Marketing Strategies For Startups
A Comprehensive Guide to Marketing Strategies For Startups
At The Branded, we understand that developing an effective marketing strategy for your startup can sometimes feel daunting.
Don’t worry though – the key to success is easily attainable with a little bit of research and creativity!
There are three main strategies every startup should consider:
1. Establish Your Brand - Your brand identity should make a strong impression on your target audience. It should convey the unique value you bring to the market, and create a sense of trust with potential customers. This includes developing a logo, tagline, website and social media presence that reflects who you are as a business.
2. Get Social - Social media is one of the fastest and most effective ways to spread the word about your startup and create a community of loyal customers. Whether it’s Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or other platforms, you need to make sure you’re using them all strategically in order to generate engagement and reach new prospects.
3. Leverage Content - Content is king when it comes to marketing. Developing content that’s relevant to your industry and target audience can help raise awareness about your business, attract new customers, and build loyalty among current ones. Whether it’s through blog posts, videos, podcasts or other forms of content, make sure you’re providing valuable information that people will want to share.
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Marketing Strategies For Startups
Step 1: Foundations
The first thing to do is to create a strong foundation for your startup. This foundation will set you up for success in the long term.
1. Branding
Consider branding as your first marketing strategy for your startup. You might be wondering why?
Having cohesive branding will instantly have your startup not just look good to the public but also provide the foundation for you to be able to succeed.
Having your mission, vision, values flushed out is a great start to creating your brand identity. It will also be the essence of your brand story. With those foundations aligned to your objectives, you can build on your brand awareness, too.
We suggest having a brand bible, a book guideline for your startup. Having these themes in your brand bible will help:
Brand Purpose
Mission & Vision
Brand Pillars
Colour Palette
Typography and rules
Logo Versions and Guidelines
Iconography
Mock-Ups
Photography Guidelines
More can be added to the brand guideline, but these are some of the essentials (depending on what your startup is about).
Looking for all the answers but don't know where to start?
Here is an example of a client of ours, Asaturi. We’ve helped them create a brand bible. The guideline that The Branded provided helped form their messaging online while building on their brand identity.
Also, remember, branding isn’t just about the logo, the fonts and the aesthetics. It’s also about your brand voice because your brand voice leaves an impression through your different modes of communication. While your brand image is a component of your brand building, your brand voice is also something to build on when setting down your foundations.
2. Goals and a clear message
Having defined goals and a clear message ties into your brand vision and purpose. Clear goals for your startup are ideal. Know what you want out of this. It will make everything easier.
Every startup will have a different definition of success.
In the beginning stages, we find that startup's always want to be heard. They want to create brand awareness while gaining new customers.
If those are your goals, here are some tips!
Brand awareness: build your online presence.
This is so important at the beginning. Making noise about who you are and what you are all about will create curiosity. Repetition online helps, too. But, what does that look like?
It could be having conversations online while community building, showing up to your platforms and building your digital presence are some of the ways. People need to know who you are and what you offer. Repetition and existing online will help.
Create that trust at the beginning. It will go a long way in terms of recognition, brand development and brand authenticity.
Gaining new customers: focus on your copy and call to action strategies.
With this, startups need to understand the value of design and copy. If your goals are getting new people to use your product or services, make sure to have a unique value proposition and a solid brand foundation to build trust–so that customers can take that step to support your business.
3. Value Proposition
We’ve mentioned this term before, value proposition. It's what makes your business unique. Ask yourselves these questions:
What separates you from others?
What makes your business stand out?
What is the tagline that makes people chose you over a competitor?
Make sure you are describing your products, services, business model and your target audience. This is something to explore and find out during your foundation step in marketing strategies for startups.
4. Set a budget
Your marketing budget will be determined by your goals at the beginning. Losing money is never fun, that’s why setting a budget for each move is the best way to go.
Measuring your return on investment after running a campaign or a specific marketing strategy will help you see if a certain tactic works for your startup. There are, of course, chances that it doesn’t prove to be worthwhile. This is when you pivot to another type of campaign or strategy.
The thing to remember is that starting small will not only give you valuable insight, but it will also provide you with experience in trial and error in the world of startup businesses.
