29 Experts Share Marketing Tips for Early-Stage Startups

Most early-stage startups, such as yourself, have only one goal — to sell your product or service and share your mind-bending idea with the world to spread awareness about what you do.

Startup marketing, if done right, can do wonders for your startup and catapult it to become the next ‘big thing’. If done wrong, however, it can severely impact your brand building and promotional activities.

As a new business, having the expertise and financial backing for making bold marketing decisions may seem a bit of a stretch. This is why, we’ve requested 28 experts to share valuable marketing tips for young, energetic, and new startups like yourself.

1. Test the MVP

All startups are born out of the idea that a product or service is needed. However, the harsh reality is that not all products and services are truly needed. In order to prove that your idea is a viable business, you must test it out with a Minimally Viable Product (MVP).

Naturally, your MVP doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to get into the hands of customers so that you can establish if your business is needed.

Whether it’s a huge success or a grand failure, you must be willing to make adjustments and improve your business. These adjustments are critical because the results of your initial test don’t mean that they’ll be repeated with additional customers.

If you are continuing to see growth after making your adjustments then you are headed in the right direction. Nonetheless, growth doesn’t guarantee success unless you are able to do it efficiently.

To find long-term success you must be able to grow efficiently, that is, acquire customers at the lowest cost possible. The downfall of most early-stage startups comes down to running out of money, so to prevent this your startup must either secure funding or turn a profit.

Unicorns aside, if the costs to acquire customers are heavily outweighing the revenue then you’re going to have a hard time securing VC funds and you could find your bank account hitting zero sooner rather than later.

Travis Sevilla is the Marketing Manager for GoShare, an on-demand moving and delivery startup.

2. Don’t be an Uber of this or the Netflix of that

Marketing and PR for early-stage startups are not easy. There’s a tendency to couch the product or service in terms of existing ones — the Uber for this or the Netflix of that. That’s usually a mistake.

To stand out, your company has to solve a unique problem or do something in a new way. So don’t use what exists to describe what you’re bringing to market. Not only is it cliche, but it’s also unlikely to be accurate. Create your own words and tell your own story.

The twin challenge is that many (not all) technology reporters have limited views of what technology is — stopping and starting with what Elon Musk said or the new iPhone release. And educating reporters is possible but time-consuming and challenging.

It’s best, therefore, to start with what they already know. Explain challenges they face personally or relate your company to big news items of the day. Find an easy-to-understand or already familiar problem that you’re solving and start there.

The more you have to explain, the less likely you are to win good news coverage. Marketing and messaging that works will take reporters and editors (and your target audiences) to new places while starting on familiar ground.

Tech is also complicated and nuanced. So don’t skimp on developing relationships with reporters and writers. Put the time in.

Rome was not built in a day and the good press isn’t either — especially if it’s new or complex. Embrace the slow burn but be clear about your key targets and be relentless.

If what you’re doing is good, and you can tell a compelling story about it, you will get the press to cover it. Be proud, patient, and persistent. It works.

Derek Newton is a PRprofessional and messaging expert in NYC. I represent select technology companies such as KULR Technology.

3. You don’t need Marketo, Salesforce, or whatever the new shiny MarTech toy is at this point.

Keep it simple. Learn fast. That should be your marketing priority as an early-stage startup. You are going to read a lot of marketing think pieces about what to do and what not to do, but there are no silver bullets.

There is no guaranteed playbook for success. You have to embrace the unknown and optimize for learning as much as possible as quickly as possible until you find what works for your startup.

That means to avoid any prohibitive marketing expenses: anything that has a high upfront cost or a long contractual agreement. You don’t need Marketo, Salesforce, or whatever the new shiny MarTech toy is at this point.

Set up a simple foundation for data and performance management: Google Analytics with a defined UTM taxonomy applied to all links you put out into the market and an off-the-shelf email service provider with a basic CRM capability is enough to get going.

Don’t waste time customizing reports or tweaking the default settings.

At this point, you need just enough to know what is working and what isn’t working. Take the time to define a few KPIs, no more than 5–10, that you can easily track on an ongoing basis and use as a north star to determine if what you are doing is moving you toward your goal or not.

In order to learn, you need to get in front of your target customers and use a hypothesis-based approach for all marketing activities.

Any feedback that you get from a target customer is a blessing; take the time to get as much of this feedback as possible so you can start refining what you are doing to be as customer-centric as possible as soon as possible.

Orlando O Neill is the Associate Director at Fjuri, a marketing strategy consulting firm. He leads Fjuri’s acquisition and engagement strategy capability, including, qualitative and quantitative research, email, paid content, and affiliate marketing. Prior to Fjuri, Orlando was the Marketing Director at Ministry of Supply, Management and Strategy Consultant at the Boston Consulting Group, and Software and Hardware Engineer at IBM. He holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and is a three US patent holder.

And ensure that every marketing activity you engage in has an explicit goal identified upfront and a way to measure progress against that goal.

This is not the time to nurture sacred cows. Try out different approaches, measure how they do, after sufficient time, cut the losers, and invest in the winners. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Avoid an overly complex go-to-marketing strategy or set up that requires a lot of time to manage that could better be spent doing and learning. Make sure everything you are doing has a purpose and is being measured against that purpose. Keep it simple. Learn fast.

Mallory Whitfield is Director of Marketing at LookFar, a New Orleans-based software development studio that works with tech startups. She is also the host of the Badass Creatives podcast, and she has spoken extensively on digital marketing topics at events that include New Orleans Entrepreneur Week, VenturePOP, and more.

