Carole Petterson, Negosentro | Startups are put in a difficult position from the day they are created. It’s important to manage resources carefully at first because it’s the first year of doing business that’s often the most difficult. However, there are also a lot of competitors to worry about and startups need to have an effective and all-encompassing marketing campaign in place.
This doesn’t have to be an expensive endeavor, but in order for a marketing campaign to be successful, it needs to be based on the understanding of the customers and their needs.
Engage with the customers
The main goal of any marketing strategy is to sell products and make a profit. However, it isn’t enough to do only that. Those kinds of single-minded campaigns are usually seen as boring and artificial. In order to avoid this mistake, the campaign should try to be broader and engage with the customers on a personal level.
Try to think about the channels that your business uses for promotion as a network for connecting with the customers. The customers and clients should feel like they belong to a community instead of just purchasing goods or using a service.
Find your unique benefit
A marketing campaign needs to be based on the unique benefits that your company is able to offer its customers. It’s wrong to try to compare your business to all the rest in the industry. First of all, that way, you advertise others as much as yourself and second of all, all businesses have some quality in which they can outrank the others.
Instead, your campaign as a whole should focus on what you do best and what no one else can provide. This unique ability needs to find its way to all the channels you use to promote the company.
A/B testing
A/B testing is one of the simplest marketing concepts and it can provide great results. Basically, A/B testing means you should have an alternative version of every marketing campaign and you should test them both with actual customers.
The results will let you take your brainstorming to a new level because knowing why an idea was rejected could mean more than knowing why it was selected. It also provides you with a backlog of alternative ideas to be remodeled and reused.
User data
Modern technology allows businesses to know almost everything they might want to know about their customers. This can inform the marketing campaign in significant and meaningful ways. If you know what data to focus on, the business can be more open to thinking on its feet and make changes based on the real-time needs of the customers.
It’s best to turn to a digital agency that handles the back-end part of the job. Have in mind that this can also present a problem for some customers and that you need to be very careful as to what kind of data are you saving. Keeping the customers in the loop is also imperative.
Inside baseball
Some of your marketing efforts should be oriented toward the industry you’re working in, instead of the customers themselves. These marketing campaigns are usually smaller in scale and cost much less than the traditional ones.
The goal of such a campaign isn’t to make a sale, but to make the industry aware of your business and to position it within it. Start by writing for industry-related publications and blogs, but you can also go beyond that and organize events and gatherings. These events are often where deals get made.
Customer services
Customer services aren’t always seen as a part of a marketing campaign, but that’s the way most customers get in contact with your business for the first time. That’s where impressions are made and you should take advantage of this.
Partly, this can be accomplished just by choosing the best employees to handle this part of the job. That way, you can be sure that your business is presented the way it deserves to be. Also, try to integrate the rest of your campaign with the customer services and use the experience to push your agenda in a more intimate, one-on-one setting.
Remarketing
Remarketing is often forgotten or treated as an afterthought of advertising campaigns and it can be one of the most useful tools available to startups and other businesses. Remarketing refers to the practice of targeting the customers that have visited your site, but haven’t made a purchase.
When organized using the data the customers leave online, a remarketing campaign can help you get back as much as 70 percent of the customers you have lost before they’ve made a purchase.
Marketing a startup requires you to understand both your company and the customers that use your services. Only then can you make content that will set you apart from the rest of the industry.