Marketing Strategies For Startups Step 2: Audience Research
Knowing who your audience is will help you with brand planning and building.
1. Do market research
Conducting market research to help you understand who your audience is and the market landscape will help you with your startup marketing strategies.
You need to know who your customers are and what they think of your specific industry.
Other things to research are:
What gaps you are filling in your respective industry?
Who are your competitors? What are they doing differently?
How can you stand out amongst your competitors?
To help, conducting a SWOT analysis as an exercise for your startup is a great idea! A SWOT analysis helps you see the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
2. Who is your target audience?
Defining your target audience will help your marketing reach the right people. Knowing your ideal audience will help make it easier for you to create the right messaging.
Reaching your audience with the right tactics will make your efforts more worthwhile.
Here are some questions to ask yourself while determining your target audience:
What does your target audience benefit from your startup?
Why should they choose you?
Who is your target audience?
3. Create a Buyer Persona
Creating a buyer persona will help with defining your target audience.
A buyer persona is essentially a profile of who your target audience is. Here is a quick guideline to include in your buyer persona:
Who are they?
Demographic (age, gender, education level)
Background (occupation, career path, major, interest, hobbies)
Identifiers (personality type, values)
What do they want
As a full-service digital marketing and branding agency in Vancouver, we’ve created buyer personas and implemented our market research for our clients. It has proven to help them scale.
Understanding your audience means better marketing strategies for your startup.
Book a call with us, and we can figure this step out together.
Social Media Strategies for Startups
Let’s move on to actionable items after you create that strong foundation for your startup.
Moving on to social media marketing strategies.
To reach your target audience, you might have to be on multiple different platforms. Consider all the social platforms that fit your specific startup business.
The most popular ones that you are familiar with are:
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
Youtube
LinkedIn
While it is good to be present on every single social media platform, it can be overwhelming and daunting.
Especially when you are just starting and having to create different types of content.
But it is also the time to experiment and see which platform works best for your business.
Each social channel will offer something different and reach different kinds of audiences.
This can be a chance to convert people who are scrolling by to potential customers.
After testing out all the social media channels, setting up a social media marketing plan on specific platforms will help you scale your business.
Using social marketing platforms like Hootsuite or Later can help with that.
Here is a blog post by The Branded on Social Media Management Tips, that might help.
In short, create and schedule posts across your chosen platforms.
Then dive into ads. Social media is a quick way to reach your customers.
It will also assist in boosting your brand awareness, and it will be the catalyst for a future customer to see what your startup is all about.
Social media marketing will always be for your benefit.
Content Strategies for Startups
Content marketing is providing high-quality content that offers value to customers and those browsing through your platforms and website. Having valuable content can lead to a purchase or a share.
Content marketing involves:
Blog posts
Videos
Podcasts
Infographics
Email Marketing
Content marketing isn't focused entirely on sales, it’s about the value provided to your target audience.
It has to be in line with what people care about as well.
Blog posts for Startups
Blog posts are a great way to showcase your expertise. You can create long-form content that satisfies SEO while increasing organic traffic and building brand awareness.
Writing blog posts is a great way to build a digital footprint.
Today, people are more and more interested in valuable content versus aesthetics. So, show your expertise and let people know that you can be trusted as a startup with whatever service or product you provide.
As a blog example, we, of course, are proud of our collection of blog posts. We provide information on how to scale your business from the start, from providing business name ideas to marketing strategies for Gen Z.
Emails for Startups
Emails are a great way to reach a mass audience.
But you need to be crafty and strategic because you don’t want to end up too sales-focused.
Again, you want to provide something valuable.
Our tip is to have a catchy headline with valuable resources for the person receiving the email.
Whatever that may be in your field of expertise, give something of importance–that could mean important updates, tips and tricks, information about your company, anything that will create curiosity or buzz.
You want to avoid being the spam in someone's mailbox only to end up being deleted or unopened.
Offline Strategies for Startups
A mixture of online and offline marketing strategies for startups is good practice.
Consider trying a few of these to implement in your marketing strategies.
Offline marketing can consist of these 3.
Word-of-mouth: this is a free way to spread your business initiatives.
Most people are likely to try or choose something when they hear a friend, family member or possibly an influencer that they trust talking about a specific product or service.
