According to a study by Small Business Trends in 2016, a bit over 50% of startup businesses marketing tips will fail in the first year.
If that’s not enough to increase your determination to succeed, once you get up and running, only 40 percent of small businesses are profitable, 30 percent break even and 30 percent are continually losing money.
If you are going to go into business, you need to let people know that you are in business right? Without a solid marketing plan, most startups will fail due to a simple lack of money and customers.
So today I will help save you some time and effort by sharing ten marketing things you can learn from startups with success stories.
So let’s get right to it!
1. Use Content To Increase Visibility
One of my favorite examples of a successful entrepreneur is Neil Patel. He is the king of SEO and digital marketing and has built his business from the ground up using content marketing.
You can view his lengthy blog posts, YouTube Channel, and LinkedIn profile brimming with creative and highly insightful content.
2. Think Outside Of The Box
When you want to attract attention to your product or service, a little out-of-the-box thinking works well. Take for example one of the most successful online media sites, Reddit. The truly used the philosophy of “fake it until you make it” when they first started maketing tips in 2005.
We can also see that Airbnb used their own brand of cereal to market their name and the founders of PayPal gave out free money.
Do anything you can to stand out from the crowd.
3. Collect Feedback So That You Can Improve Your Product
Slack is a great example of a successful startup business that is known as a next-generation business communication tool, and is often referred to as “one of the fastest growing apps in its class.”
Source – Podiumblog
You can read in this post by Yalantis.com that Slack used collected feedback initially to improve their product in the very beginning.
According to their founder, part of Slack’s success was taking to the time to listen to their customers and to make their customers’ opinion a priority.
Customers’ feedback not only helps in improving the product but you get to know the finer details too. For example – what features are being liked the most? What functions are fetching value? What aren’t.
Basis this, you can upgrade your product, eliminating less useful features. This would naturally cut down on the development cost and save you the extra penny.
Buffer is a prime example of a successful start-up company that used the power of social media to spread its message. Social media marketing in 2019 is absolutely vital to your success.
In an article by Entrepreneur.com titled, “Marketing Lessons For Your Startup: 3 Successful Stories,” you can see how Buffer systematically used various social media channels to reach their audience and grow their business.
5. Know Your Product and Its Vision
If you are going to go out and sell your product, you must be able to convince your potential clients that they need to have what you are selling.
Source – Episerver
You cannot convince people to buy your product if you don’t know everything little small detail about how it works and what value it will bring to your clients.
Jack Ma, founder, and CEO of Alibaba built his business on this moto which was to help small businesses grow.
6. Make In-Bound Marketing A Priority
Velo IT Group tells you to make inbound marketing a priority. This successful startup company out of Dallas, TX focuses primarily on developing inbound marketing strategies to generate leads.
They do this by focusing on providing valuable and education content to their potential clients in order to develop email lists so that they can then send them drip email campaigns to lead them down a funnel.
You can use tools like MailChimp to help with automating the email marketing process and develop a powerful lead generating campaign.
7. Frequent Live Events
The successful Frank Recruitment Group used live events to initially begin their company and gather success.
Source – EventManagerBlog
They take those leads they get from the event, in the form of business cards usually, then add them begin a drip email marketing campaign to them.
They hire expert email writers who reach out to prospects using impeccable personalised templates.
It’s a great way to generate business and establish trust in your marketplace.
8. Develop Targeted Landing Pages
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve noticed with clients trying to do their own Google Ad campaigns is they don’t spend the time to develop dedicated landing pages. I also see this occur on Facebook.
Sam Sternweiler of Opasite agrees with me.
Opasite is a successful startup that believes greatly in developing landing pages when trying to convert as many people as possible. You can use platforms such as Leadpages to help you with landing page building.
9. Don’t Wait To Start Doing SEO
Hannah Whitehouse of Bounzezap says not to wait to start doing your SEO. When marketing your product, I’m sure you have already spent some money on developing a decent looking website.
Make sure not to stop there at web development. To drive as much traffic as possible to your website, you need to learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization.
But more importantly than that, don’t wait to start doing SEO on your site. SEO takes a long time to see any rankings on Google.
Make use of a good SEO tracker from day one. That would keep you abreast with your SEO score and how your SEO initiatives are performing.
Depending on how competitive your keywords are, it could be anywhere from 6 months to a full year to start seeing results.
10. Use Correct Channel Marketing To Find Customers
If you have a product or service that is geared towards teenagers, don’t place an ad in the Yellowpage. Well, that may be a little extreme, but you get my point.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook says to make sure you are catering to your audience. Instead of spending your budget on Facebook ads, you might want to consider spending the bulk of your money on Snapchat and Instagram ads.
According to Statista’s 2018 study on social media platform usage, 53% of 13-14-year-olds use Snapchat, followed closely by 50% usage by 15-17-year-olds. Make sure you know your audience before you start spending your money.
Conclusion
The marketing tips that are given here are from successful companies that have made it through that dreaded first year.
Save this post and read it again. Make sure to keep these marketing tips when developing your business plan.
See you at the top!
Roberto Garvin –
I am Roberto, co-founder of Mofluid. It is absolutely amazing to see how technology continues to evolve, from email to browsers, search engines, mobile, AI and now blockchain. I am fortunate to witness it all. Really excited to see what’s next.
