When launching a startup, one of the most important moments is bringing a product or service to the market. According to statistics, the lion's share of young companies fails at this stage. How many strong and competent teams had an excellent product? High Quality, which never reached its consumer. Maybe he got there, but investments inappropriately dried up, and the business stalled. Experienced media expert Jay Summit knows how to properly promote startup projects. He successfully launched, nurtured and sold about five thousand newborn companies, built his own marketing model and shared the secrets of successful promotion.
Get the right clients for your startup project
The goal that all startup projects strive to achieve is not just to get clients, but the right clients, the right ones. target audience, which these projects really need, and if the idea of the product is understandable only to the founders of the startup, it will not be possible to convince the client to purchase the product, and there is simply no point in further development.
The first priority marketing activity for a newly created company is to test assumptions. Offer your products to the consumer to make sure whether he needs it, whether there is a need for this product, whether customers will return to you again and whether they will recommend you to their family, friends and acquaintances.
Your main task is to minimum costs using these gestures to prove the viability of the main idea of the startup project. And it doesn’t matter what parameters you use 
select your target audience for sensitivity testing. This could be a geographic criterion or someone who will undertake to test a demo or prototype of a product or service.
A reliable indicator that the chosen business model has the right to life, and the project will grow, is when new clients come without increasing marketing costs. And if you manage to organize your work process in such a way that the marketing costs of attracting each new customer are less than the income brought by the client, you can confidently assume that everything will work out and your business will succeed. The higher the discrepancy between these two indicators, the less you will have to spend.
In other words, the more profitable your consumer base, the higher the startup's income. Facebook's success is built on this very formula. Currently, each client provides the company with $6 in revenue quarterly, which makes his business one of the world's leaders in profitability. This circumstance also easily attracts more and more new people. Once a successful startup in the past, and today a global giant, the social network Fscebook is valued at $200 billion.
Change the marketing concept of a startup project
The next secret of marketing support for a startup is this: if your competitor does not have the ability to calculate your marketing expenses, it means that he will not be able to repeat your business model.
Each promotion channel increases your recognition and new clients. To ensure successful growth, you need to know which channel brought each individual customer and how much money was spent on attracting them. The expert advises measuring the effectiveness of every dollar spent on marketing.
The summit provides a practical example of the struggle for clients of two companies Uber and Lyft (services for ordering a taxi of any class of your choice). The business models are the same, the ideas are identical, but they achieved success different levels. Uber has attracted billions of green money in investment funding for a large-scale launch of the project and is valued at more than $40 billion, while not being a profitable project.
And the reason is precisely that the cost of attracting one Uber client is 4 times cheaper than Lyft. The team managed to calculate this in a timely manner and convey it to investors. That's the whole secret.
If the startup idea is truly grandiose and competent, get ready for the fact that competitors will flock like flies to honey, and they will set themselves the main task - to lure away your customers. And it’s not scary if it didn’t appear on the market first, but it must have such indicators that investors themselves will look for you in order to invest their available funds in your promising company. Therefore, work through these parameters.
Limit startup project costs
And what your investors certainly won’t like is seeing money spent unwisely on marketing.
For example, it is not appropriate for a startup to present itself as a sponsor at large public conferences and pay crazy amounts of money to place its logo on stadium banners. Venture investors rarely attend such events. And if one of them gets there by accident, then just such a marketing approach will simply scare them away. Focus solely on minimizing the cost of acquiring a new client.
The summit summarizes that every dollar you invest in promoting startup projects, consider it as if it is your last. And what marketing methods do you use to promote your startup? Share your experience in the comments.
The sign “We are open” and leaflets that fly like airplanes into the nearest trash can cannot be called promotion of a startup. One post with a photo of smiling people in some public page is not marketing. And shopping on the link exchange and boosting behavioral factors on the site is not SEO.
Where to start and how to promote a startup? This is perhaps the most frequently asked question at all kinds of seminars, webinars and other educational and inspiring events. And in this article I'm going to take responsibility, put on the crown and answer this question.
If you are a “proper” startup, you have probably already read at least one of Guy Kawasaki’s books, where you can come across the idea that “sales fixes everything.”
What, pardon the tautology, is included in inbound marketing?
- SEO/SEM marketing.
- Social media.
- Blogging to attract users' attention to your site. In a fashionable way, this is called content marketing.
- As well as the use of various e-commerce tools. For example, Google Analytics.
So where to start? The three most important channels that will help drive traffic to your website and increase sales of your product are search, social media, and content.
Attention! Not just one thing, not something two. You must use all three to get maximum benefit. Why? They are interconnected and if you use one channel, the other two will still have to be tightened to strengthen it.
Search
Organic search is responsible for a larger percentage of website traffic.
Accordingly, SEO continues to be relevant for promoting a startup, because a blog alone will not raise you higher in search results; your content should be .
What should you pay special attention to?
