12 Marketing Tips Your Startup Can’t Afford to Ignore

• Updated on: 2018-09-10
• Read original article here

All startups want to succeed, obviously. In the simplest of terms, the way to get that done is through effective marketing. Getting great exposure for your brand starts with knowing your contacts, your audience, and your competition. Without them, you might as well throw in the towel now. However, the last thing you want to do is drain your entire budget on marketing.

We asked twelve entrepreneurs to share their most effective marketing secrets. Check them out below and decide what works best for your startup:

Stop trying to be everywhere, and focus on one marketing channel that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. You can expand out later, but when you are first starting out, you must focus on the most important channel. That channel will likely differ depending on your goals, which you and your team will need to figure out, but start with one channel only.

The easiest way to create breakthrough marketing in any industry is to understand your customer’s problem better than competition and your customer do. By being able to see this problem from multiple angles, you will have a long-term advantage when it comes to creating high-performance marketing campaigns.

In-person networking and developing long-term relationships work: do customer interviews, meet with marketing influencers in your field and go to conferences. Relationships you develop now may take years to show return on investment, but it will be worth the investment. Good relationships get you your customers.

If you are able to devise a few clever ways to build marketing efforts into your product, you are effectively eliminating a variable cost and turning it into a one-time fixed cost. If harnessed correctly, your user acquisition costs will exponentially go down as you as you scale.

It is not easy setting up sales funnels, but they really work. Take the time to establish several marketing channels that will get the word out about your business, social media, live events or webinars. When you have many ongoing programs, they can all be tracked for efficacy.

Answer this question first: Are you trying to drive sales, build awareness or build technical credibility? Once you’ve ‘segmented’ your desired outcome by answering that simple question, build a detailed schedule for your social media platforms that includes the message and campaign duration. This prevents the ‘see what sticks’ method and provides a road map on what and when to measure.

As Google demands high-quality inbound links from trusted sources, organic SEO is rapidly morphing into PR. A few media mentions can rapidly increase a site’s authority and visibility. Wasting money and time on low-quality SEO campaigns will not yield results, and investing in paid search or display requires an ongoing investment. Start with great PR, and enjoy the results for years to follow.

It is important to have your current employees market using their social media and contributing to the company’s social media. This is the cheapest and most authentic way to market your startup.

When marketing my video marketing company, I focus on the results and benefits we will provide, rather than the service alone. Rather than talking about the cameras or the editing software we use, we highlight the online results our videos have achieved for our clients, teach them why video marketing is important and how it will affect their bottom-line.

Reach new customers by finding industry experts who produce the type of content your customers read. Offer them your product/service for free in exchange for an honest review. Make sure to do your research and familiarize yourself with their work. If it’s a good match, you won’t have to explain the value to their readers. They will want to write about you.

Whether you’re marketing your startup through blogs or social media, you must stay committed to your online presence. When our company first started, we published a blog post three times a week covering topics from how-to articles to mobile marketing news. By publishing content consistently, we built our reputation and positioned ourselves at the top of search rankings.