Marketing Your Startup Read online

  So your customers are out there on social media, no doubt. And they’re in other places, too—commuting via subway, showing up at key conferences, or pushing their kids in swings at the park. You just need to find them, and connect with them. That’s what this book will help you do.

  But before selecting which channels you’ll use, you need a detailed strategy that will drive your focus, determine where to allocate your funds, and keep you on track.

  Here are the steps that you can take to get started.

  DEFINE YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE

  Before you spend a dime on marketing, take the time to research your audience. It’s the most important part of your marketing strategy, and it comes before the development of any campaign. Without research, you’ll never know where to focus your marketing efforts. You’ll end up with a poor return, regardless of whether you spend $1,000 or $100,000.

  Research takes a lot of forms and should include, at minimum, the following:

  Identifying your target audience (you’ve already done this)

  Audience segmentation (how different members of your audience should or could be targeted). Your personas should help here.

  Competitive analysis

  Customer surveys

  Audience pain points in relation to your product or service

  This research serves as the foundation for every campaign you create for pre- and post-launch efforts. Yes, you can buy data reports for your audience or industry. But it’s often not necessary, since you can uncover almost all of this information with a little judicious digging.

  IDENTIFY WHAT MAKES THEM TICK

  Once you’ve spent time discovering your ideal customer segment, figure out the platforms that they hang out on, given their specific interests. Find out where they go to consume content—is it blogs, YouTube, Snapchat, or Instagram? Do they watch TV or read certain trade publications?

  A good path for discovery would be to speak to some of your potential customers in and around you. Ask them their preferred platforms and what they do on each social media channel they’re frequenting. Ask them what they read, and why. This will help you prioritize. (You’re not going to try to be on all of the channels at once—more on that later.)

  IDENTIFY THE FORMAT AND MESSAGING

  Once you know the channels, you have a better understanding of the format the content will need to take. For instance, if you’re looking at Snapchat and YouTube, you pretty much know it’s going to be delivered via video.

  On the other hand, if Facebook and Instagram are the channels you want to focus on, you will have multiple format options. You could make videos, articles, images, or some of each. Your strategy will be different if your audience commutes via subway every day, staring at advertising posters.

  While you’re deciding on the content format and the go-to channel(s), it’s important to have specific strategies for each channel. Posting the same content across all social media channels is not going to get you the desired result because people interact with different channels differently. Choose one or two channels that you believe will most effectively reach your potential audience, and then format your messaging and craft content to fit the chosen channel or channels.

  DETERMINE YOUR PRIMARY GOALS

  After homing in on where your audience is, define your goals. While many large, established corporations use marketing across channels to facilitate growth in all areas of business, it’s more likely that a startup will focus on one or two of the following:

  • Brand awareness. Just about every startup these days uses social media for driving brand awareness. It happens organically as you post content, engage with users, and promote your brand. While it can be done cheaply and quickly, as more brands populate social channels, a clear strategy is increasingly required to cut through the clutter.

  • Content distribution. Many brands and businesses use social media as a content distribution and dissemination platform. If your content is engaging and unique enough, it’s possible that others could share your posts and advertise your brand for you.

  • Lead generation. Ideally, you would like your marketing to drive traffic to your website or blog. This requires a long-term investment and results usually aren’t seen for many months.

  • Customer acquisition. Finally, the best-case scenario is that your marketing raises brand awareness, your content generates leads, and leads turn into customers.

  CHOOSE YOUR CHANNELS

  Depending on your strategy, approach, and goals, you should be able to determine which platforms or channels are right for your startup. We dive into that in detail in the next section of the book.

  Social media isn’t the only cheap option (and it’s not always cheap, as you’ll see in the next section of this book). Some startups have great success thinking offline. For example, you can set up a free meetup for potential customers (using space you already have, and serving bagels and coffee), and use the attendee information to offer white papers, newsletters, or other content. You can guest-post on another company’s blog. It’s a great way to drive traffic to your site.

  You could also leverage another company’s prospect or customer list in exchange for giving free product to people on the list, or via some kind of cross-promotional agreement. If you have a new kind of toothbrush, for example, reach out to dentists in your area.

  “ In ed-tech, our buyers read email before 7:00 a.m. or after 3:30 p.m. and if we are going to do a webinar, then it needs to be between 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. Knowing when your potential buyer is engaged in content is critical to the success of your marketing plans.”

  KATHARINE MOBLEY, CMO, Crescerance

  5

  ONLINE MARKETING

  SEO

  What you knew about search engine optimization—or thought you knew—just a few years ago is likely different today.

