Every business starts with an idea. Once upon a time, you’ve come up with a brilliant concept worth launching a startup. Most commonly, the market you aim to enter is already cluttered with other unique products and services. To stand out in that crowd, you need to make sure your idea is worth investing finances, time, and effort. Alongside investments and a detailed business plan, your success on this challenging and arduous journey strongly requires a proper startup marketing strategy. Most definitely, you need to prioritize the principles of making your startup noticeable to your potential clients if you want to reach your business goals.
How to Create a Marketing Strategy for a Startup to Make it Prosper
The main point of working on the marketing strategy for your startup business is not even about finding the best ways and means of making your company noticeable. But first and foremost, it is about defining what makes your targeted audience happy and how your product launch can contribute to making them even happier. Without placing the customers’ interests in the spotlight, you risk getting lost in the dark woods of your clients’ needs and tendencies of the market. There’s also a risk to join more than 30% of startup companies that bankrupted during last year because there was no need of their products and services on the market.
There is no better way of finding out how much your customers are satisfied with your product or service other than simply asking them. Asking them through consistent and systematic feedback data collecting that can clearly show not just users’ attitude to the brand and product, but also can reveal the hidden truth about what they really need. Processing the feedback timely and effectively will help you shape up your product concept and get the tips how to create an effective marketing strategy the startup will benefit from. Storing this data in your CRM system will help you stay on track and even foresee some upcoming trends.
It’s all about the customers, the customers who are ready to purchase your products or services, thus, you will generate more revenue with every successful customer story. Being customer-oriented from the very beginning can also help you gather a team you can trust and rely on and grow your business.
Focus your team efforts on solving the clients’ problems and make them really care to see how much closer they will start taking your startup idea and the clients’ pains. By just this one factor of how your employees prioritize customers’ success, you can understand whether you all are moving in one direction. And this direction must always be towards meeting the clients’ requirements needs which will inevitably lead to your company's success as well.
How to Form a Marketing Strategy for a Startup in Three Simple Steps
Now that you can see how valuable it is to walk some extra miles when creating a strategy for promoting your startup on the market, you must be curious what are the initial steps you must make. Marketing is a complex system with numerous approaches and tools to apply to it to see the potential of your business. But it doesn’t mean that you need to run away from it in panic, hoping for the outstanding qualities of the product you want to offer. Alternatively, the harder the system looks like, the simpler is the solution and very often it is very plain to see.
Define clearly your end goal
Obviously, you may think that the end goal is the successful startup development and launch of your business, while the launch is just the beginning. Your end goal, for instance, must be definite and include some clearly noted numbers of the customers you intend to acquire in a particular amount of time. So you could also calculate the approx revenue and expenses.
Determine your target market
You already know that the main aim of your product is to make your clients happy, but who are your clients? What country, region or area are they from? What are their occupations? What are the everyday problems that the usage of your services can help them solve faster and more effectively? Answering these and many more other questions about your potential customers will help you understand who are working for. Most certainly, knowing all ins and outs about your customers will not only help to come up with relevant and valuable startup marketing strategy ideas. But also find out what changes and correction need to be made to your product before the launch on the market.
Determine your budget
Apparently, all these three points are connected and depend on each other. Calculating all the expenses from taxes to the products shipping costs, from salaries for your staff to the costs of the coffee in the office is important for your investors. It is utterly important as well for building your marketing strategy, as long as you would most certainly like to have your product advertised through various channels and those services cost money.
Channels to Include in a Marketing Strategy for a Startup
As soon as you are ready with setting the final goal, calculating the approximate revenue and expenses and determining your target audience, you can consider the means and channels to speak out to your potential customers. Different types of products and services will be interesting to different kinds of customers, and different customers have different information channel preferences. To feel around for the perfect channel that will immediately connect you with your clients and understand how to plan marketing strategy, you will need to try several of them. The most widely used and battle-proven means of communication include:
Website
There is no point to get acquainted with your customers through a one-hundred-page complex website with sophisticated design and a pile of freshly written blog articles. You can start with a user-friendly organized and designed landing page that would contain the main information about your company and your product and would not overwhelm your clients with enormous information. Add some not annoying CTAs, useful facts and stay honest and authentic.
Email marketing
No matter where users register new accounts these days, they will always need emails. Email marketing has been always one of the most popular and effective channels of connecting businesses with clients. People rely on emails and contacting your potential customers via email can turn out to be a reasonable action of the marketing strategy for startup business.
Social media
Social media is represented by numerous variable channels of communication and offer an abundance of solutions for promoting literally any kind of business. There are about seven billion people in the world and almost a half the world’s population uses Facebook due to this report. Leveraging the functionality and versatility of different social media, you can reach out to a huge amount of users and acquire many customers.
Content marketing
Creating content is a new profession that gets more and more specialists involved every day. As we all know, content is king, and basically, it is the bridge that connects you with your customers. Depending on your target audience analysis, you can decide what type of content will suit more to promoting your company.
Mobile apps
Promoting your mobile app or any online product is a difficult and costly process. Try to look for new opportunities and creative approaches. For instance, you can create several simple mobile apps to promote your main product.
Developing a mobile application in a form of a game or some puzzle or weather forecast is not too expensive and also - it is much easier to promote. You will get audience for these apps quickly and with far less budget required than marketing your main application.
What happens next? In these simple apps, you can place as many commercials for your product, service or brand as you wish. You can attach a banner that will welcome the users to download your business application or visit the website.
Measuring the Success of Marketing Strategies to See the Progress
You can’t evaluate the effectiveness of your startup marketing strategy without defining the criteria of progress. Except the final goal you would like to reach, you need to set certain benchmarks on the way to see how close you manage to get to them or even overshoot some of your aims and expectations. What you can do to stay updated about the effectiveness of your marketing strategy:
- Define your KPIs and metrics. Set up some certain goals of how many customers you must acquire weekly during the first three months after your startup launch. Or just decide on how many interactions with your app or website you would like to register during some particular time period. Those KPIs can vary from business to business, you need to consider which of them are really relevant for your business evolution.
- Installing a Customer Feedback Loop. You already know that if you are unsure about how to make a good marketing strategy for an online startup, collecting your customers’ feedback will help. Leveraging the clients’ feedback data will enable you to see which communication channels with your target audience don’t work at all, what kind of content your customers are keen on. And of course, you can find out what should be changed in your product and, depending on that, you can decide whether the marketing strategy also requires some changes.
You are about to start a fascinating and exciting part of your life called ‘startup launch’. Take your time, consider all the risks, study the market and build a proper marketing strategy. Your startup deserves to be noticed by the customers and if you doubt you can achieve it by yourself, contact our experts, and we will do all the work for you.
