Angela Hausman, PhD April 5, 2021 Running a startup offers many challenges and rewards to the budding entrepreneur, not the least of which is marketing your business and managing its finances. While every new business, and most existing ones, struggle with financial management, choosing to maintain strong finances with an RCM software if you’re in the health and wellness business ensures your approach to patient care and confidentiality is done correctly since such businesses face additional challenges. In other businesses, seeking insights from experts in those fields ensures the best outcome as these businesses understand the ins and outs common in your industry and offer targeted advice. The truth is that there’s a lot more to launching a successful startup than you might think but starting on a sound financial foundation helps get things started. Then, you have the resources to focus on marketing your startup to achieve success.
Of course, one of the most crucial aspects of your business’s success comes from your approach to marketing and the strategy you build to reach and convert your target market. The fact is that when it comes to your business, you could have the most unique and innovative business on the planet, but if no one knows about your venture and what you’re offering, you can’t expect to achieve success, can you? The old adage that ‘if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door’ is hogwash.
Bearing that in mind, it’s essential that you take your business’s marketing seriously from the get-go. Of course, the question is what does it take to see success from your startup through effective marketing? For everything that you need to know, have a read of the guide below!
Marketing your startup
Marketing your startup begins with a plan; one that’s fleshed out with thorough research and analysis then builds appropriate strategies designed to fit with your target market. Don’t skimp on time or effort in building your marketing plan or rush into making decisions before you fully completed the plan. Don’t know what to include in the plan? No problem, I’ve written a guide to help you build a marketing plan that creates success.
With your marketing plan in hand, your next task is to build detailed action plans for each tactic you included in the plan
Since this site focuses on digital marketing strategy, I created an infographic to help identify opportunities for your business as you begin marketing your startup.
Data-driven digital marketing
Start with a digital-first strategy
As you start building tactics for marketing your startup, consider a digital-first strategy because it’s very cost-effective, highly targeted, and measurable. This strategy ensures you use your limited resources effectively by choosing low-cost options designed to reach your target market and offers metrics that help you optimize your strategy quickly. Traditional marketing doesn’t offer the same advantages to your startup.
Notice that advertising and promotional strategies only drive visitors to your website and social media platforms. You need additional marketing strategies to convert visitors and sustain customers to generate loyalty and positive word of mouth that brings in new customers. Thus, marketing is so much more than advertising.
For today, however, let’s confine our discussion on marketing your startup to the top half of the graphic, driving traffic to your website. If you find this whets your appetite for learning more about marketing your startup, you’ll find lots of great advice in other posts on this website.
Creating a digital presence
You have several options when it comes to creating a digital presence for your startup, including a website and social media. You might also take advantage of 3rd party platforms, such as Amazon, to host your online shop rather than (or in addition to) creating your own e-commerce site. Whatever you choose, I highly recommend a website rather than simply building a presence on social media because a website is totally yours; you make the rules, you decide how visitors interact with you, and you keep all the money from sales. Using social media (or Amazon) for your store not only means sharing the profits with them, but it also limits your control and puts you at risk should these platforms change the way they operate, especially if these changes negatively impact your customers.
One of the best places to build next when it comes to marketing your startup is on social media. Using social media sites is primarily free, which means that it is extremely easy to get started on social media for marketing your business, even if you don’t have much of a budget to work with at the present time. Start out by setting up social media accounts for your business on some or all of the platforms where your target market is active you have nearly free access to reach them. Limit yourself to those platforms with the highest percentage of your target market until you have the bandwidth to handle more platforms, as it’s better to post consistently and build engagement on one platform than to do a poor job on multiple.
You must begin by mapping out a marketing plan for each channel. Not sure how to go about it? Look at your competitors’ pages and see what they are doing that seems to work well for them and take inspiration from those actions.
Ensure you share high-value content
Let’s be honest here, not all content is equal. They say that content is king but the truth is, content is only king if it actually provides value to your target market. Content that’s dull, dreary, or not relevant is not going to spark an interest in your products or services, so it’s important that you make sure your content adds value and is relevant to your audience. Not sure how to create high-value content? Seek out a content creation specialist and work with them to build a strategy. or go it alone with advice from other posts on sites like this one.
Not only must you post valuable content, but you must also post consistently to achieve success. Below is a graphic showing recommended post frequency on various social platforms.
Image courtesy of Plug and Play Tech Center
Again, if this seems like too much for you and your team, given all the other tasks you have, start slowly by choosing 1 platform then add others as you can. Personally, I recommend starting with a blog on your website as this both supports building traffic and converting visitors.
Put some budget behind your efforts
When it comes to marketing your startup, if you really want to see success it’s important that you put some funds behind your marketing efforts. You need to ensure that you are giving your business’s marketing everything you’ve got because, at the end of the day, it’s your marketing that’s going to make or break your business and its success.
Conclusion
Of course, these are only a few of the many options for marketing your startup and I recommend you read more from this website and similar sites before you get too deep into the planning process. Meanwhile, if you have comments or want to ask specific questions related to this content, share them in the comment section below.
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