The journey of every startup business starts with a marketing campaign. Regardless of the fact of how well you will design your products or services or how they’ll be of value to consumers these days, you won’t accomplish much if no one knows about your offers. The online market is known to be overcrowded with a highly competitive landscape as well.
Businesses that are unable to cut through such noise and effectively reach out to their target audience are simply unable to succeed. To make things even worse, startup businesses must compete against well-developed and better-funded companies without a solid budget. In other words, you have to market yourself well even before your company becomes profitable and before you even have a product to sell.
In an environment where having funds to back your strategies is of the utmost importance, startups have to make do with what they have. However, you don’t always need substantial funds to create an effective and creative marketing campaign that will make your startup well-known. With that in mind, here are a few ways you can jumpstart your startup marketing strategy.
Conduct thorough market research
The essence of every marketing campaign and strategy is valuable information and the best way to gather such information is through market research. The main reason research is vital for your startup’s marketing efforts is that it provides you with data that’s crucial for strategic decision making.
You must be aware of the surroundings you’ll operate within and you must know well how the market itself operates, as well as who the major players are. If you skip research, you’re practically going in blind and you can improvise at best, which is something no startup business can afford to do.
If you’re going to engage in effective marketing, you have to be certain you’re making the right choice. As an example, here are a few things market research can help you discover.
- Identify your target audience.
- Identify market demand for products or services – (42% of startups fail due to the lack of market demand).
- Determine audience preferences, needs, expectations, demographics and demands.
- Determine the popular market trends your audience is following.
- Identify the main competitors and how they operate.
- Determine the best marketing channels and platforms.
- Determine how to tailor your messages to consumers in the best way possible.
Conduct a competitive analysis
A competitive analysis is an essential factor in your market research. The main reason competitive analysis requires more attention from your part is that it allows you to determine against whom you’re competing with.
That being said, by understanding how your main competitors operate, how they develop their marketing strategies and how they interact with consumers, among other things, will allow you to determine a way to outrun them. The fact of the matter is that you’re not trying to copy what your competitors are doing. Instead, you’re analyzing them, in order to identify gaps that will allow you to gain a competitive advantage at one point.
What’s more, you’re also analyzing competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. You want to avoid competing against others at their best and instead focus on outrunning them at their weakest aspects. For instance, your competitor may excel at content marketing, but their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts are seriously lacking. You gain a competitive advantage if you develop a better SEO campaign than they do.
Develop a brand
Branding is a marketing strategy that can help elevate your startup on the market. The sooner you develop a brand for your business the better. In addition, aside from making your startup more recognizable and visible on the market, a branding strategy can increase your other marketing efforts to a whole new level of efficiency.
In other words, every brand has a unique selling proposition that makes them stand out and differentiate from other businesses and even other brands. However, every brand is designed in a unique way, which makes them easy to spot in the crowd. As an example, if you engage in effective business printing, every branded item ranging from business cards to handout gifts will be recognizable by the consumers.
Furthermore, the important thing to understand is that when developing a brand for your startup business, you have to do it in accordance with your audience’s preferences and not your own. Simply put, your brand must appeal to your customers in every sense of the word. With that in mind, here are a few key brand elements you must focus on.
- Brand identity – Represents how you present your business to the audience, such as who you are, your company’s mission, brand promise and core values.
- Tone of voice – The unique way your brand communicates with consumers.
- Brand personality – If your brand was human, how would it behave?
- Brand image – How the audience perceives your brand.
- Visual identity – Brand visuals that make your brand unique, which includes colors, fonts, layouts, etc.
- Unique selling proposition – The thing about your products, services or offers that make your brand unique and that provides value to customers.
Content is king
There’s no better way to jumpstart your marketing strategies than with content marketing. Content is considered king in the marketing world and there’s a really good reason behind it. The main reason content is so effective is that it delivers true value to consumers through information, education and entertainment.
Through content marketing, you can build a meaningful relationship with your target audience and ensure their engagement even before you develop an MVP (Minimal Viable Product). The key, however, is in determining which type of content to develop that will be interesting to your audience. For example, the types of content you may opt for are infographics, blog posts, videos, eBooks, podcasts, webinars, whitepapers and so on. You must understand that the content you create needs to be of top-quality, original, unique and highly relevant to your audience.
Otherwise, it may have a more negative impact than what you’re trying to accomplish. Moreover, content can be published across various media channels, such as social media, websites and blogs, email and even traditional methods. The better the content you produce the more benefits your startup business will have.
Leverage social media to your advantage
Social media platforms are an ideal channel for startup marketing. Even though people claim social media is a pay-to-win approach, you won’t have to spend your entire marketing budget to gain viable results. The fact of the matter is that social media puts you and your business in direct contact with your target audience.
From there, you can rely on various strategies to make your startup visible and to ensure the audience’s engagement. However, the important thing is to do some research first. You don’t have to have a presence on every social media network. That would be a monumental waste of both time and resources. Instead, determine which networks your audience is most commonly present at and start building a presence there.
Remember that you require a unique approach for each network, even though it may be the same audience. The main reason is that one-size-fits-all doesn’t work on social media. As for the strategies, here are a few things you can consider for social media marketing.
- Content marketing.
- Influencer marketing.
- Social media contests and giveaways.
- Event promotions.
- Paid advertisement.
- Video marketing.
You can also combine different strategies to create a unique campaign that will help your startup gain the recognition and exposure it needs.
It’s no secret that startup businesses don’t have it easy when it comes to developing and growing on a competitive and crowded market. Still, the right marketing strategy can level the field and help your startup stand out from the others. That’s why it’s important to plan things out and make an effort to jumpstart your marketing strategies.
