How to Establish Your Startup Marketing Strategy
So you've set up your own business and have a website. You have a great product or service and have sold it to your first pilot customers, partners in your network, friends, and family. You get encouragement that your solution is something great, and you are ready to conquer the world. What's next, though?
The world is full of advice for getting your website on the first page of Google in just a few days: how to buy success with followers and likes on social media; and how to maximize your traffic with advertisements on Google Adwords, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. You just have to do it, and the path to unprecedented wealth is paved with long-tail keywords. Yeah, right.
Sometime later, your bank account isn't what it used to be, and you haven't hit the jackpot. Sounds familiar?
A saying in the startup world is, "If it were easy, everyone could do it." That has held rather true for our startups and businesses--we weren't born or founded smart. Pretty much all of the trailing thoughts and experiences, we have messed up royally in our first steps. But we learned quickly (and the hard way) that this can work with a couple of simple principles. Many start and then think about a Marketing Strategy second.
Let's turn this around and look at some basic premises that work for every startup, every business, and individual situation.
When pushing for quick results, build a foundation first.
Yes, you can buy yourself into revenue. It comes at a cost, though. More often than not, that price is quite steep. "In the old days" (which were the days when we were young), one way to get traffic to your website was by placing pay-per-click ads, i.e., you paid $100s or $1,000s every month. You got Google Analytics to show you, in real-time, that you have this incredible website with money-laden visitors flocking all over your website.
(At least) two things are wrong with that: only a small fraction of those visitors convert to buyers, while the others remain anonymous visitors. More importantly, the second you stop paying for your PPC ads, your visitor stream stops. Unless you are great at that approach (that is, born smart...some people are), learning in the paid advertisement world is VERY expensive and builds up little relative to a solid foundation for future growth. When boosting your traffic with paid advertisement, ensure a maximum number of landing pages to help you convert into leads or customers.
One of the ways to make that happen is through disciplined content generation. Content, often generated through an effective business blog, lets search engines index your site and improve its ranking. When done right, it educates your visitors about typical issues your business solves for your customers and inspires your prospects to reach out to you for potential solutions. Consultants and leaders called this "creating pull" decades ago. Modern terminology calls it "Inbound Marketing."
Not only does good content generation answer questions your prospects might be searching for and, as such, attract them to your site, but it also provides an excellent opportunity to demonstrate competence in your areas of strength.
Furthermore, visitor traffic coming from organic search, triggered by disciplined content generation, is compounding. Many of our customer examples show that less than 20% of visitor traffic comes from content generated in the last 30 days.
Does content marketing lead to quick results? Can you get the first prospect within a week of publishing your first blog post, creating your calls-to-action, and making white papers and guides available for download on dozens of landing pages?
Well...... nope. Of course not.
While content marketing often yields mind-boggling results and exponential growth, it can take a few weeks or even months for organic traffic to pick up significantly. Knowing how to write well and reuse content for gated white papers, deep-domain-expertise pillar pages, email campaigns, sales-executive meeting follow-ups, etc., helps accelerate the benefits you can obtain. Eventually, the results will outweigh the initial investment by a long shot, and you will never look back.
Below is a little case study from our history books of a startup marketing agency:
The above example shows the development of sessions from Organic Search in the first 15 months of a new website launched in February 2019. It was managed with two weekly blog posts of about 1,400 words until April. We added a third weekly post and some thorough SEO and Keyword optimization in May 2019. Yet, it took another nine months for results to show.
Interesting yet relatively common: more than 40% of organic search traffic in May 2020, the most recent month of this chart, was generated from content published in 2019--more than six months earlier.
A couple of months later, the trend continues nicely:
Get good at storytelling, network with storytellers, and build and convert a pipeline.
So, leads begin to come in. Your lead generation is working (yeah, right). Interest in your brand, products, and services begins to grow. Now, you'll need to sharpen your pitch to crisply articulate what value your customers can expect (and when) once they use your products and services. What value are you adding? Why buy from you? Why now?
Entertaining your visitors with the coolness of your offering is nice. You will need to articulate, though, (1) how you would use your services if you were the customer (and why) and, ideally, (2) how others have already been using them and what results they've achieved.