  It’s been years since you could game Google’s rankings with clever meta-tagging, simple keyword inputs, and the production of lots of similar content. Today, the algorithm is more sophisticated, with protections built in to prevent spam and content farms from showing up at the top of rankings. Many businesses have caught on to that. More than ever, the content that’s ranked highly is created by humans for humans—and that’s obvious when you see it.

  Marketers must also keep up with the changing nature of how consumers search. In contrast to a few years ago, today’s searchers are using search strings of five or six words—think phrases or sentence fragments—to get the results they want. While keyword tracking is still a part of today’s SEO, the focus on ranking for shorter, more general keywords is all but gone. Large organizations with huge budgets may still be able to rank for those terms, but most businesses have realized that this strategy is extremely expensive—not to mention ineffective.

  Customers are also thinking local, because of Google’s habit of providing personalized search results. This means that two people can search for entirely the same thing, but get two sets of results based on their geographical location.

  To take advantage of these shifts, think less about specific keywords and instead focus on writing longform content that naturally ranks for those long-tail search queries. For instance, ranking for “windows” may make you feel pretty important in the window installation industry, but likely won’t result in high conversion rates. Ranking for “double-hung window installation San Francisco,” on the other hand, is far more likely to result in sales. You’ll know where to start for your industry, and Google Analytics will help you narrow it down—try inputting different combinations of words and phrases and research related terms, too.

  SEO requires a commitment over the long term; it’s not a quick fix. As a start, experts recommend focusing on content formats that earn links, like longform, research-based articles, opinion-forming features, or comprehensive explainer and list posts because they provide more depth for search. When coming up with new topics for your content, keyword research can be invaluable. It gives you insight in
to the words and phrases people use to find your products or services, enabling you to create content that people are actually looking for.

  Once work on a particular SEO initiative has been completed, it takes time to see optimal results. Search engines need to find and index new content; competitors are constantly changing their tactics—meaning you may also need to change yours before you see results; and it often takes time to build traction for new content in the form of inbound links and social shares—both of which will help boost your ranking.

  How Measurable Is It?

  If you’re just measuring page views (or likes, or followers) who come in through search, you’re probably not going far enough, says Dave Kerpen, CEO of Likeable Local. Vanity metrics like those offer a narrow window into a website’s effectiveness. After all, a million site visitors aren’t going to help you if none of them are converting. Google Analytics can help you dig a little deeper into the numbers to start collecting more actionable data. Here are a few data points to start with:

  • Customized metrics. Even if your page views are through the roof, that number alone doesn’t give you enough information to take a certain action. Conversion rate is a much more important metric to track. Bounce rate is another easy statistic to find, but bounce rate by source can indicate how well-qualified your traffic is from an individual source. Determine where you need more information from your analytics. Custom reports can show you the unique data your company needs. For example, analyze traffic and behavior to show where customers come from and what they do when they get to your website.

  • ROI calculation. Stop crossing your fingers. ROI calculation takes a few steps to set up in Google Analytics, but the payoff is huge. Setting values to your goals will show you which customer actions result in the most revenue. Once you know that, you can optimize your page with ROI in mind.

  • Source attribution. Search marketing doesn’t live within a vacuum. A customer might check you out initially from organic search, come back later via a Twitter post, and make a purchase from an email. If you only track the customer’s last interaction, you won’t be attributing accurate value to your social or SEO presence. Attribution models can reveal which sources lead to conversions. This can help you predict which initiatives will be successful in the future.

  • Visitor behavior. Users Flow reports depict the paths that visitors take through your website. Understanding these paths can help you streamline your conversion process and reduce friction. If you have a lot of drop-offs at your shopping cart, you could offer a coupon code to the visitor in exchange for filling out the form. Just like that, you’ve captured their information and have an opportunity to nurture the relationship.

  • Conversion goals. What do you want people to do after they come to your site? Downloading white papers or subscribing to an email newsletter is great, but how do you assign a dollar amount to those actions? Google Analytics allows you to assign goal values to specific actions. When you calculate values for customer actions, you can prove the success of your campaigns.

  How Much Does It Cost?

  Like so many marketing disciplines, there’s a range. A self-taught freelancer may charge $75 an hour to audit your content, perform keyword analysis, and develop a link-building strategy so your site generates important third-party links to it. More established firms may charge closer to $200 an hour, or require an ongoing contract or per-project pricing. A monthly, contract, or project plan may allow you to take a more holistic view of the work, rather than counting hours and stressing out if they begin to tip past your budget limit.

  Can I DIY?

