Client experience starts from the moment a consumer engages with your brand. This is why establishing your start up’s brand identity early on is important to effectively compete within the high tech industry. So how can you create a marketing plan that doesn’t break the bank within the first 5 years of your company’s existence?
I recommend the following 8 Easy Startup Marketing Strategies You Can’t Miss if you want to defeat your competition.
1. Align Marketing Strategy To Business Goals
The easiest way to start to define your startup marketing strategy is to work backward from your specific business goals. Aligning to S.M.A.R.T. goals in your marketing plan enables you to ensure your efforts are being prioritized correctly. It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of marketing and promoting your business as most owners and founders hold such passion to what they are bringing to market. Take your time to get this one right early on to avoid future missteps.
If you haven’t identified specific, measurable and attainable goals, use our S.M.A.R.T. Goals worksheet (download here).
Example: Increase our organic search ranking from #12 to #1 using keywords, Kubernetes Security by the end of the quarter optimizing content.
2. Use Buyer Personas To Identify Your Target Audience
These help you identify what your potential customers are experiencing within their current roles and markets. In return, a buyer persona helps you identify how you’ll help solve your customer’s problems to minimize the risk of marketing our services vs. marketing how we are helping our target buyer.
Download our easy to use template within our FREE Toolkit here to identify your ideal buyer’s background, demographics, identifiers, goals, challenges and how your tech startup’s solutions can help them.
3. Solidify Your Brand Message
Do you have a consistent elevator pitch, tag line that speaks to how you are solving problems within your marketplace? If not, this is a perfect time to identify these important aspects of your brand. In some start up environments, the executive team struggles with coming together to a common vision. This can be detrimental to partnerships so to avoid this I recommend having a third party host a Branding Workshop to help your organization work through some of these potential identity issues.
4. Leverage Social Media For Both Sales & Marketing
This is an inexpensive way to connect and share relevant content through your startup marketing program. The key to social media is to follow the 80/20 rule to ensure you are posting a variety of content consistently and only spend time on platforms that make sense for your business. For example, it may not make sense for you to market on Facebook if you’re selling a highly technical solution in a B2B environment. It does, however, make sense to regularly post and contribute on LinkedIn. Here is a quick outline of various levels of social media content you can use to share thought leadership and grow your brand.
80% posts should be educational content to your audience. Only 20% of your social media content should promote your business.
80/20 Rule
5. Host Virtual Events
Online events have become the marketing test of 2020! From virtual coffees, happy hour events to exclusive virtual cooking demonstrations and celebrity concert events, this year has proven that the human need for connection is very much alive. As our world post-pandemic continues to favor remote-based activity, we’ll need to continue to connect with our customers and buyers on various platforms. Creative ways to build community through virtual yoga sessions, exclusive executive peering events have never been easier through the power of teleconferencing!
Some low-cost options:
Consider starting a virtual meetup around your technology area of focus
Virtual coffee or industry book club meetings
Offering an online workout to promote health & wellness
Free tech bootcamp class to your professional community to help prepare guests for a specific technology certification
6. Content Is King
Content comes in many forms from blog posts to downloadable whitepapers, social media posts and video. You can create content as a company. If it makes sense for your business, leverage the power of user generated content.
Example – If you are a SAAS company that offers endpoint detection, hold a capture the flag event or bug bounty content to get users to engage with your team. This can be wildly successful and depending on the nature of your company’s focus may create viral brand awareness and lead generation.
If I’m suffering from writer’s block I like to use Hubspot’s free Content Idea Generator.
7. Optimize Your Content For Search Engines
Content takes time to publish so ensuring you are optimizing SEO within articles, adding alt tags to images and other ways to maximize your search rankings will result in a positive ROI. Make sure you start this early within your marketing program as it is not an overnight process.
8. Don’t Be Shy, Ask For Referrals!
Implementing a marketing and sales process that asks for referrals along the buyer journey is critical. Automating this around various touchpoints such as a renewal, post sale or after a particular project milestone will help you gain referrals from many different customers.
If you’d like brainstorm go to market strategy ideas please reach out for a free consultation or sign up for our weekly sales tips at www.relativitysells.com
