How to Promote Startup Business – Are you thinking of promoting your startup company? If yes, then I know what you are thinking right now. Where do I start? What’s the best marketing strategy for startups? How do I get my startup business off the ground?
As a startup business owner you often feel like you are alone. It’s hard to imagine who can help you promote your website, blog or social media accounts to potential customers and clients. You worry about how to learn marketing strategies that would increase traffic and sales and how and where to promote and market your startup company.
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Send Emails
Email marketing is an essential strategy for attracting customers to your startup for little or no cost. Once you have a prospect or customer’s email address, you can send him or her emails to promote your startup.
To take advantage of this marketing strategy, you must first collect prospects’ email addresses. If you have a website for your startup, consider placing a newsletter signup form on it. Alternatively, you can ask customers directly for their email addresses. The key thing to remember is that you must diversify your emails with non-commercial content like guides, how-to articles, videos and infographics. If you only send advertorial emails, subscribers will probably opt out of receiving your newsletter.
Launch a referral program
If you want to develop a huge following very quickly, you need to look into referral marketing.
This is a basic strategy where you allow customers to help promote your product for you. It’s a simple concept, but it isn’t used nearly enough by most of the startups I’ve seen.It’s especially critical to use since 92% of people trust personal recommendations more than all other forms of marketing.
You want to get your customers excited to share the news of your startup with their friends and promote it heavily.
To do this effectively, don’t build a referral program from scratch. After all, other companies have done the hard work for you.
I recommend using a tool like Ambassador. It will handle all the difficult details of the referral program, allowing you to focus on the product creation and promotion.
Target Your Audience
While increasing the visibility and user base of your startup, remember one simple thing — you can’t engage nor please everybody. Not everyone will like your product, and that’s fine, as you’re not aiming for that, anyway. You have to know who’s going to be interested in your product or service and focus on them.
First things first, define your target audience. Then study them, learn their age group, gender, location, concerns, wants, and needs. Only after that, can you develop your product in a way that will satisfy them. Next, organize the promotion, keeping this particular group of people in mind. This group should be your priority. Remember, time and energy are valuable resources, don’t waste them!
SEO Can’t Be Ignored
The next important step of a promo campaign is Search engine optimization (SEO). It can’t be ignored in the Google world. The idea behind SEO is to increase your website’s visibility and traffic. It’s a free and efficient way to attract more potential clients.
Source: Moz Pro
SEO has 2 main branches: on-page and off-page. The former takes action directly within your website, like optimizing your content, meta descriptions, titles, URL, and so on. It helps you rank higher on Google search results. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, refers to outside factors, such as backlinks, social media shares, etc. It’s less popular but still equally important.
We highly recommend you read how-to-guides and statistics on SEO to improve your marketing campaign.
Social media
Harness the power of social media to draw attention to your new business. There are many social channels you could choose from; which ones you use largely depends on your target audience. Unsurprisingly, the main social sites to focus on are Twitter and Facebook. When tweeting, strike the right balance between professional and fun; the main thing is to give people a reason to follow your business, so ensure your tweets are engaging, interesting and relevant to your audience. Your Facebook page is also free; use it for any lengthier posts and offer special Facebook-only deals to your followers. You should try and share other useful content from around the web too, rather than pushing out your own content all of the time. Try allocating an hour or so a day to focus on building your social media activity.
Local press
Local press are often interested to hear of entrepreneurial stories, particular ones which involve an innovative offering or something completely new. Pitch your story to local media outlets such as newspapers, local magazines, broadcast news and radio shows to see if they are interested in covering you.
Find your place in the market
According to a study by CB Insights, lack of demand in the marketplace is the number one reason startups fail. Maybe the product or service being offered doesn’t solve a problem or isn’t unique enough to set itself apart from the competition. Maybe its focus is too narrow and the pool of potential customers isn’t large enough to build (and scale) a successful company. Or, maybe it just hasn’t been positioned correctly and never had the chance to reach the right people.
To give your new startup a better chance of avoiding these common pitfalls, take time to thoroughly research other products on the market and gauge interest from your potential customers. Once you’ve determined there is enough demand to sustain your business, you can start thinking about how you’ll tell your target audience about all the great stuff you have to offer.
Networking events
As well as what you know, it’s also about who you know. Professional networking is a free way to launch your company and can open up numerous opportunities. As well as networking online (via LinkedIn, for example), attend as many relevant networking events as possible. You could even consider teaming up with complementary businesses and refer your customers to one another.
Turn your product into a challenge
One of the biggest problems with viral marketing is that it’s often difficult to tell exactly what the company has to offer.
If you create a video that everyone loves, you might suffer a lack of recognition. A clever video might not necessarily explain your product or even direct viewers to buy.
So, what’s the solution? Make your product the focal point of the viral marketing campaign you decide to run.
Codecademy challenged people to learn to code as their 2012 New Year’s resolution. Since learning to code was easiest to do on their platform, it became a viral success.
Codecademy’s New Year’s campaign led to the site growing to its massive current user base.To make this work, try to find the exact need your product solves, and turn it into a challenge for others to solve that need. They’ll think of your startup when they do.
Attend trade shows
If you’re not afraid to go offline, you can build a huge following by connecting with influencers at conferences and trade shows.
In the Ruby community, there are a handful of live events where developers meet to discuss what’s new in programming, like RubyConf and RailsConf.
By leveraging the relationships he had already built with developers, Mike Perham was able to promote his new program, Sidekiq, at these conferences.
This put Sidekiq swag into the hands of ideal customers and helped them grow into a huge company. This kind of offline promotion can be a massive way to grow your new business.
Give away stickers
While it might seem ridiculously simple, you can actually create a giant user base by giving away free stickers and placing them where people can see them publicly.
When he launched the community site Reddit, Alexis Ohanian spent $500 on stickers. This was the only investment the company made in marketing.
He traveled around the country, putting them in visible places and even giving them away to strangers. This unique marketing tactic was how Reddit grew into the site it is today.
If you’re going to create multiple stickers to give away, I’d recommend using a company dedicated to printing custom stickers in bulk.
A site like StickerMule offers big discounts if you’re going to print hundreds of stickers, just as the founders of Reddit did to promote their startup.
This can be a cost-effective way to stand out and create a massive movement of people interested in your startup.
Curated Social Media
If you’re not using social media to promote your business, you definitely should be. Alongside a small business website—which you absolutely need to have!—social media platforms are usually the first place prospective customers go to get a feel for who you are and what you do. And business accounts on the main platforms, like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Snapchat, are generally free.
An active presence on social media is a crucial way to let people know what kind of service you’re providing, and offer a snapshot into your company culture. Thoughtfully curated social media profiles—think well-lit shots of your products, fun and informative Instagram stories, and active Facebook conversations—are an easy way to elevate your business, and make people want what you’re selling.
Also, if you have an active social media presence, it’s easy to interact and communicate directly with your customer base. People like knowing there’s a person on the other end of the screen, and forming those personal connections with people encourages brand loyalty, making them more likely to become return customers.
Plus, if you have a social media practice that’s unique to you, like a hashtag or a filter (or simply great content) your customers will be more inclined to pin, tweet, and share with their own friends and followers. Essentially, free advertising for you.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the best marketing tactics build on top of one another. Don’t choose just one of these ways to promote your business; use whatever you think fits your company.In today’s highly competitive world, it can be quite challenging to draw attention to your brand. That’s why you have to get creative and diversify your promotional sources.