A Three-Step Guide to Creating Your Strategy
Marketing for your new startup is exciting. You have invested the time and effort developing your product or service and now you need to make sure that your market is as excited as you are.
In this three-step guide, we’ll cover the essential components of creating a successful marketing strategy and helping your startup grow faster by attracting the attention of the right people: ideal customers.
Messaging, Buyer Personas and Positioning
Before thinking about marketing tactics, you need to lay a solid foundation for your brand and message. This is a step that many startups skip, which along with a lack of user research and market demand, can be a reason why nine out of ten startups fail.
After making sure that there is demand for your product, here are some basic questions to ask yourself before planning your marketing strategy:
Who are you helping? Before you start marketing your product, you need to define your target audience. Go even further within your target group and identify your different buyer personas.
What problems do you help your customers solve? What are the pain points and challenges that you are offering a solution to? Define this thoroughly; If you get this right, it will depend on whether or not your marketing message gets across to your ideal customer.
How do you help your customers? It is no accident that we are talking about them how after this who and the What. Starting with the how is a classic startup mistake that will cause you to fail. As tempting as it is to delve into the details of your product, the tough truth is that if you don’t answer every prospect’s most important question first, “What’s in this?”
Once you have the answers to these three questions, it’s much easier to create compelling marketing messages that will effectively resonate with your ideal customers. This forms the framework for any startup’s successful marketing strategy.
A Three Step Guide to Marketing for Startups
Below is our framework for an effective marketing strategy for your startup. Think of it as the foundation to build on and expand as you scale, and bring in new tactics like email maintenance and other marketing automations.
1. Optimize your website.
To get your marketing strategy off the ground, the first thing you need to focus on is optimizing your website.
With great search engine optimization (SEO), landing pages for conversions, and a blog to drive traffic and build trust, your website becomes a marketing engine of its own.
Get your SEO started right from the start.
Pay attention to SEO early in your startup’s journey and you will reap the rewards later.
Make sure you identify what keywords your prospects are looking for so you can start building your website and content to rank for them.
Tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush are great for this and can be used both to review your competitors’ keywords and to audit and improve your website.
Optimize your website for lead generation.
Once a visitor lands on your website, make sure they can take a next step. Offer something valuable to motivate visitors to leave their contact details.
If you get stuck with the offer, downloading a white paper or a free trial of your service are classic lead magnets. Once you have their email, you can reach prospects and nurture them through automation and personalization in your sales funnel.
Blog and guest blog.
Did you know that a B2B buyer consumes an average of 13 (!) Pieces of content from a provider before deciding to buy?
To build trust with your prospects, it is important to showcase your expertise and build credibility by posting useful and valuable content on your website.
Blogging guests on other websites is also an inexpensive way to increase traffic and get better known.
2. Design a social media marketing strategy.
Once your website is in good shape, social media is the next arena to hit. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of options, so where should a startup start?
Choose the right channels.
Where does your target group prefer to hang out online? If you’re targeting Generation Z kids, TikTok might be the place. What if you sell a B2B product? Then LinkedIn is probably a better channel.
Choosing your channels carefully with your key people in mind can help you create more targeted messages and avoid spending time on low ROI channels.
Provide value.
Once you’ve chosen your channels and platform, it’s time to start thinking about what to publish. It should be your guiding star help, not for sale. On social media, people tend to filter out or block anything that feels too selling.
Look for content that is either educational, inspirational, or entertaining, depending on your product and audience.
Interact with your audience and influencers.
There’s a reason it’s called social media Social Media. These are not platforms for one-way communication; One of the keys to success is interaction.
Always answer questions and comments as quickly as possible and interact with the influencers in your industry to build relationships and awareness of your startup.
Experiment with ads.
Advertising can be difficult to maneuver, so start small to avoid spiraling costs. Start by targeting the lowest hanging fruit and experiment to see what works.
Trial and error is often the best way to start with minimal expenditure and only when you start to see real results.
3. Recruit customer ambassadors.
Create systems for referrals.
The best marketing you can get is happy customers whom you recommend to their colleagues. It’s the most trustworthy, effective, and least expensive type of marketing.
Build referral processes into your funnel right from the start, such as: B. by incentivizing active customers to recommend new registrations.
Use testimonials and case studies.
Social proof is gold in marketing. Research shows that 91% of people read customer reviews and 84% of people trust online reviews as much as they do personal recommendations.
Testimonials and case studies are highly effective ways of leveraging satisfied customer stories on a large scale. And the investment is worth it. A well-written case study is one of the most influential marketing pieces of content you can create and can be used at all stages of the sales funnel.
Start early and collect testimonials from satisfied customers. Then write case studies that describe how your product helps them.
Now that you have a basic marketing strategy to build on, let’s talk about how to properly scale it as your business continues to grow.
Prepare to scale: experiment, measure, and iterate
When creating a marketing plan for your startup, be prepared to continually experiment, measure, and iterate.
experiment
Traditional marketing campaigns are a dying breed. Today’s most successful companies are the ones that are constantly optimizing and adapting, allocating funds where they get the best bang for their buck. Being agile and adapting is vital.
Measure
It’s also important to set your core KPIs early on in your startup’s marketing journey. These should be closely aligned with your overall company metrics (and should remain so as your startup scales).
Pick a few key KPIs that you focus on and visualize them transparently and accurately in your reporting dashboards. These can include:
- Number of marketing leads by channel
- Conversion rate by channel
- Acquisition costs per channel
To get high quality data that provides actionable insights, avoid being inundated with unimportant vanity metrics, sync data between your apps, and create a culture of data integrity in your organization for optimal accuracy.
Iterate
Don’t fall into the fallacy trap of sunk costs: you can always turn your back on what isn’t working, and often that’s exactly what a startup should do.
Learn from your experimentation and document what you do and how much money you spend on the different channels. That way, new hires don’t have to reinvent the wheel and you can track your expenses and measure ROI.
Remember to start with the definition who you help, What you help them, and how you do it.
Once you’ve got your story and messaging in place, it’s time to move on to the channels you use to communicate it: including your website, social media, and customer-generated content like case studies. And don’t forget to document your results to learn and track performance as you go.