Internal optimization
If your site loads slowly, is not optimized for mobile and does not have high behavioral indicators (the page has a lot of bounces), then don’t be surprised why your site is somewhere under the plinth.Search engines want only the best for users - this means that people who are looking for something must achieve the desired result in the shortest possible time. Therefore, search robots carefully ensure that your site is relevant to the user searching for keywords, which you used during optimization. Yes, I did not twist the proposal weakly. But the process itself cannot be called simple.
And if, once on your site, the user almost immediately clicks on the “back” button or closes the tab, then the search engine will immediately understand that you this request are useless and will lower you in the search results.
External optimization
Once you have ensured that every article/page on your site is well optimized, you need to start building the authority of your domain and its pages. This is one of the most important points known to SEO. The more authority a site has, the more likely it is that you will receive strong traffic and high rankings.
The most important external factor that affects your domain authority is the ability to get fresh and good backlinks to your site from resources with higher authority and at the same time get rid of low-quality links (links from spam sites, resources with low search engine trust) ).
Social media
The more people share your content, the better it is for your search rankings.
Here important points, which are worth considering in order to use social networks most effectively and independently manage organic traffic. This will also help you gain weight in search rankings.
Selecting the correct channel(s)
Of course, the more channels you use, the better. But if time/opportunity allows you to work with only one channel, then choose the most voluminous one, the one that captures the majority of the audience.
Creating a strategy
First, create a portrait of your audience. Let's say your startup idea is a social network for cats (I didn't think about the example for a long time). It turns out that your main goal is to lure to your site those who are ready to maintain an account for their cat. Who is capable of this? Hipsters, school kids and everyone who is strong and independent. Now we are thinking about where to find all these people? First of all, in the relevant public pages. First, we go to the public pages of breeders and nurseries, then to pages like “Catism” or “The mimemeter has burst.” After that, you need to watch the most ridiculous bands that have the most psychedelic content. There are people sitting here who are ready to do anything in order for a couple of people to appreciate their unusualness.
After we launched a targeted strike on the target audience, it would be nice to simply place ourselves in a large popular group. People will also come from there, bringing you a little traffic.
Be consistent
It takes time to gain huge crowds of loyal fans. The only way to do this is to be consistent in your social media strategy.
Build a Strong Community
This works great for offline startups. Let's say you don't have a cat social network, but some kind of holiday home for cats and their owners. And if you create a popular public page for cat lovers, then it will be much easier to lure them to the website of your holiday home. This way you won’t look like pushy sellers who go everywhere with their offer. After you create a successful community, you will have loyal fans, potential buyers, who are gathered in one place and are ready to listen to any of your suggestions on the topic.
By the way, another option is to create a useful or very funny free application.
Content
Content is at the center of any event: it is necessary to promote a startup on social networks, and it is indispensable when optimizing for search. This is the only thing that allows you to have a dialogue with your audience.
In the meantime, take a look at the key components of effective content marketing for a startup that needs traffic, awareness, and sales.
Set a goal
You must clearly understand what you ultimately want to get from content marketing. Do you need to sell a specific product? Increase brand awareness, increase the number of subscribers, get addresses Email? The entire content strategy will depend on your decision: style, percentage of content types, etc.
Create a mix
Play with different formats, don't limit yourself to simple text. Post presentations, videos, infographics, photographs, art... This is much more interesting than dry text.
Take it with quality
Here's the plan: 20% content and 80% promotion. Just a couple of really good, detailed posts a week with deep meaning and topic coverage can bring more leads than five short and superficial ones. Write less and prepare better, and spend the rest of your time promoting what you have written. And yes, I didn’t learn this from some book, not from some blog, or at another seminar. Of course, 100% someone somewhere has already said this. BUT! I got to this point myself (through experience), spending a lot of my working time.
Feel the connection between search and social factors
Writing a good article that answers your audience’s question (in other words, an article containing keywords related to your topic) will help promote your startup in search engines and rank higher in search results. Then everything happens as follows: a person is interested in a specific question, he finds the answer on your site, he likes the design and style of presentation, and he most likely shares it with his friends. And this is already a signal to the search engine that the specific material on your site is valuable to readers. “Since it is interesting, even more people should know about it,” says the search engine and takes you even higher.
If you do this marketing trinity well, you will be much closer to the Holy Grail.
- Organize a guest post on a major trust site. Three channels will work here at once: you will receive a link, your post will be shared (because the site is popular). And since the post will a priori be good (and optimized!), then there is a 90% chance that it will reach the TOP for the keywords you used. What a beauty, what a beauty!
- Do something for free or organize a competition - a classic that always works. Not only will you quickly get clients for your startup, but also some kind of recognition. If the conditions of your freebie are repost, then you will also use social networks.
