How to Market Your Startup

Getting Started

In today’s environment, marketing needs to be involved early in the sales process.
The first key to marketing your startup is determining your audience–your “buyer personas.”
Buyer personas are the common traits of the prospective customers you should be targeting.
It is worth the investment to hire someone with expertise in creating buyer personas.

Consistent & Targeted

Tailor your language to your specific audience; marketing today is one-to-one.
There are often multiple people involved in the decision-making process, and your messaging may need to be different for each of them.
It is critical to have a consistent marketing messaging and useful content to attract and share with your target audience.

Getting the Most Mileage Out of Your Tactics

Choose marketing tactics that will help you break through the noise and clutter; think outside of the box, and get creative.
When you create a good piece of content, think about how you can use that same content multiple times and extend its life. Can you repurpose it as an ebook, an infographic, a blog post, a video, social media posts, etc.?
People learn and internalize messages differently. Sharing valuable content several times, but in different formats, is a way to create multiple touch-points with prospects.

The Price of a Lead

Determine how much you are willing to spend per lead and to get in the door with those top prospects; that dollar amount will vary based on the potential long-term revenue the relationship could create.
A large part of the value in marketing is nurturing a relationship until the prospect is ready to buy. Help educate the prospect on how you will solve their pain point.

Analyze to See What Works

Spend more dollars on the campaigns that are most effective for your unique company.
Subtle changes to marketing tactics can make a big difference in people’s responses; A/B testing can help you determine what works best.
If you opt to do A/B testing on your tactics, be careful about testing too many things at one time or you won’t be able to correlate the adjustment to the outcome.
Be careful not to “come on too strong” by pushing for a sale before the prospect has had time to learn about your product or service and how it can help them.

Advice from the Pros