Essential Startup Marketing: 6 Essentials to Implement and Grow your New Business

Getting it right in startup marketing is every entrepreneur’s dream come true. Yet, while coming up with the right marketing strategy to help you connect with your target audience can be a challenge, implementing what you come up with is usually the toughest part for many startups.

Especially, when you are looking to grow your startup exponentially without taking out a business personal loan to fund a fruitless campaign. Having fewer funds while starting a new business can be quite challenging for a business owners. That is where considering these essential might help if implemented correctly.

So how do you implement a marketing strategy that will take your startup to the next level?

Here are essential marketing steps you’ll want to use to boost your new business’ growth.

1. Begin Before You Start Up

Contrary to popular belief, pre-launch marketing is great for your new business.

You do not need to start implementing your viral marketing or growth hacking strategy after launch. In fact, depending on your product or service, you’ll want to start before launch day.

Running a preemptive marketing campaign for your startup before it launches ensures you create brand awareness, introduce your central “why”, and connect with early adopters with your startup’s story and value proposition.

If you skipped or skimped this essential starting up step, you can still implement the next step below.

2. Improve Your Product-market Fit

Peter Drucker, the great marketing guru, put it best when addressing the aim of any marketing:
“…is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him (or her) and sells itself”

To achieve exponential growth from your marketing strategy, you’ll need to reach your ideal customers and convert more of them than before. That means increasing customer acquisition and slicing customer objections to boost conversions and retainment.

According to marketing firm, HubSpot, the effective way to increase both customer acquisition and retainment rates is to continuously improve your product to address specific needs of your customers.

So, how do you know your customer’s needs?

You ask them.

One of the best way to do just that is to use the Net Promote Score (NPS). This is where you send out a survey to ask customers to rate, on a scale of 1-10, how likely they are to recommend your product or service to a friend.

You can use online surveys tool Survey Monkey or install Intercom to talk with your website visitors in real-time.

You want to go further and request them to offer a short, honest and written answer for their rating. Be sure to thank them for their worthy contribution to help you serve them better.

Getting genuine feedback could be important than making immediate sales.

You can then use the feedback to craft your “Central Why”, Unique Value Proposition, and make your marketing material more targeted towards this buyer persona or ideal market.

3. Build Marketing into Your Service or Product

Let’s take Apple’s exemplary example here.

The “thing” about Apple products is not only do they work as advertised, but they also look the part. The crazy following Apple enjoys is not primarily hinged on how well the software bit of IOS works.

Apple’s build marketing into their products by implementing a sleek product design strategy. And their competitions have over the years observed this unique offering and are now making almost cloning the iPhone, for example.

What do you want to be the most conspicuous aspect of your target market’s user experience? What is it about your offering that will prompt someone to want to recommend, share and refer their parents, siblings, friends and foes to your product or service?

Again, understanding your core market, your startup’s buyer persona will play an immense role here too.

4. Explore Different Marketing Approaches or Platforms to Nail the Best for Your Ideal Market Segment

Did you know some of the largest startups in the world achieved viral growth on a
budget?

The likes of SnapChat and DropBox implemented their startup marketing successfully
by using the best marketing methods for their new businesses.

So how do you do it as well?

Picture this:

You launch a marketing strategy and it goes viral on Instagram but you can’t see the same effect ramping up your sales. The viral campaign does not yield conversions.

That is what happens when a marketing campaign fails to reach your ideal customers. And how do you reach your customers precisely where they are?

Perhaps your ideal customer is more convinced when you present case studies, white papers and sample work instead of posting viral video on YouTube or Facebook. The customer here wants a demonstration of your offering’s use case and how it fits to their
use case.

With this kind of buyer, you’d need to recalibrate your content marketing to focus more on producing quality studies that demonstrate how you can help your customers solve their core problems.

5. A/B Test your Approaches

Ultimately, the best way to understand which aspects of your startup marketing plan are working is to split test them.

Marcus Taylor of marketing firm, Venture Habour, recalls how split testing helped him come up with a technique that grew his website’s reach and conversions from 2.5% to 10%. Split testing led him to understand that adding the number of subscribers, likes or users next to a sign up button increased sign ups or conversion.

If split testing yourself feels like a stretchy path, since it can take months to analyze outcomes successfully, you can commission UserTesting.com to experiment on your behalf.

Still, conversion tools such as Leadformly can boost your marketing implementation past the split testing stage by affording you high-converting forms fast.

Yet, using WiderFunnel’s model will help you to experiment on the likelihood of a website visitor to convert.

6. Measure Marketing ROI

Ultimately, you want to know if your overall strategy is working. You’ll want to have parameters for measuring your marketing campaign’s effectiveness and efficiency. The rule of thumb is to keep what works and ditch what does not.

Takeaway

Implementing these essential startup growth hacks will take your startup to the next level with time. The key to substantial growth is to continuously improve your product or service’s unique offering and positioning it in front of your target market to boost conversions.

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