Startups often invest significantly in developing and perfecting their product or service. They know the value it has to offer. Yet no matter how valuable it is, without an effective way of communicating that with your prospective customers, there’s no way to profit from it.
Startups – like every other business – must have a clearly defined marketing strategy, one that is crafted with specific branding elements to help customers get to know the company. Startups in their early stages often find this difficult. They may not have a clearly defined brand or a large budget to put towards their marketing.
Yet, marketing is vital for the success of the company’s product. Without a startup marketing strategy, your project has no ability to move forward. The bottom line is that startups do not rise to the top using just paid advertising or partnerships. They need a proven marketing strategy that makes the best use of their limited funds.
As you work to develop a marketing strategy for your startup, then remember a few things. Define your branding as a first step. Then, find a way to stand out and make a splash in a positive manner. The secret, though, is that you don’t have to try to redefine marketing. Just use the methods that other organizations have had success with and make them your own.
Effective Marketing Strategies
Where do you start? Let’s focus on a few of the most effective startup marketing strategies used. You can incorporate these tools into what you’re doing as they apply to your company.
#1: Content Marketing
HubSpot is one of the most well-known organizations today. It’s become the go-to resource for marketing advice for big and small companies. In 2006, it was a brand new company, facing the need to grow rapidly. They accomplished that by focusing on high-quality, innovative content.
Content marketing is a core component of any marketing campaign. It is an affordable method of connecting people with the information they are seeking as it relates to your business. Through content marketing – such as the use of website content and blogs – it’s possible to provide your customers with valuable, even thought leadership guidance.
HubSpot managed to do this, with 75% of their leads coming directly from content they’ve created. How did they do it?
The began by offering free whitepapers and case studies. They offered webinars of no charge to those who attended. To get access, all people had to do was fill out a form. Each form creates a lead, and that lead helped grow their business.
They also added calls to action at the end of every piece of content they created. That led to tripling the number of leads they generated.
#2: Leveraging Social Media
Social media is an excellent resource for business owners just starting up because it’s highly engaging and effective but doesn’t have a high budget point to reach. Social media is not simply advertising, though. It’s creating engagement opportunities where people watch videos, interact with content, get a chuckle, and learn about a product or service as well.
Tailor Brands does this well. A quick look at their social media shows fun videos with a pointed message – their marketing methods solve problems, are easier to create, and are highly effective. Check out this YouTube video as an example.
Leveraging social media enables startups to work to build their brand recognition but also to create sales opportunities. Tailor Brands did this by offering a combination of informative content and great deals or discounts on their logo making services.
Take a closer look at your current social media. Is it a solid reflection of your business’s image and goals? Does it need to be refreshed to better reach your target clients? Most importantly, use social media as a way to stand out in a meaningful way.
#3: Video Marketing
Video marketing is a strategy for promoting your online business and making your potential customers aware of your product offerings by making quality and interesting videos of products with people using the items. Partnering with a company like Standby Productions can ensure these videos are professionally produced and engaging, maximizing their impact on your audience. The technique of making videos that encourage people to buy your products by helping them connect with and understand you better is thus known as video marketing. Â
Using video marketing, you can promote your products and showcase your most recent collections. This channel might be useful if you want to start earning money or attract new clients because it’s one of the best ways to promote your business. A demo video, product video or a testimonial video is a quick, high-quality marketing video that aids in the sale and promotion of your online business offerings.
With the use of a video editor that comes with ready-made templates, and many more features to add on, you can easily produce professional-looking videos in minutes without affecting your marketing budget for your brand
#4: Look for Partners
Most of the time, startups are not creating a new industry, nor are they rewriting the entire market they are in. That means that most of the time, there are platforms that you can tap into and ensure your product or service gets the attention it deserves. Turning to and partnering with organizations that have the same difficulties and sometimes more experience than you can help you propel your company forward.
When it comes to using the partnership strategy, there may be no better example of this than what Slack has done for itself. Slack has integrated itself into numerous other tools and resources to become, quite frankly, indispensable. That includes integrations like Simple Pool, Giphy, Tettra, Trops, Marker, Trello, Monkey Test It, Google Drive…and so on.
By doing this, Slack has proven itself to be incredibly valuable. It’s easy to use and provides all the tools and resources needed by anyone using its platform. How can you make your product or service more appealing to your audience? What relationships can you form?
#5: Send Personalized Emails
Connections are a big part of startup marketing. The right connections may help you get your business in front of a much larger audience of customers. The problem is that many organizations are not sure how to create those connections.
One way to do so is to send personalized emails. LinkedIn is a good example of this. As a LinkedIn member, you likely receive an email daily or every few days that create a consolidated list of articles and other bits of news that seems to be related to you and your business. In order to get people back to its social media platform, LinkedIn does a great job of sending highly valuable content based on what your business is but also based on what your network is sharing.
As a business owner, then, you need to create connections and build relationships with them. Of course, LinkedIn can help you to formulate those. Once you start to do so, create highly valuable emails to send to your prospects to get them back to your website or blog. This type of email marketing isn’t a sales tactic as much as it is a tool for building your brand and providing truly valuable information to others.
Personalized emails create relationships and build trust. People will get to know your brand and engage with it more readily when the content within them is worthy of reading. Building that trust is often critical to startup marketing success.
#6: Provide an Incentive
Another way to drive success to your brand as a startup is to give people something to talk about and engage with to learn more about it. Offering an incentive may be a bit more expensive than other methods, depending on what your industry is. However, when you provide something tangible or usable to others, they are sure to get a better idea of what your company has to offer to them.
One company that did this well is Birchbox. They use their network to offer something free or valuable, such as a discount, that helps get people to engage. For example, one of their marketing campaigns incorporated a free prize when customers make their first purchase from the company. They gamified the process a bit and made it hard for people not to want to click to find out what they could get.
You don’t have to give away your company. As a startup, you need to incorporate tools that help people get a feel for what your business has to offer.
Effective marketing strategies like these help companies to get in front of their clients, creating opportunities to build their reputation and get in front of their prospective clients. As a startup, you have to get the word out. Use the methods that other startups created to achieve your own growth and success
