Marketing for Startups

Marketing is essential for startups. It finds your target audience, attracts their attention, gets them interested, raises their desire, and then either encourages them to buy or passes them on to sales. Here, we outline a simple process you can follow to plan your startup marketing strategy. Beginning with defining your value proposition, audience and brand, launching with go-to-market (GTM), and always investing in the long term.

Define your value proposition

Uber's initial value proposition focused on being the "Everyone's Private Driver". Warby Parker's "Designer eyewear at a revolutionary price" promised an alternative to high-cost prescription glasses.

Start all your marketing planning, brand positioning and messages with a clear, compelling value proposition that differentiates your startup from competitors. What are your product's unique selling points (USPs)? What makes you more than another copycat company? Your answers should be one-line statements – if it takes longer to describe what you’re selling, you’re not yet ready to sell it. Revisit and tailor your value proposition as you learn more about your target customers' needs and desires.

Identify your audience

Nike focuses on athletes and sports enthusiasts, crafting different inspiring and empowering stories for different sports fans, for example with Tiger for golf and Selena for tennis.

Define and segment your prospective customers and other target audiences, including existing and potential investors. Consider using demographics, psychographics, and buyer personas to understand who you’re trying to reach. You might identify industries, job roles, and, for high-value B2B products, even specific companies; here at Hofy, for example, we prioritize IT managers and some industries for specific attention. Tailor marketing messages for your different audience segments, test results for each, and prioritize accordingly.

Define your brand

Red Bull tells adrenalin-fuelled stories. Coca-Cola shows happiness and togetherness. Patagonia made the ultimate commitment to environmental sustainability by announcing that "the earth is now our sole shareholder". 

The business school cliche, ‘Nike is a marketing company and not a clothing company,’ tells us how important branding is, that it might be more important than any physical products you sell, and even become your most valuable asset. Specific products, people, and even you might come and go, but the brand remains. Your brand is a combination of how your audience feels when they think of it and the promise you're making if they choose to buy your product.

Plan your marketing strategy

Your marketing strategy is what you want to achieve and the high-level tactics you’ll use to achieve it. Start with your goals and timelines and make sure these are considered at all levels of planning and implementation. For example, you might be balancing short-term needs for getting to market, leads and revenue with long-term aims to build market share, enhance the brand, and increase customer lifetime value. 

Learn about your audience

Learn all you can about your defined target audiences. Do they use email? Which social media platforms do they use? Do they visit any specialist websites you might place ads and content on? Do they attend events you might sponsor and attend? Do they listen to the radio and watch TV? Might they be influenced by professional or sports personalities? If you have a website already receiving visitors then look at the searches being used to reach it and the websites referring visitors; if not try Google Trends.

Use go-to-market

Use go-to-market (GTM) marketing if your product is not yet available to buy. GTM marketing focuses on the short term requirements of launching your product, including: defining your value proposition, audiences and brand (as looked at above); ensuring marketing works with new sales processes; and prioritizing different marketing channels. You must prioritize because you can't do everything at once. However, PPC (pay-per-click advertising) ads, social media ads, and email marketing can always be put in place easily and quickly scaled up if the results are good.

Think long term

As early as possible, as much as possible and for as long as possible, invest in long term marketing tactics that build your brand, reach new prospects, and encourage engagement. Always have plans for creating loyal, repeat customers, and even brand ambassadors. Such long term tactics include SEO, PR, email and content marketing. Tailor content marketing for different audiences, including existing customers, and allow two-way conversations as much as possible – social media is perfect for this.

Understand each stage of the funnel

Think of all your marketing as existing in your marketing funnel. Cold prospects at the top are everyone in your audience with no knowledge of your products and brand. Mid-funnel is warm prospects who have shown some interest. Hot prospects at the bottom have shown strong interest and includes existing customers who might repurchase and upgrade. Tailor your marketing and the metrics you use to each stage of the funnel – from raising awareness, interest and desire to encouraging an action.

Be data driven

To know which channels and campaigns to invest more in, you must know how they perform, for which you need effective tracking, analytics and analysis. Be sure your analytics uses an attribution model that shares the credit for sales across the many different contacts buyers have before purchasing. Otherwise you’ll stop investing in the top-of-the-funnel marketing that does the hardest job of first attracting new prospects (but might appear to make few sales). Lastly, remember your ABT and Always Be Testing across and within channels.

In conclusion, your startup needs marketing to bring your products to the right audiences, let them know how good they are, why they should buy, and how to do so. You need a defined marketing strategy that begins with establishing a strong value proposition, identifying your target audiences, and defining your brand identity. You’ll need to balance the tactics of short term go-to-market marketing with long-term approaches like content marketing, PR and SEO. Framing your marketing within a funnel helps tailor marketing to different levels of customer awareness and interest. Always testing different ideas using robust analytics will guide resource allocation and optimizations. Your resulting marketing strategy will help get your startup to market then build long-term growth and success.