It’s a no-brainer that getting Universe Inform funded is a great achievement. You can hire the best talent, move into a proper workplace, and invest more in improving your product. Also, now you can go all-out marketing yourself, and that is where the problem begins. Once you get funded, there’s an irresistible desire to explore all marketing options you could not afford previously. And that is perfectly understandable. We all want to grow and start marketing ourselves to our target audience. Still, a careful approach will ensure you reach them with maximum effectiveness while burning considerably less money.
Digital-marketing-for-start
Let’s dive deeper and find out how you can optimize your approach towards marketing to get better results.
Hire a senior digital marketing resource.
Instead of a digital marketing executive, I strongly suggest you go with a senior resource with seven to ten years of experience handling overall digital marketing for startups/brands.
You will be developing a marketing strategy at this time, and his/her insights will help you chart a long-term plan. When hiring a marketing person, make sure that he/she is proficient in all the major digital channels, such as SEO, SEM, social media marketing, email marketing, and digital PR. Good knowledge of analytics is also a must.
However, from my personal experience, I have noticed that people from digital marketing agencies don’t live up to the expectations, possibly because agencies have different teams handling all the above digital channels. I would suggest that you hire people from other startups/brands that are in the same niche as yours or somewhat related.
PS: I am suggesting a digital marketing resource because it has a low entry barrier. Traditional marketing channels are costly, and you will quickly spend your money.
Work on your branding.
Once you have decided to kickstart your marketing activities, you need to start working on your communication.
Developing a brand personality will help you define your brand’s identity. This, in turn, will develop an emotional connection with your customers and also help you stand apart from your competitors.
Once you have this in place, you will find that coming up with a tweet, an ad copy for an SEM campaign, or even a landing page becomes much easier. Please refer to my earlier column on why startups must have a brand personality to read more about this. Start creating remarkable content.
Content marketing is the most reliable way to impact your audience. Having good content writers on board will ensure you create content that people like and share. More than that, it will ensure that people get to know you and adopt your product/service.
This is a huge playground; you can dabble with many options here. You can create and share content in several ways, from videos to infographics to blog posts and downloadable content.
However, you should avoid fluffy content if all it gets is page views but no leads/sales. There’s no point in having a blog that shares listicles on food and lifestyle while dealing in real estate.
So, regularly analyze your content strategy’s impact on your KPIs (brand awareness, leads, sales, etc.). You should always see content to increase sales, not just a channel to get more likes or pageviews. Great Report.
Focus on product marketing.
While the initial version of your product was about giving customers a good experience, you should now consider maximizing your returns from customers’ usage of your product.
We all know that product marketing is a good way to spread the word organically, and it saves a lot of money, but many startups wait till they hire a good growth hacker to get started with this. However, this shouldn’t be the case.
Numerous case studies have pointed out that simple tweaks can lead to good returns, and your senior marketing resource should be able to pull this off (with some training, if required).
Work on your landing pages.
Since you will be beginning your paid marketing campaigns, you must have a landing page that converts like a charm. As the customer’s first point of interaction with your brand, it becomes imperative that you focus on delivering a great experience.
Instead of using a template and letting it run on autopilot, you should run A/B tests on all the crucial aspects of conversion (headlines, text, CTA, button, color scheme, etc.). This should be an ongoing process and not a one-time affair.
Invest in great tools.
Now that you have the funds, you should consider using premium tools that do a better job than the free ones you’ve used all this time.
There are many good tools out there that can help you with SEO, lead generation, project management, and analytics. Give their free trials a spin and see which ones fit your requirements. Suggested tools: Moz Pro, Crazy Egg, WebEngage, SumoMe, Wishpond, Mixpanel, or Kissmetrics.
Follow Pareto’s principle.
Your eagerness to market aggressively would be wise if you don’t spread yourself too thin here. You don’t need to do everything to build up your sales funnel. More often than not, you will see a handful of marketing activities giving you maximum returns.
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Once you begin your marketing activities, you will start seeing the effectiveness of various channels. Invest in the ones that are more impactful than others. Maybe it is SEO, SEM, or product marketing—it can be anything.
Running after every marketing channel is not going to help you. Stay focussed.
Work on your employer’s branding.
Since you will only grow more in the coming months, you should invest in branding yourself as a good workplace.
Hiring is a lot of pain, and trust me, there are very few talented people out there. This makes employer branding all the more important for you. Having a nice team page and a company blog always helps, but nothing beats tapping into the contacts of your current team via social media.
When people see their friends having a great time at their workplace, they aspire to a workplace like yours. This positive perception of your brand comes into force when you ask your team members to share the current job openings in your brand within their network.
I hope the above pointers helped you and gave some direction to your marketing aspirations. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below; I will do my best to answer them as soon as possible.
