Marketing Approach for Startups
Marketing Strategy Overview for Startups
Getting Started
Creating the marketing foundation for your startup company is crucial for success. Before jumping into marketing, you must evaluate the following:
- Your business
- Your product
- Your customers
- Your competition
The better the Product, the easier to Market – how is your product viral?
Problems/Opportunities
Determine how your product helps someone’s problem. People buy products because they need to solve a problem
- Product Strength versus competition
- Buyer Persona – Who will buy your product/service
- Customer Journey – How they will buy your product/service
- Product Viral – How can people who use your product/service recommend it to others for you
Goals
Your Revenue goals need to be aligned with your customer goals and conversion rate.
- Set your Revenue – how much revenue you want to obtain
- Set your Customer goals – how much traffic do you need
- Set your Conversion rates – how many potential customers will become customers
- Understand your marketing budget
Branding
- Logo Development
- Brand Development/Management logo, corporate kit, tagline
- Responsive Web Presence – website (interactive, social, blog, content)
Tactics/Communicate
- Online Influencers (Social Media, Press, High level users)
- Content Creation and keep it consistent
- Keywords (Google Ad Words)
- Strategic Partnerships (complimentary products)
- Build and Maintain a Database
- Distribution (web pages, blog, social media, landing pages, call to action, emails)
- Blog Strategy (Thought leadership content based)
- Digital PR (Twitter)
- Social Media Strategy (VOC) & Frequency (base this on your customer journey – solve their problem)
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Online Campaigns/Email Campaigns
- Video (webinars, YouTube channel, speaking events) enhance your audience viewership quickly
- Offline Marketing (Events, Networking, Influencers)
Evaluation
- Metrics – Learn to measure your marketing efforts
- Incorporate marketing software to post and track your results such as Hootsuite or Sprout. For email tracking, use Mailchimp or Sendgrid
- Web Analytics – Google webmaster, Bing webmaster, Alexa
- Test your keywords with Google Analytics to understand the value of your keywords and what is trending
- Innovation – Let your marketing efforts and customer feedback help improve your product or solution
Conclusion
Remember to remain flexible. Not all items mentioned above need to be implemented at the same time. As you build your company and test marketing tactics, results will determine what is working and what is not.
Your budget will determine what marketing efforts can be initiated. Also prioritize your marketing efforts to understand what tool is best to reach your audience.
Frank Anastacio Trevino Jr
Founder and CEO of iLLUMULUS, a Global Marketing & Customer Strategy firm. I work with companies to connect with customers, Creating Value through the marketing digital experience. I share my time between South Korea and Denver, Colorado. You can find me on Linkedin or follow me on Twitter