4. Stay scrappy

Build relationships and develop a deep understanding of your customer as early as possible. The feedback you get from customers early on during the product development process can save you huge amounts of time and money marketing your product down the road.

When gathering feedback, stay scrappy, and use as many free and low-cost tools as possible.

By seeking out existing conversations and asking open-ended questions using tools like Facebook groups, your LinkedIn network, and Google Forms, you’ll not only gain insights into the pain points of your customers but you’ll also get a better understanding of the way they talk about the problem your product solves.

When you’re ready to bring your product to market, you can mimic your customer’s tone and voice in your social media posts and website copy.

You can also use these tools to get feedback on potential brand colors, fonts, and logos, ensuring that your branding resonates with your target audience. We like to say, “Validate early and often.”

In order to provide the best chance of your product’s success and in order to save you money, it is always better to test assumptions early on, before the expense of software development has begun.

Brandon Wright is a Marketer at ThoughtLab, a creative digital agency that focuses on helping startups reach their full potential. In addition to his work as a digital marketer, Bradon is a fan of motorcycles, microbrews, and has a religious connection to chairs. He eats nothing with a face but faces anything trying to eat him.

5. Shut the web browser tabs with articles on ‘advice given by “successful” entrepreneurs’

This is going to be tough, but I’m going to need you to peel yourself away from your computer screen today. I know, I know, I too often find myself trapped in a web of “how-to” articles and lists of advice given by “successful” entrepreneurs.

Before I even realize what is going on I have 20 new tabs of content open that I HAVE to read, thing happens every week! It’s easy to do; bringing a product or service to market is extremely tough and it’s easy to fall into a paralysis by analysis if the process is unfamiliar to you.

Today I want you to try something new. I want to you close your MacBook and talk to your potential customers. Yes, face to face…

Find a select group of people that represent your ideal client and ask them if you can pick their brain over lunch. The insight that you’ll get while conversing over a $20 ratatouille will be worth its weight in gold once you start spending marketing dollars.

Ask questions that tell you where your target audience hangs out, physically and digitally, personally and professionally. What tabs of “must-read” content do you they have open on their computer? Who do they follow on Instagram?

What events are they excited to attend? You get the idea, the questions will change based on your particular product, industry, and target market, but the strategy remains the same.

Find potential customers, crawl inside their frontal cortex, and take look around. This will guide every other marketing decision you have to make.

6. Don’t say ‘we’ll think about this later’ to SEO

Unfortunately, SEO takes time, and it can take months before you even start to see results. The sooner that this becomes a priority, the quicker you’ll be able to take advantage of increased organic leads.

Leads from this source are arguably the most important, as these are people who are actively searching for a solution to their problem — a solution which you should be able to provide.

Of course, it’s daunting to conduct keyword research and discover how competitive a term is, especially when you’re not even on the list. But dedicate yourself to ranking for these terms, and you’d be surprised at how effective this strategy can be.

This is definitely a long-term approach, which takes a lot of work. You need to make sure you’re consistently publishing valuable, high-quality content (not just on your own website, but on relevant publications in your industry, too), to get on Google’s radar, but the payoff is well worth the investment.

Not only will you benefit from a constant stream of targeted traffic, but you’ll also establish yourself as an authority in your industry — a key priority for new businesses looking to dominate their market.

A helpful tip to start seeing an ROI from your SEO efforts at a time where budget may be tight and priorities need to be clearly set is to consider long-tail keywords.

These are longer, more specific keywords, and while they’ll have a lower search volume, they’ll also be less competitive, and users searching for such terms are more likely to be ready to purchase.

In terms of the actual content you’re writing, using your chosen keywords is important, but don’t go overboard. Stuffing your keywords into your copy hasn’t worked for years, and the focus should be on making sure every piece of content you create is useful to users.

And while your content should never be too promotional, you should use every post as an opportunity to direct visitors to your website further down your sales funnel.

Use a solid call to action to drive conversions, because, without them, it doesn’t matter how sexy your website looks, or how much traffic you have coming to your site: you’ll find yourself struggling to stay afloat.

7. Don’t invest in growth too early

While this may sound like strange advice, it’s the mistake I most often see early-stage startups make. Bringing a new tech product to market is hard, and it’s a natural tendency for companies to want to really step on the customer acquisition gas as soon as their minimum viable product is complete.

Oftentimes there are investor expectations or simply a team that’s been working for little or no pay for quite some time that adds to this sense of urgency.

What happens when you invest in growth too early is often marketing dollars are simply burned inefficiently, or you begin to acquire customers before you truly know how to make them successful with your product.

When this occurs, all too often you see high churn rates which create a tailwind that is difficult to overcome and impedes growth.

Before you decide to invest in growth, do whatever it takes to make a small number of early customers successful. Your strategies and means of making customers successful with your product don’t need to be efficient and don’t need to scale; the important thing is that you find a recipe to make customers wildly successful with your product.

If you can do this for 3 customers, you can do it for 10 or 100.

Once you’ve found your recipe for success, focus on figuring out how to cost-effectively scaled and deliver your customer success process. Only once you’ve done this are you ready to truly invest in growth. Mark Roberge, former CRO of Hubspot, refers to this framework as…

Geoff Roberts is the co-founder of a tech start-up, Outseta, as well as Founder of www.saasgrowthstrategy.com, a small consultancy that helps early-stage tech companies with go-to-market strategy. Geoff previously led marketing at Buildium, where he scaled the company to $15mm in revenue while acquiring 10,000+ new customers.

Read the full article here.

Originally published at https://get.tech on March 7, 2019.