint.
More importantly, consider how you want to split that funds. Perhaps your blog has been your most effective tool to date, and you want to spend 40% of your budget on it. Or perhaps you want to spend 35% of your money on creating a new eBook or online course. Just make certain that the logistics are in order before you begin spending.
How Can You Market Your Startup Effectively?
Here are some tips for you to market your startup effectively:
Don’t Be Afraid To Try
If you have an idea, don’t fret about how others will respond to it. You having that thought implies that there may be others who require what you have in mind.
Take a chance. The most difficult part of convincing yourself to transform your concept into a product is convincing others that they need your product. This is when marketing comes into play.
You’ve probably seen this well-known image of iPods.
What if the description said ‘’a new product, just for your songs.’’
Will it have the same effect? Who needs a new method to listen to music?
However, it appears that Apple noticed that users wanted a simpler way to store more tunes. They only needed to help people understand what the product was all about.
This is also the basic concept of growth hacking.
The greatest danger is not taking any risks at all. In a rapidly changing environment, the only approach that is sure to fail is not taking chances.
Mark Zuckerberg
It’s already 2022, and Elon Musk is Elon Musk because he took chances by dropping out of college and building SpaceX and Tesla.
Let me tell you how companies would be if they played it safe
- Paypal would not exist if it could not guarantee 100% security when it came to money transfers.
- Netflix would be no different from a pirate movie platform; after all, who doesn’t enjoy Netflix originals?
- Instagram would fade away in the face of competition from Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit.
Don’t Try To Invent a New Marketing Strategy
It has been done before. Reinventing the wheel won’t make people like it.
Remember the iPod case study? They did not develop a new method to listen to music; rather, they made it more convenient and accessible. The same may be said about marketing tactics.
Some Startup Marketing Strategies You Should Try
We’ll lay out some concepts to help you understand how a marketing plan might help your business succeed. These startup ideas will help you picture how a great approach might help you achieve your own marketing objectives.
| Startup Marketing Strategies | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Try Social Media to Connect With Customers | Can be utilised to expand your audience and communicate with current members. |
| Use User-Generated Content To Tell Your Story | lt is a simple and cost-free approach to incorporating testimonials. |
| Create SEO-Optimized Content To Attract High-Intent Visitors | The goal behind SEO is to optimise your web pages (and content) for keyword words that prospects use to search for items or services similar to yours. |
| Implement a Referral Program | Invite individuals who have previously purchased your product/service to advocate on your behalf |
Try Social Media to Connect With Customers
Social media marketing does not have to cost money; it can be utilised to expand your audience and communicate with current members. A social media profile for a company that shows customers, provides useful material and promotes audience interaction is a free method to increase reach, drive traffic to your website, and demonstrate industry credibility.
Use User-Generated Content To Tell Your Story
Startups typically lack the funds to launch large-scale social media marketing. Take Hopjump, the travelling agency as an example. Hopjump’s marketing team discovered that the greatest approach to share their story is on Instagram. Clients enjoying their destination vacations booked using the service may be seen on the business page:
Customers who share their incredible vacation photos on Instagram may tag Hopjump for a chance to be featured on the page, increasing visibility for the firm. Customers who are pleased with their purchases can tell others about them.
A marketing strategy that uses user-generated material is a simple and cost-free approach to incorporating testimonials. You may run the campaign through your social media platforms and incorporate hashtags to appear in more feeds.
Create SEO-Optimized Content To Attract High-Intent Visitors
SEO is another free and low-cost approach that startup marketers may utilise to spread the word about their company.
However, there is one catch: of all the tactics outlined, this one takes the longest. That is not to imply it is a time-consuming task — it is not — but it is a continuous job. The more you optimise your website, the better it will function, resulting in more leads for your business.
The goal behind SEO is to optimise your web pages (and content) for keyword words that prospects use to search for items or services similar to yours.
Of course, your core service pages will be competing with other firms in your market on many comparable keywords, but you can utilise the content you develop to connect to these sites, boosting their SEO value and raising their ranking on SERP results pages over time.
Updating and improving your website will ensure that it continues to develop and attract interested prospects, in the long run, so don’t pass up this chance.
Implement a Referral Program
Referral-based marketing has gained popularity in recent years as consumers increasingly rely on product/service evaluations, testimonials, and case studies to support their purchasing decisions.
The goal of this startup marketing strategy is to invite individuals who have previously purchased your product/service to advocate on your behalf – whether through a review, testimonial, or case study.
This type of material is crucial since it demonstrates and informs your potential clients that you have already handled problems for others like them. Offer discounts or free product trials to boost the likelihood of your consumers doing this for you.
Conclusion
Startup marketing is a difficult science to master. Some brilliant ideas have failed due to a lack of media coverage and customer awareness. Others have failed as a result of poor strategy. Still, other brilliant concepts have gone on to achieve billion-dollar success!
References
15 Fundamental Startup Marketing Strategies + Examples and Ideas
The Ultimate Guide to Startup Marketing
Startup Marketing Strategy: 18 Ideas and Tactics That Actually Work