Effective Marketing Strategies for Your First Startup

Behind every successful startup, you'll see a significant role of marketing. Marketing is basically talking to your potential customers in their language. Depending on your type of business, in various stages and phases of your business, you'll need the help of marketing. It helps your brand to stay on top of customers' minds whenever they think of purchasing a similar service or product that you are offering. The main aim is to tell people about your product, show why it's better, and get customers interested.

Why do you need it?

There aren't many reasons why you don't need it, honestly. In this generation, especially digital marketing is very important for your startup. In the early 1900s, word-of-mouth used to play a very important role in the businesses. But imagine you have started up your very first business but have not told anyone about it. How are you going to make your first sell? Marketing comes here to solve this problem. It helps to let people know about your business and creates a positive impact in their minds. All of these ultimately lead to your first actual sale. 

Setting your goals

We live in an age of attention deficiency where everybody wants to be both entertained and educated in the shortest span of time. Creating marketing campaigns that grab and hold the attention of your target customer is extremely challenging. But not that much if you plan enough. 

As you are starting out, we don't recommend you go straight into selling your product or service. First, try to have a positive impact on the potential customers. You need to try your best to stay in their mind whenever they're trying to purchase something of a similar kind.

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is basically making people recognize your brand. It is considered the foundation of successful marketing strategies. Promote your brand positively. Talk about how it can bring goodness to the potential customers' lives. Talk about how it can help them do things faster. A major mistake a lot of people make is not thinking much about brand color, slogan, etc. Although these things may sound like a no-brainer to think about at the early stage of your business, but all of these things help a lot to establish in customers' minds positively or negatively. When your startup starts growing, and you feel the sudden urge to rebrand, this is just too difficult to do. Because, changing your brand color, slogan, and theme means re-rooting your brand in people's minds, which is a super complicated and time-consuming process. So, think about all these little but impactful details before starting out. This will help you seed a positive impression of your business.

Selling Product/service

Once you've done trying your best to make a positive impression about your brand, it's time to play the main game. Generating the revenue. You need to start focusing on selling your unique product or service. Marketing can make products or services popular even if they don't have much unique value.

Then imagine what unique and useful product/service + effective marketing can do.

How to Achieve Your Marketing Goals?

You can use different marketing tactics to reach your startup to your target customers. All of these can depend on a lot of things, such as - market size, TG, type of product, etc. But today, we're going to discuss a few basic ideas that you can implement in almost every type of business that actually works. 

Identify your target audience

There is nothing called enough research. Be sure to regularly research the market and your target consumers. Because, at this age, consumer behavior is constantly changing. People are changing their lifestyles depending on social media trends and whatnot. Always try to identify who you are reaching out to and how you can do this easily. 

Marketing, without proper research, won't work. Imagine you have a high-end watch business, and you push online ads to everyone without researching. Do you think 16-year-olds will buy your thousand-dollar watches? Chances are less than 0.5%. Doing research saves time and money and brings in actual sales.

Utilize news media

Many founders miss this important tip. Putting your newly starting startup in the news can give your brand great positive exposure. While you can create your website, make it look nice, do SEO, and boost social media and forum posts, established news media still offers "Trust, awareness, and credibility," along with vital exposure.

Getting people to talk about your brand through media coverage can help create amazing brand awareness. Reaching out to media or journalists of your preference can be challenging. But you can seek help from trusted online journalist databases, such as Journalist Hunt, to reach thousands of journalists in the easiest way.

Establish your website

Introduction to social media, short content, offline marketing, and whatnot might look super engaging to your eye. It is, actually, but still, for 99% of the brands, the brand's website is the place of trust for everyone. If you really want to establish your brand, we recommend customizing your business website properly. Do proper SEO and write blogs of the same niche. This will not only help your brand to increase credibility but also will help establish a good rank in search engines. If done properly, blogs will bring potential new customers to your website.

Email newsletters

Sending newsletters is a very old online marketing technique that started almost 40 years ago, but it is still super useful for funneling customers.

On your website, you can provide options for discounts or offers to potential customers who are visiting. This will not only attract them to buy your product or service but also open the path for you to acquire recurring customers. Once they join your newsletter list by putting in their email, you can keep sending lucrative offers, tips, and relevant content that might be useful to them, ensuring it has the potential to bring them back to your website and convince them to make a purchase. This is a very popular and influential "online" word-of-mouth technique that still works to this day if done correctly.

Do not frequently send emails; keep the email content short and catchy. Avoid clickbait, and you should see good results.

Social media

We know you're doing it; your competitors are doing it, but please make sure you're doing it right. First, pick the platforms that your potential customers use the most. For example, if you're starting a tech startup for tech nerds, you may want to create a relevant subreddit on Reddit and post informative content there. Doing the same on Facebook won't be as helpful because Reddit has more potential customers than Facebook. Why waste your resources in the wrong place, right?

Your first approach should be reaching audiences organically. Create shareable content and try to avoid clickbait if you genuinely want to build trust and maintain it for the long term. Use various post formats like infographics, text posts, videos, reels, etc. Try to respond to every query or comment regularly. This will not only boost your credibility among social media users but also help increase impressions. The more interactions, comments, and reactions you get, the more it will reach more people. If you see good results in organic reach, you can consider boosting it to reach a larger audience.

Offline promotion

Does "Offline promotion" seem to conflict with your modern startup? I understand it may, but depending on your niche, offline promotion can be highly useful for most startups, especially when targeting local customers. For instance, if you're launching a food delivery startup, consider advertising in local cafes, bakeries, and restaurants. If you're in the B2C fintech sector, promote your service in local supermarkets – we've all seen such ads, right?

Organize workshops at local colleges, engage with people, and share the amazingness of your new startup. There's no marketing stronger than word-of-mouth, and offline promotion is an excellent way to achieve it.

Conclusion

Effective marketing is essential. It is important to target the right audience, utilize news media, establish a trustworthy website, and leverage email newsletters and social media effectively to achieve your marketing goals. It is the key to making your brand known and trusted in today's competitive business landscape. So, make sure you're doing it right. Best of luck with your very first startup!