Expected or already achieved results, presented in a context relevant to your prospect and narrated in a familiar language, build credibility. Having existing customers serve as a reference will further increase the trust and comfort level a new customer seeks when making key decisions about your solutions.
For the importance of establishing trust, watch a first introduction to the trust formula:
Being great in sales is being good at storytelling—stories from the non-fiction section. Apply your story to incoming leads from your networking, inbound marketing activities, and referrals.
At the same time, frame the sweet spot of your solution offering, define your target industries and buyer personas, and build targeted outreach campaigns to supplement your slowly ramping-up inbound marketing. Identify targeted names of people you'd like to win as customers. Listen to them, their requirements, their suggestions, and their rejections. Modify your approach until you get it right. While "dialing for dollars" can be frustrating, working with a highly relevant target population will let you iron out the bugs in your product and go-to-market approach and generate wins. And let's face it, winning is better.
Proactive digital advertising, e.g., adding paid advertisements on social media or Google Adwords, is fine as long as you understand the temporary nature of those activities: they stop working when you stop funding them. If defined and targeted well, they can be a solid, cash flow-positive boost to your revenue stream, especially beneficial until your inbound marketing and brand reputation kick in. Ensure sufficient landing pages to provide opportunities to convert traffic into leads.
Finding the right outbound activities and combining them with your fundamental inbound marketing approach is a critical element of startup success:
B2B Growth Marketing Elements
The best venture capital comes from happy customers.
When employed in a large company, your paycheck comes from the HR department. When you work with your startup, because you're not making any money, your pay comes from the venture capital company—true for many, but still dead wrong.
Ultimately, the thing that pays your bills will have to be revenue, which must come from customers. As simple as that.
Your friends and family and their capital injections, in addition to your savings or 0% credit card loans or, later, money from the venture capital world, can fund you with initial cash to get started, accelerate growth, or help through difficult times. I feel fortunate to have those.
More advanced stages of despair can quickly involve merchant loans for 20%+ APY, depleting your retirement savings, or similar nonsense. Unfortunately, these situations are relatively common. After all, the failure rate of startups is larger than the success rate...
Bootstrapping at least your pilot phase, building and showcasing the foundation of your go-to-market success with modest means (e.g., inbound marketing, grooming your storytelling capabilities to build your pipeline, and winning first pilot users) will not only increase your chances of success but also significantly increase your negotiation position when it comes to attracting external capital.
Ask for advice, even if you don't think you need it.
Yes, good advice can be expensive. If it is truly good, though, it will be more than just an expense. It will provide you with a tangible return on investment (ROI). An ROI of more traffic, more referrals, more opportunities to convert traffic into leads, and leads into customers. Network with individuals and companies who have lived through the whole cycle of building successful and growing companies, ones who have failed to do so but have succeeded more often.
Learn to not just grow big with lots of money burned through in a flash but how to grow better by building a foundation with lots of capabilities in your business and yourself. If benefit and ROI disappear when the consultant, the agency, or the money stream stops, it will not have been the best approach for you to help you grow better.
In addition to working with great partners (and paying for it in return), surround yourself with great mentors. Mentors who have nothing else in mind other than seeing you succeed. Mentors who listen rather than talk, mentors who coach rather than instruct. Most great (business) leaders will cite their mentor network for success. You can find great mentors in all aspects of life, your city's startup community, LinkedIn groups, (good) old bosses or teachers, etc.
Be proactive in building and maintaining a small network of mentors. Even and especially when you think you don't need them. The world's best athletes surround themselves with great trainers, even though they already perform well. It works for us as well. If we don't learn and improve ourselves, we won't be able to do the best for ourselves, our families, or our businesses.
It is good to dream, but you need to get started.
The longest journey starts with the first step. Business success requires the first customer, the first sales opportunity, the first prospect, the initial lead, and the first visitor. Building your business and your customer attraction model with the "end" in mind is important.
But even more important than having a plan is to get started—all the best of luck. Let us know if you want to bounce off some ideas and plans.
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