Startup Marketing
Photo by Ann H:
Marketing 101 for Startup Founders
By Robin Anderson
One of the most important things you can do as a Founder is to start marketing your product before it’s ready. It may not seem to make sense - after all your product isn’t ready for prime time. However, the benefits from starting your marketing early actually increase the odds of success at the time of market release.
The benefits of starting your marketing early begins with building a relationship with early adopters of your product. Allowing them to have early access to your product will help you to:
Discover which planned features and functionality are really important, potentially leading to you having a competitive advantage
Learn what planned features and functionality are NOT important saving you time and money with product development
Gain a greater understanding as to the pain you are solving
Get to know the specific words and phrases they use to describe their problem and how your product is the solution - use this in all of your communications
Build connections/relationships with your customers as you go through this process
Validate your product solution through customer testimonials
Demonstrate customer traction at the time of release
Engaging early adopters into your product development process will help you build a better product, strengthen your relationship with your early adopters and build credibility to reach new customers. This starts with having a good understanding of who your customer - your primary persona. And it helps to have a basic website as it will help those early adopters to get an idea as to what you are trying to build and understand your vision and mission. It takes time to build awareness and attract interest with new customers. Remember, you’re starting with zero followers (friends and family don’t really count).
Having created a basic website and identified your primary persona here are the top 5 things you need to do to start marketing:
Write your product messaging
Pick and map your social media focus
Get to work on your SEO
Create content
Recruit early adopters
Messaging
Now is the perfect time to begin building your main message. This WILL change over time as you build your product. Get to know your audience and learn more about their pain points, along with the very words they use to talk about how your product solves their problem.
How do you get started? Begin with positioning your product.
Product positioning is a statement for your target customer that describes what your product does and how it works. It centers around your key benefits that address customer pain points while including your unique differentiation from your competition. Tell them the problem your product solves. The point is to connect with your customer on an emotional level.
“If you can position your product as the bridge between where they are and where they hope to be, they will crave it like kids crave chocolate.”
Learn more about developing a messaging framework here:
Social media marketing
Using social media as a means to drive awareness can be viewed as an easy way to promote your company and product. And with today’s market automation tools, posting on every social media platform that is available is extremely efficient. We recommend grabbing social media handles on the most frequently used platforms. However, when it comes to promoting and managing your presence everywhere you post - the comments and responses, the follow through with building your community - may quickly become unwieldy, making it impossible to keep up and be present for your audience who may be active participants. Therefore, it’s important to figure out where the best place your customer is going to be. Pick one or two, then make the most of your promotions and actively converse with your followers to do the best you can with one platform before expanding your marketing footprint. It requires time to build your follower base which is why now is the best time to get started before you finalize and launch your product.
You can learn more about how to build your social media presence here.
SEO
Why is SEO so important? The main reason is because a majority of people still search for answers or content through search engines. Incorporating SEO into your website gives you the advantage of delivering results for a longer amount of time than free social media posts or paid ads can do. Another major reason is that you want the right customer to find the right information about your product quickly and easily.
Here are four keys to basic SEO:
Navigation: In order for your website to be ready to offer your visitors a great experience, it should be easy to navigate. Make sure what your visitors are looking for is easy to find on your home page.
Keywords: Use keywords that your customers will use to either search for your service or your product.
More about Keywords: Use keywords in your headline and paragraph headers, along within the main copy of your blogs and descriptions. Don’t load your content with keywords purposely. You will pay a Google penalty for that.
Link Building - Include on-page links (adding links to a blog post from other organizations, and groups) and off-page links (collaborating with partners or influencers by adding guest blogs, etc.).
SEO is constantly evolving due to updates to Google’s search algorithm. Therefore, it is important to monitor and update your efforts as these changes are implemented.
Start building your foundation now, and keep in mind that SEO is a long game (but so is trying to watch everything you like on Netflix). Then, once you have the foundation mastered, you can search the web to your heart’s content for more advanced SEO techniques.
For more information about SEO, check out this article.
Create Content
Many startups believe that marketing is simply creating and posting promo spots on social media. They believe that such postings will be enough to attract followers, who will then eventually become customers. If it were this easy, everyone would be wildly successful. How does it REALLY work?
Content. Create it, then market it. Content is the foundation for all your marketing efforts.
The basis of content marketing is quality content. It’s a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience. You do this by providing content of value on a regular basis. The content you create will be used for all your inbound marketing efforts. From SEO, social media, advertising and more.
The content you create is mainly written or visual information not focused on the product directly, but all the experiences around it. It can be in digital or print newsletters, blogs, articles, social posts, video, speech or any other publications or productions that include topics your audience is particularly interested in, and that is related to your service or product.
Every marketing tactic you plan will be based upon the content you create. Content is necessary for every stage of your buyer’s journey. From awareness and consideration, to conversion. Your content needs to align with your persona and where they are at within each stage of buying. The point is to provide value to those who would be most interested in what you have to offer. Think of it as sharing what they want to see when they are ready to see it.
The form may be sharing tips, benefits, or solutions to the problems they are encountering within the realm of what you have to offer. This is what will eventually drive them to become a customer.
Get more tips for creating content here.
Build your Community
Do you remember when you signed up for an Instagram, or Facebook account? Everyone started at zero - zero followers. You quickly added a few friends and family members. And over time you gradually built up a following. It was easy, as people knew who you were. Now imagine that no one knows who you are, how do you get people to follow you, and more importantly how long does it take to build a community?
Save yourself time, energy, and aggravation. Get started building your online community before you need the customers. Whatever your primary reason for creating and building your community, pinpoint that upfront, and use that as your driver. As with anything you do as a startup founder that involves future customers, you’ll find members are more willing to participate when you give more than you receive. Show the value of being a part of your community. Be helpful, engage with them, be open and transparent. Above all, listen. Value the feedback that your members share. And finally, be patient. Don’t require feedback, rather encourage it. The results you get will be far more helpful than a simple feature priority list. You’ll have an array of insights, and a future customer base to build and sell your product.
Find out more about how to build a community here.
Just as it takes time, energy, and experience to build your product, so does getting the word out. As you can see, you don’t have to spend a lot of money, but you do have to put in the effort. The value you get from starting your marketing early, will actually save you time and money as you’ll end up with a product that truly solves the problem and you’ll be able to communicate it in a way that new customers will be able to relate and understand.
Need help kickstarting your marketing? Contact us for a FREE 30-minute consultation.
FunFact Friday
Rather than take a traditional approach to their marketing, due to the competition consisting of large corporations, Dollar Shave Club had to come up with something unique. Something that would be an attention grabber. They came up with a marketing campaign that included a humorous sales video of CEO Michael Dubin telling you why you should subscribe to receive quality razors $1.00 a month. This video grabbed over 12,000 new subscribers within 48 hours, making it a true competitor in the industry.