A startup is a company that’s in the initial stages of business. Until the business gets off the ground.
Startup marketing is just as it sounds. Doing marketing for startups
But before we dive into the How? Let’s look at the WHY?
Resources is one of the major differentiation between an already large organization and a startup, which is also one of the major limitations for many startups. So where it’s easy to budget a $5million marketing budget for a campaign, it’s not so easy to do so with a startup and of course lack of expertise. But as a startup founder, you already know this, so I will just move on without stating the obvious😒.
Startups need to find innovative and creative ways to get the same or almost the same result as the big guns without spending the same resources. That means a lot of experimentation and optimization and making sure every 1 cent is going in the right direction.
That means we are running experiments and optimizing Facebook ads CPC when it’s 5 cents per click because we know that when we reduced by 20% to 4 cents then we have saved $10,000 for 10,000 clicks from your ad campaign. Now imagine if we reduce the CPC further by 50%?🤔
Another example is knowing that every traffic coming to your website must be optimized, so running experiments to increase the conversion rate. If only 10% of your traffic convert then you can increase to a 20 or 30% conversation rate, that means out of every 100,000 traffic to your website, you get 10,000 conversions, but when you increase your conversion rate to 20%, your conversion jumps up to 20,000 for every 100,000. I mean the possibilities are endless.
Startup marketing thrives in developing hypotheses, experimentation, analytics, and interacting with the customers every step of the way till they get to the AHA moment of your product.
Read Also: MARKETING BEFORE LAUNCH
According to Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown, as published in their book “Hacking Growth” (a good read by the way), the Aha! moment is “the moment that the utility of the product really clicks for the users; when the users really get the core value — what the product is for, why they need it, and what benefit they derive from using it. Basically, it’s when your users realise that they can’t function effectively without your product.
Startup marketing is quite similar to growth marketing but has more depth in the product and customer relationship than growth marketing. Startup marketing is not a hack but a process. It is more or less like a flywheel, you hypothesise, test, iterate and hypothesise again.
It is all about having a mindset of experimentation, analytics and grit. Yes, grit, because it’s not going to be all rosy, some experiments will fail, but you will fail forward.
Read up the next article in the Startup Growth Marketing series – ACHIEVING PRODUCT-MARKET FIT