Word of mouth marketing already accentuates trust in your startup because people are already sharing the word and talking about it. Get people to try your service or product and consider implementing referral incentives in your marketing strategy.
It will reward those talking about it but will also reward you down the line.
It’s a great way to position your brand as trustworthy and authentic.
Brochures and business cards: these are tangible items that people can have.
Have business cards ready with your logo, your name, your information as well as brochures for more information about your business. When you give this out to friends, family or fans, it will help with brand awareness.
It shows that you are brand building, and people will most likely back it up, especially those close to you. When they have a brochure or business card, they’re able to give it away, too. It's free promotion for you.
Press releases: reach out to journalists
It’s a good idea to get to know local journalists in your area. Provide them with a way to see what your brand is about.
Make sure you have an enticing story ready about your brand. Use your value proposition and share your brand story. Offline marketing strategies for startups like this, is all about creating those relationships with the media.
A tip is to send press releases to them, because if they choose to cover it, it will be free press and advertising for you because it reaches an even bigger audience.
Using offline marketing strategies for startups can scale your business. Mix this in with online strategies, and you’re on your way!
Unique Strategies for Startups
Let’s look at some non-traditional marketing strategies that can work for you.
Again, it depends on a startup’s goals and brand objectives. All these strategies are meant to be experimental at first–depending on the allocated budget. But a lot of these that we have already mentioned are cost-effective or free.
So, there is no harm. After all, you are trying everything you can to get your startup off the ground. Let’s look at unique strategies.
Stickers
Giving away stickers is how the popular network of communities, Reddit, got started.
Alexis Ohanian travelled around the country placing stickers in places people would see them and would also give stickers away to strangers. Their empire is built on $500 worth of stickers, and to this date, that is the total amount of money spent on advertising.
“The focus was on building a great product and a community online–the stickers were just an excuse for people to show their allegiance. Stickers have now become a currency for startups.” - Alexis Ohanian
Note that it doesn’t have to be stickers. Giving away t-shirts is another idea.
Try an invite-only platform
We are naturally curious and always wanting the exclusive on things. As consumers, we always want what we can’t have.
Creating an invite-only platform creates buzz and encourages people to see your brand. This is a great strategy to build up.
Take a look at Clubhouse, an invitation-only social media platform where people can communicate in voice chat rooms. This app has created a lot of buzz in the past year.
A gift for each purchase
A gift in every purchase is always a nice touch for the customer. As a startup company this might make you turn away, but consider this strategy to be one that gets the most attention.
Take a look at Diamond Candles. For every candle one purchases, there is a ring inside that can be worth up to $5,000. Normally people get rings worth $10. It works for the company though.
The build-up of the candle burning is something a lot of people look forward to. They also share it on their social media accounts. That's another way to build awareness.
Growth Strategies for Startups
We’ve shown how to create marketing strategies for startups, along with showcasing a few examples. We’ve also discussed the importance of foundation and audience research.
Now, we want to highlight the importance of flexibility during your business startup journey. Because the truth is, not every strategy is for you, and you will have to try and try again.
The art of getting noticed and making noise for your business can be a tough one to go at, especially if it is just you behind the scenes. That’s why being able to pivot when a strategy does not work is important. There are lots of strategies that can work for one company and not the other. Vice versa.
Sometimes it is luck, but it’s also the people behind the brand that makes everything work. It’s the experiments on different marketing strategies that you’ve implemented.
Whether it has worked or not, these strategies will always benefit your brand in the long run. These guidelines are here to point you in the right direction.
And, we’re also here to help you grow. As a full-service Vancouver Branding Agency, we understand the work that needs to be done. As branding and marketing experts, that’s our thing.
We’re familiar with creating something from nothing. We have been in your shoes, and we’re here to help you.
Let’s work together!
If you need help writing a business plan for your startup, checkout our guide here https://www.brandedagency.com/blog/writing-a-business-plan-guide
Looking for PR Campaign Ideas?
Checkout our PR Campaign Idea blog post.
Here are some very specific step by step branding guides for: Real Estate, Lawyers, Accounting, Doctors, Dentists, Optometrists, Jewellery, Makeup & Beauty, Skincare, Pet Food, Fashion and Construction.
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