Startup marketing doesn’t have to take its toll on your bank accounts. All you need is the right proportion of all the ingredients: time, effort, money, and creativity. How? This entry will help you out.
Everybody loves a good startup story. Airbnb, Facebook, and YouTube. These are inherently viral startups that turned out to be multi-million companies. But what do they have in common? They have the right niche at the right time.
In the history of startups, few startup companies went viral and big. Although most startups want to join the inner circle with the likes of Zuckerberg and Bezos, that is not simply the case.
If you just kickstart a startup company and want to reach those levels of success. Focus on your startup marketing campaign during the first months of your operation.
5 Steps to a Winning Startup Marketing Growth
Most startup entrepreneurs have novel or brilliant ideas. However, it doesn’t guarantee a successful business endeavor. In most cases, startups fail because of insufficient startup marketing strategies.
No matter how brilliant the product or services, it is bound to fail without strategic marketing and advertising components. Here are some basic startup marketing considerations that professional business marketing consultants recommend:
1. Situational Analysis
Situational analysis is essential to make the right decision in every business aspect. Market research for startups is the first step to implementing and achieving situational analysis. It is always the deciding factor and can help you structure your marketing plan.
Additionally, it can help you determine its effectiveness, allowing you to make immediate solutions when your plan isn’t achieving its desired results.
The result of market research provides input to the situational analysis. It makes a realistic assessment of the business. Additionally, it defines the potential market, evaluates projected growth, and assesses competitors.
Situational analysis uses SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis. The strengths and weaknesses focus on the internal evaluation of the business, while opportunities and threats are external factors.
Create your SWOT analysis as a list of information or a matrix model. Your SWOT analysis should involve targeting specific objectives in the business. Also, it must identify the factors that support or hinder those objectives.
2. Create Marketing Goals
There is no use in creating a marketing team or a marketing campaign if there are no marketing goals. Building a business is as practical as embarking on a vacation.
You wouldn’t board a plane without a plan and a destination. In other words, a startup marketing plan should have defined marketing and business goals.
To create marketing goals, let’s start with these questions:
- What goals do you hope to accomplish during the first year of operation?
- In two years?
- How about in five years?
Having an end goal, and achieving it, allows your startup marketing plan to establish a milestone. For every achievement, it opens an opportunity to start using other startup marketing tools and strategies.
3. Decide on your Strategy
A startup marketing plan has a lot of diverse strategies. Other than your business plan, investors are also interested in your marketing plan. So, in order for you to convince investors to fund your business, you must decide on your marketing strategy as well.
With the competitive market, viral marketing or premier branding is not a good strategy anymore. A clear marketing plan is enough and will offer high returns. Here are five suggestions to include in a concise startup marketing plan:
- Build a professional website and add content marketing.
- Use social media marketing.
- Get your customer’s attention using digital marketing for startups.
- Formulate a plan on how you will generate leads.
- Make connections with communities, partners, and referrals.
4. Strategy implementation
A strategically placed startup marketing plan is one of the factors that separate a successful new business from the rest. Marketing is not only for big companies, but it is also crucial for startups.
Again, what use is a good strategy if you fail to implement it? A startup marketing plan is useless if you simply let it sit. Do something with all the strategies you come up with.
Now, the question lies in how do you implement your marketing strategies? How do you apply your marketing efforts for success?
The answers to these questions are the following:
- Set the right expectations
- Build a clear timeline
- Track progress
- Monitor and check-in regularly
- Communicate results
- Celebrate success
5. Performance Review
Startup marketing performance review is important to understand what works and what doesn’t. For instance, which medium generates good results? Also, which should you remove from your strategy or maybe cut down the budget?
When strategies perform very well, it’s essential to understand why it worked. This is to replicate that success in the future. For example, you crafted an extensive lead generation guide that creates an influx of potential customers. Study the strategy and take notes of important factors that will help with your future campaigns.
On the other hand, you’ll need a consistent evaluation of strategies that don’t work. Let’s say you’re running a social marketing campaign to promote a product or service. You should evaluate to see if your audience is responsive. If your post gets few responses, then you might work on your content and your graphics.
Performance review offers a considerable advantage when you understand what works and what doesn’t. As such, you can start optimizing your strategies for better results.
We can help you realize your startup marketing plan
Stay away from most startup owners’ common mindset that goes, “if I build it, they will come.” Remember that your profit is as good as your marketing strategies. Before you let others value your product or services, value your own business first.
Also, in the competitive market, you don’t want to spend time with impractical marketing strategies. A well-executed startup marketing plan and using the appropriate resources is what you need.
Full Scale is an offshore company that can help you. We have a pool of software developers that can help you build your website. Our marketing team can help you with content marketing, social media marketing, and graphic designs.
Here at Full Scale, we always aspire for growth. Our CEOs, Matt DeCoursey and Matt Watson, will help you with startup marketing insights that will bring clients to your door. Talk to us.