This is a base that will be useful to anyone who still doesn’t know anything about what enormous opportunities the Internet provides for promoting a startup and how to wisely take advantage of these opportunities. These tips will help you in any direction: from launching a new store with watermelon soap or something equally unusual.
Have questions? I will be glad to answer them in the comments. Good luck in your endeavors.
Today it is fashionable to call a startup any undertaking that potentially has a chance of rapid promotion and profit. The problem with a precise definition of the concept is that experts in the field of economics often formulate different characteristics of projects that can be called startups, and there is no consensus on this matter yet. One thing you can be sure of is that promoting a new, young project is a difficult and long-term process that should be approached responsibly.
What projects can be called a startup?
In global business practice, the following concept of a startup has developed: it is a new business idea (not necessarily a young company behind it, many experts say). This could be a completely new line of business for an experienced market player that needs to be developed in order to make a profit. The following characteristics are attributed to a startup, but researchers emphasize that the presence of each of them is not strict for classifying a project as a startup:
- Often the project is based on private investment, while the investor is willing to risk his funds by investing them in a project with an as yet unguaranteed future, the development of which will take a lot of time (so-called venture investments);
- A project is created by a team of people interested in it, who understand its essence and often work independently to create a promoted product, and at least for a certain time while the project develops, they remain its owners (some people also formulate this sign as the team’s inspiration by a common idea);
- A certain novelty of an idea or product is often present in a project;
- The company is developing in stages, at each subsequent level attracting large quantity investments, increasing your potential, developing your product, expanding your customer base.
Sometimes startups are associated only with the world of technology and scientific research, the result of which can bring profit, but basically today there is a practice of using this concept for almost any new business project.
Who creates startups?
Any person passionate about his idea can engage in a startup in the sense in which this phenomenon is understood by the majority today. This could be a company or a team of people if they really understand what they are doing and understand the benefits of the product they are promoting for other people. It also requires a certain courage and understanding of market mechanisms to convince investors at a certain stage to invest money in their project and then manage these investments correctly. There were cases when, at the initial stage, a project was promoted by one or two people and only then attracted the attention of sponsors and a wide audience.
Types of startups
Although most often a certain amount of novelty is expected from a startup, it does not necessarily have to be something new. You can offer an unexpected look or approach to already familiar things. Based on the degree of originality of the idea, the following types of startups can be distinguished:
- Brand new original ideas and products - this type of project is associated with high risks, since its success is difficult to predict;
- Improved and successful copies of existing products and services - targeting a different audience or implementing significant changes to someone else's idea can launch a fairly successful business (for example, such a copy can be considered social network“Vkontakte” in relation to Facebook;
- Invaders are projects that promote familiar products, while trying to capture a niche in the market, squeezing out competitors.
Startups can also be distinguished by products and areas to which the ideas being promoted belong (science, technology, art, services).
Ways to promote a startup
To promote a new idea, you need to spend a lot of time and effort. At the initial stage, promotion is not always associated with high costs. It is important for a startup to formulate an idea, imagine its target audience, and think about how to convey to investors and clients the idea of the benefits of the product, service, or technology being produced.
At this stage, you can use the following SEO strategies, in addition to the usual ones (optimizing the resource with which the product is promoted, placing internal and external links, working with social networks, forums):
- You can try to attract the attention of major players and authoritative figures in the chosen field - appear on thematic forums, in comments to articles posted on their resources, while offering useful ideas, sharing your ideas and suggestions. By positioning himself as a specialist in his field, a startuper earns the respect of his senior comrades and attracts the attention of users.
- You need to promote yourself first in unoccupied niches, earning traffic and regular visitors/clients - you can start promoting with unpopular and unique queries, working through them carefully and achieving leading positions in the search results for them first.
- Clients can be attracted to promotion through referral bonuses - when another potential buyer, reader, or user comes from a client, the one who referred him receives a certain bonus.
- You need to constantly work on expanding your network of contacts in the early stages of SEO promotion, making useful contacts, with the possibility of future joint mutually beneficial activities, even simple exchange links.
All these strategies do not start working right away. They gradually bear fruit in the form of increased traffic and gradual growth of client and partner bases.
How to attract the attention of investors?
Often investors pay attention to a project when they see its rapid and stable growth, at least among a limited audience, or, conversely, a sharp expansion of the audience in the long term. Promoting a startup in terms of investment implies that at each subsequent level new investments are attracted to further expand the project and field of activity. There are several ways to attract investors (but the list is unlimited; quite unexpected and original opportunities can always appear, which are important to notice and not miss):
- Participation in projects to raise funds for new ideas on special platforms;
- Useful contacts among people involved in investments, participation in thematic investment events, competitions, forums, meetings, charity events;
- A clear idea of goals, development opportunities, ways to make a profit and problems that can be solved with the help of the promoted product, service or technology;
- A competent business plan and project presentation.
Confidence in success and the ability to convince other people of it are qualities that distinguish most successful startupers.