So you have your marketing basics down and are ready to get this startup business rocking. Or you are entering a new market, a new geography, or a new industry with your existing business. You have your funding and solid business plan, and your employees are hired. Now it's time to work those finishing touches to implement your go-to-marketing plan. A sound foundation is critical to your success, but if you want to elevate your early marketing strategy, you'll need to raise your game even more.
These six marketing hacks will boost your startup and accelerate your growth.
1. Pilot with smaller groups and niche markets
While casting a wide net might be suitable for marketing, a one-size-fits-all strategy will be a recipe for failure. As you develop your marketing strategy, experiment with pilot groups and niche markets and see if you can effectively capture one or more of them. Start with contacts you have: email lists and social media followers are your best friends here. A quick analysis will give you enough insight to discover a few distinct niche markets to focus on more intently.
Start strategizing once you've figured out which markets you want to cater to. Depending on who you're targeting, there are several things you can do to make your niche marketing stand out from your general marketing. For instance, if you find a significantly young niche, you can feel more comfortable loosening up your marketing language to target that audience.
Also, tailor offers and deals you advertise based on the niche. For example, older demographics are more likely to be unwilling to pay for shipping. Offering free shipping will help you draw a slightly older client base.
2. Make Use of Events
Marketing is all about consistency. Getting those scheduled emails out on time, week in and week out, having regular social media posts to remind contacts you're here, and keeping your ads up to date… are marketing fundamentals.
But if you stick to consistent marketing only, you run the risk of getting a bit repetitive and, well, boring. Of course, we're not saying you should stop doing your marketing fundamentals. Instead, you should make the most out of marketing opportunities that are by nature spontaneous and irregular.
Organizing marketing events should be your go-to for this. Events are a great way to capture people's attention for a short but intense period. They increase visibility and engagement and allow you to interact with your audience in a way that traditional marketing doesn't always allow. The only downside is that they are significantly more complicated and expensive to set up than other marketing strategies. But since you probably won't be running weekly events, the benefits vastly outweigh the costs.
Product launch parties are a great place to start. You're already announcing your new product through email lists, social media, and ads, so why not make an event for it too? Think of how companies like Apple hold yearly events to announce their new products. At this point, Apple Events are so notorious that people tune in to them year after year, even though some years Apple has very little to announce. And you won't be releasing new products too often, so the events will make each launch feel more special.
Events don't have to be in person. Online meetings and regular webinars are great cost-effective platforms for generating and engaging leads and educating customers.
3. Focus on Your Home Page
Your home page is one of your most reliable interfaces with your customers. It's what they'll see when they want to see what your business is all about. Because of this, you should spend as much time as necessary to curate the best home page you can.
Think of all the different things a home page needs to contain: introductions, basic product and culture information, access links to other pages, and even calls to action. You must ensure that when someone lands on your home page, they get a good impression of your business.
Ensure you invest in proper web design tools and resources to have up-to-date assets. These are usually more efficient and better running, making for a smoother browsing experience. The last thing you want is to have a beautiful home page only for it to run slowly. Don't forget to use white space and multimedia properly to boost your page's readability.
Once you have the design elements down, focus on the content. While your content marketing budget will be low initially, remember that your home page has to serve multiple purposes simultaneously, all while being concise and fun to navigate.
With a strong home page first impression, you can expect a significant increase in several metrics, such as email list sign-ups, conversion rates, and time spent on the website.
4. Get your basic, technical SEO in shape
Some common errors that technical SEO can fix include:
Website speed: Optimize website speed by improving server response time, reducing the size of images and other media, and implementing caching and compression techniques.
Duplicate content: Identify and resolve issues with duplicate content on a website, which can confuse search engines and lead to lower search rankings.
Broken links: Broken links negatively impact user experience and search engine rankings.
Redirects: Ensure that redirects are correctly implemented and avoid redirect chains, which can negatively impact website speed and search engine rankings.
XML Sitemap: Ensure an XML sitemap is created and submitted to search engines to help search engines crawl and index your website more effectively.
Mobile responsiveness: A website must seamlessly adapt to different screen sizes and devices, which is essential for user experience and search engine rankings.
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5. Create a sense of urgency - leverage FOMO
Fear of missing out (aka FOMO) is a natural part of human psychology, and you should ensure you're leveraging it as much as possible in your marketing strategy. FOMO revolves around our unwillingness to be excluded from activities, events, and experiences other people participate in.
For marketing, FOMO can be easily used for time-sensitive things like sales, limited-edition product releases, trials, and demos. If you create a sense of exclusivity around your company and its products, you'll notice more traffic and more eager customers approaching you.
Many strategies focus on FOMO, so you'll need to find the one best suited for your business, product, and customer base. Here are a few broad examples of FOMO-based strategies:
If you're selling a physical product, release unique limited-edition versions. The most interested customers will have the more exclusive product for a small premium.
If you sell a software product, you can set up an early exclusive beta to test the product and drive excitement for the full release.
If you're selling a service, you can offer trial periods so that users can try the service without spending too much money initially.
6. Take Advantage of FAQs
When visiting your website, users are always going to have questions. Given the current practices around web design, there's only so much information you can put into a page before it gets too cluttered. So you won't be able to answer all your visitors' questions naturally.
A great addition to your website in these cases is an FAQ section. FAQs are great places to put questions that are relevant enough that they demand an answer, but you couldn't find a way to integrate the answers into your website organically. FAQs are great because they don't need to be very organized. All you need is a list of questions and their answers. You can design and stylize it if you so wish, but it's not necessary at all. You don't need to organize the questions that much, either. You can mix questions about any part of your business and website; it won't harm your user experience.
Listening to your sales prospects and customers is the best way to determine what questions should be answered in your FAQ. If you don't have easy ways to communicate with them, you can always ask your sales or customer service departments frequently to see what questions they have to answer.
Ready to Grow Your Business?
By sticking to your basics and implementing them with the little hacks we've listed for you here, you will indeed feel success in traffic and sales. But don't forget that this isn't an exhaustive list, and there is much more to explore regarding marketing.