  Search engine optimization should have a place in every company’s marketing arsenal, but staying abreast of SEO’s evolutionary leaps isn’t simple. Yes, you can mine Google Analytics as a starting point, and attempt to craft your content and site accordingly, but an expert vendor can up your game materially. It’s no longer good enough to just be noticed online. You have to be noticed by the right people at the right time with the right content.

  It’s the quick shifts in this landscape that make it a tough bet for effective do-it-yourselfing. Google has been known to make sudden, significant changes that render large parts of an SEO strategy obsolete. As an example, the company has said that mobile-first content indexing is coming—meaning sites will be ranked according to how well they cater to the mobile user. When that happens, it’s likely to mean significant changes to algorithms and, as a result, SEO strategies.

  Tapping the vast network of available marketing resources and outsourcing choices may seem like a letdown to founders with DIY on the brain. But from a pragmatic standpoint, letting professionals work their magic often makes more sense than risking a sloppy job that has to be redone—particularly because compared with other marketing initiatives, this one doesn’t need to set you back tens of thousands of dollars when you outsource to a pro.

  EMAIL

  Email marketing has two massive benefits: It can be done quite cheaply, and it’s incredibly easy to measure. Taken together, it’s easy to understand why email has become the first type of marketing many companies take on, and the one they focus on most.

  Email offers other benefits to marketers as well. Aside from delivering great metrics, it delivers a regular way of staying in front of your customers, whether you’re offering an ongoing newsletter or a promotion. Email can be used by your business to market to customers, alert them to new product offerings, and offer loyalty discounts or promotions. At the same time, your customers can use email to troubleshoot any problems they have with your products or services, provide you feedback, and ask questions.

  But email campaigns—often hailed as the reigning ROI champions of digital marketing—only work if they have an audience. That’s an increasing challenge in an era where consumers are bombarded with email marketing messages. For most companies, the greatest challenge in email marketing is building a targeted list with accurate information. An urban apartment dweller doesn’t want content about landscaping, and a mom of three probably isn’t interested in late-night entertainment. Accurate targeting and segmenting is critical to your success.

  Email marketing is part art and part science. It takes a combination of know-how and creativity to get customers and clients just to open your email—let alone to read the whole thing, or click through to your site.

  What’s Your Subject?

  Your subject line is the headline for your email. Numerous studies have also shown that emails are more likely to be opened if the subject line is two or three words, as opposed to a sentence. Ideally, the teaser—your opening sentences—should complement and reinforce the subject line’s relevance.

  When you’re writing the subject line, avoid gimmicks and tricks. They may work once, but they erode trust and eventually debase most brands. If you’re unsure, test it. Actually, even if you think you’re sure, still test it. A/B testing your subject line is easy: Divide your list in two, each with a different subject line, and track the open rate, click through rate, and purchase/conversion rate on your landing page. This will help you build your best version of sales scripting to use on your website, offline marketing collateral, and even in your live salesperson scripting.

  Take extra care with the opening sentences of your message. In most email readers, the Inbox display includes the sender, the time sent, the subject line, and the first twenty words (or so) of the email. Prospects decide whether to open your email based on those four elements, so pack in a benefit to your readers—something they will learn, or get.

  Be Real

  You want to come across as a real person; your email should come from one specific person, and go to one specific recipient. Don’t write to crowds, and don’t write from committees or departments or companies. Write to one person. Unless you have a culture that values formality (or work in an industry where that’s the norm), start your marketing email with the first name of the prospect, followed by a comma. No honorific (like “Mr.”) and no “Dear. .
.”. Write as if to a colleague, not your Great Aunt Ruth.

  Yes, the email is from your company, but it’s not about you. Prospects and customers are interested in themselves, their own careers, their own business, and their own customers (usually in that order). They will shrug off and ignore any message that’s primarily about you, your business, your product, your enthusiasm, or your opinion. Make your emails valuable. This can be a key insight, a touching story, a special offer, or anything else that is relevant to your business and your audience. What do you talk with your prospects and customers about when you’re with them in person? What do they care about? How do you touch their lives? This is the core of your email messaging.

  Whatever you decide as the core of your message, it should be clear and simple. A thread should carry through from your subject line, through the top of the email, to short, skimmable body copy, with mobile-friendly design. Remember, your email is very likely to be opened from someone’s phone.

  Every email should have a call-to-action—but just one. The more CTAs that you cram in, the less likely it is that the prospect will act. Whether you want someone to click through to your site, to call you, or to respond to a survey depends on the nature of your business.

  Before you hit send, do a quality assurance check. Test the message on multiple browsers and readers, including on mobile devices and tablets. Check that all of your links work, as well as the landing pages they point to. And don’t forget to check spelling and grammar. A simple quality assurance checklist can make sure you’ve checked everything before you hit the send button.