6 Marketing Basics for Start-Ups: Building a Strong Foundation
While it may seem overwhelming to the new entrepreneur, understanding the fundamentals of marketing will provide you with a strong foundation to build your business upon.
The early days of starting a business is an exhilarating journey filled with challenges and opportunities, and one of the most critical aspects of launching a successful start-up is an effective marketing strategy. While it may seem overwhelming to the new entrepreneur, understanding the fundamentals of marketing will provide you with a strong foundation to build your business upon.
Following are 6 marketing basics for start-ups businesses to keep in mind when developing your initial marketing strategy:
1. Understand Your Target Audience
The first step in any marketing strategy is to know your customer. Ask yourself:
Who is your ideal customer? Create detailed customer personas to understand their needs, preferences, and behaviors. Remember, less is more: Start out with 1-3 solid customer personas and dig deep into their wants and needs rather than covering a wider breadth of customer base.
What problem does your product or service solve for them? Clearly define the value proposition and how it can help your targeted customer base. This is where you start to outline your products/services/offerings in greater detail. Again, stick to a few options and focus on the granular details with those limited offerings rather than many options.
Where can you find them? Identify the channels where your target audience spends their time. Are you going to focus more on digital or traditional print/in-person methods? Social v. email v. paid advertising? While you’ll want to cover several different channels with your overall promotional strategy, there will be 2-3 channels that you focus on the most — and this is the time when you figure out what those networks are going to be.
2. Build a Strong Brand Identity
Essentially, your brand is the personality of your business. It's how you want customers to perceive you.
Develop a compelling brand story: This narrative should both resonate with your target audience and differentiate you from competitors. Why should people choose you over Company Y? This story will become your marketing hook and elevator pitch in later stages.
Create a visual identity: Design a logo, color palette, and typography that reflects your brand's personality. When deciding your branding scheme, think about how it’s going to be used the most — print or digital — as that will have some impact on what fonts/colors you can use. For example, if you’re going to be getting lots of printed collateral or signage made, use Pantone (PMS) colors (or the equivalent) and standard fonts for your brand. Also make sure you don’t have too much color blending in your logos so they can easily be reproduced in black/white or greyscale if need be.
Consistency is key: Ensure your brand message and visuals are consistent across all marketing materials. For example, your social media pages should all have the same image for the cover page (just resized per network guidelines) and your company logo as the network avatar. Canva’s resizing tool is great for this, plus it already has templates built into the program for many common networks as well as social media posts/ad sizes.
3. Leverage Content Marketing
Content marketing is about creating valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.
Identify relevant topics: Create content that addresses your target audience's pain points and interests. What problem are you providing a solution to, and how exactly do you solve it with your product/service/offering?
Choose the right channels: Determine where your audience consumes content (blog, social media, email, etc.). Are you looking to target younger consumers? Maybe you’ll focus primarily on Snapchat, TikTok & Instagram as your primary marketing channels. Business professionals fare better with LinkedIn and email marketing. While you’ll always want to have the main offerings — website/blog, email marketing, Facebook and either Twitter or LinkedIn — knowing which primary channels your audience uses will save you a lot of time and money.
Optimize for search engines: Use relevant keywords to improve your content's visibility in search results. You could have the best website in the world, but if it’s not continually optimized for SEO on Google and Bing, it won’t help you attract new customers.
4. Embrace Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool for building brand awareness and engaging with your audience.
Select the right platforms: Focus on where your target audience spends their time. If you can, invest a few bucks in a social media scheduling program like Loomly or Sprout Social to help you manage your various networks and keep tabs on interactions and analytics.
Create engaging content: Share valuable insights, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and interact with your followers. I always like to create a trove of evergreen posts about both the brand and its various services/offerings that can be reused whenever you need filler content throughout the year. Don’t forget to use a mix of video and poll/question posts in addition to standard link and image ones.
Utilize social listening: Monitor conversations about your industry and brand to identify opportunities. Reposting and liking/sharing content will not only bring attention to your brand, but it can help you grow your follower counts by introducing your brand to a new audience. Plus, many customers turn to social media for customer support these days (good and bad) — so be attuned to that.
5. Build Relationships
Networking and building relationships are essential for start-up success.
Attend industry or chamber/local events: Connect with potential customers, partners, and investors. Sometimes, your best referral partners are those in a similar industry who you may be able to partner up with on future projects.
Leverage online communities: Participate in forums and groups related to your industry. Alignable is a great online community of 9+ million business owners looking to meet other entrepreneurs just like you; LinkedIn is also a great source for networking as well.
Offer value: Provide helpful information and resources to build trust and credibility. Think of it as a two-way relationship: You only get back as much as you give.
6. Measure and Analyze
Marketing is an ongoing process, and you’re always updating and changing things as your business evolves from start-up to established. Track your efforts and make data-driven decisions.
Set clear goals: Define what you want to achieve with your marketing campaigns and then ask yourself, did you meet those goals? If you didn’t, ask yourself why and either adapt your strategy or your goals based on your findings.
Track key metrics: Monitor website traffic, social media engagement, and conversion rates. Tools like Google Analytics and Loomly/Sprout Social can provide you with this data.
Analyze results: Identify what's working and what's not, and make adjustments accordingly. Sometimes the change can be a good thing.
Remember, marketing is an investment in your business. It takes time and effort to build a strong brand and attract customers. By following these basic principles and consistently adapting your strategy, you'll be well on your way to achieving your start-up goals.