It’s becoming harder and harder for startups to gain traction in cost efficient ways. This is because the competitive landscape for capturing attention is becoming overly saturated with idea after idea. It’s easy to get somebody look at your brand, but the real challenge lies in getting them to interact and remember you brand.
Getting people to remember your brand is vital for the successful of a startup, which is why we are going to talk about 7 startup marketing tips that are cost efficient. These tips should be useful for guiding you towards success in an ultra competitive business and attention economy.
With our tips, you will be be able to accomplish some great results. You just need to remember that each tip will only work if you do one thing well: focus. Always remember what makes your product unique, identifying what makes it unique, and then crafting your marketing strategy around these attributes. When you craft a marketing strategy, you will identify the tactics that you are confident will help you achieve your business objectives.
1. Form strategic partnerships.
One of the greatest ways to quickly grow your brand is to form strategic partnerships. When you form strategic partnerships with other companies, it lets you piggyback on the success of another company. If there’s monetary incentive for both sides of the party, it becomes a lot likelier that you can work with a more established company to generate new business for yours.
2. Become obsessively focused on your target customers.
When a lot of startups get going, they are often overly enthusiastic. When you’re overly enthusiastic, you typically think that everyone wants your product and that you should reach out to them. Don’t reach out to everyone. Stay intensely focused on your target customers and the audience that will best assist you in growing your business.
When you stay focused on your target customers, you don’t fall into the trap of desperately trying to attract any customer possible. Hone in on who you want, create a tried and tested sales machine, and you will reach your short-term business goals. When you stay focused, you will reach your target customers much more efficiently, which helps you maximize your limited startup resources.
3. Give people a reason to talk about your company.
Getting people to talk about your company is essentially incentivizing people to share. Do things like offer discounts for Tweeting, free premium features for referring new users, and more.
When you get people to share your product for you, it helps you grow faster. It helps you grow faster because you get insanely powerful peer-to-peer recommendations. When a person recommends a product to another person, it grows your brand FAST. Additionally, when people learn about a product from a friend or a person that they trust, they are much more likely to use the product (and use it for a long time!).
4. Become a strong member of your community.
A fantastic way for you to grow your startup in a cost effective way is by becoming an integral part of your local startup community. This means going to every startup event possible where your target audience is and positioning yourself as a company that is a thought(ful) leader.
By becoming deeply integrated into your local startup ecosystem, you will always be on the mind of your community. People will talk about you, recommend you, you’ll meet people who have good ideas for your company, you’ll connect with investors, and so on. The opportunities here are endless when you make yourself deeply intertwined in your community.
5. Create branded content.
Creating branded content is a wonderful startup marketing tactic. It’s a great thing to do because it allows you to create content that is discoverable in search engines, while keeping you in check with industry trends as they unfold. When you make great content, your intelligence about your industry grows (while giving you more opportunities to gain new customers!).
If you’re unsure what branded content is, it is content that isn’t overly promotional or salesy. It doesn’t brag about the services or products that your company offers, but it gives real value to your target audience. When you give real value to your target audience, they’ll want to be part of your brand and they’ll want to share your content with others. When people want to be part of your brand and share your content with others, you’ll ultimately grow faster.
6. Use social media to find customers.
One great marketing tactic that you can leverage is social media. You can use a service like Twitter to find people talking about what you do and introduce them to your brand.
An example of this in action would be a competitor to personal finance app Mint, say Everwealth, has decided to find customers using Twitter. Everwealth starts looking for people talking about Mint, and finds people complaining about a Mint feature. Everwealth would politely join in the conversations and send responses to the people along of the lines of, “Hi {name}. I saw that you’re having trouble with Mint. I’d love you to try our budgeting and finance tool: url.” This is a simple, polite, and great time to introduce your product to a likely potential customers.
7. Turn your website into a lead generation machine.
There are a lot of ways that you can turn your website into a lead generation machine. You can work on building an email list with a tool like MailChimp or use LeadBoxer to see exactly who is on your website.
You want to turn your website into a lead generation machine because sales leads are how you grow your business. The more qualified leads you have, the more chances you’ll have to discover big opportunities to increase revenue.