Marketing a startup can be a challenge, especially in competitive industries. Budgets never match expectations and it always seems like the competition has more money to spend than you.
The flip side is that your efforts are often more visible and your success can have a profound impact on the company’s fortunes. This means while it may not have the same results on a quantitative basis, startup marketing can be more meaningful in the macro-sense for a company.
We cover marketing quite extensively, as it is often the lifeblood and main growth channel for startups. So if you find it useful, check out some other cool content that we put together here and here.
With that in mind, here are some ways we think you can refine your startup marketing without breaking the bank.
Nurture leads
In the fast-paced startup world, some marketers may not invest in nurturing leads, but focus on acquisition only. This leaves a lot on the table and can be a lot of missed opportunity. In marketing speak, many marketers focus on building the funnel rather than helping the leads move through the funnel.
In B2B marketing, it might be more cost effective to focus some of your efforts on re-engaging and nurturing your current funnel to generate business. Don’t worry, you do not have to manually go through a list of a thousand potential customers and email them, there are great tools out there that let you automate this part of your job. Some of the include:
Focus on quality, not quantity
There’s a common myth in marketing that more content and channels equates to more conversions. Firstly, this isn’t sustainable as your company matures and it is unlikely to be a long-term success for the brand.
So if you’re using email, blog content, push notifications, social media engagement and other methods to contact your customers, start to look at what is successful and has the most engagement. Focus on those channels and stop inundating your customers with too much content. Once you reach unicorn status, then it might be possible to create an effective and non-intrusive omni-channel approach, but if you’re a young startup, it is just wasted effort.
This might sound harsh, but it is likely that the majority of what you put out there is not really delivering any value. Could be 50%, but it is most likely much more than that. However, when was the last time you got excited and clicked through when you got a generic message from a brand? Probably not in a while, if we’re being honest with ourselves.
All marketers should ask themselves this one question if they want to add quality and value:
Does this add value to my consumer or am I just producing unnecessary content?
Define who you want to connect with
Clearly define your target audience so you can speak to them in a way that connects with them. This may sound super basic, but it is essential to your marketing efforts and often times, startups don’t clearly define their target audience.
If you know your target audience well, you can define and refine your messages to the point that it is customised directly to engage your target market. This will help you with being able to stay focused and keep engaging the right people.
Use technology
Don’t save a penny to lose a pound, or however that saying actually goes. By saving a few dollars to avoid using automation technology like CRM systems, you can in fact, lose out on thousands if not more.
Investing in the right technology at the right time will help you save you time and money in the long term. Investing in something as simple as email marketing technology can help improve your response rates significantly over other methods including a manual approach.