As your startup’s CEO and chief bottle washer, you’ve undoubtedly spent a fair bit of time compiling your ideal buyer persona. There’s so much to know about who you’re targeting your widget at, demographics, psychographics, geographics, et al, right? And once you have all of that data sorted, sifted, and parsed, the last thing you want to do is more sorting, sifting, and parsing.
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Facebook is refocusing itself on connecting people with content from friends and family. So Instagram is the new home for brands. Engagement is high, followers are brand-loyal, and you can achieve tangible business goals.
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Real sustained growth isn't about getting lucky. Even a perfect product or service needs a well-executed marketing plan. Good ideas catch on in the market when they're supported by a good strategy.
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Niche marketing is growing in popularity, and for good reason. When done right, it’s a fantastic way to get your message in front of the right people, in the right place, and at the right time. Notice how we said, “when done right?” Yeah, that’s because you’ll often find it much easier to do wrong than right. But never fear, we’re here to help.
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To generate leads and customers from your startup's Facebook page requires that you create your page with a comprehensive strategy that will get you noticed. For example, you can't just choose a picture, you have to pick one that's the right dimensions, is high-resolution, and that represents your brand.
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It’s estimated that on average, 8 out of 10 people will only read your headline. The other 2 will actually scroll through and read the article. Seems insane, right? The take away here is not how short humankind’s attention span has gotten (that’s for another piece), rather it’s how important the headline is for read rates.
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It doesn't take long to find lists of blogging mistakes or lists of blogging tips and tricks. Honestly, when somebody offers me 101 Ways to Fix Your Blog, I tend to stay away. I mean, how can you absorb 101 things to do or not do? And how credible can 101 points on any single topic be at a point in time?
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You want your brand to be credible. This credibility can be gained in many ways, and while the foundation of credibility is knowing your stuff and being a knowledgeable resource for prospects, the good news is that you don't need to present immense amounts of details and information to be considered credible. Credibility is more about the clarity, enthusiasm, and consistency of information presented.
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Marketing via email gained traction around the turn of the 21st century as personal email accounts became common. Email marketing remains a solid way to generate leads and convert prospects for your business, as long as you do it correctly.
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What comprises effective marketing has changed substantially over the past few years. There's increased consumer skepticism and plenty of new technology. As you develop your brand's marketing strategy you need to note what the current effective marketing tactics are and what impacts consumer buying habits. Clever brands, business owners, and startup entrepreneurs realize that social proof offers vast potential for growth, and they're using positive social proof to influence purchasing behavior.
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You've bought in to the idea of content marketing, and you're following all the best practices. The customer research is done and you're writing content targeted at your buyer personas. You're starting to see results. There's been a boost in organic traffic. Shares on social media are up. You are psyched, and if you have a team, they're psyched, too. But you're also a little overwhelmed by the amount of work it took to get to this point.
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A branding guideline, or a brand style guide, or a style guide, is a document that details all the particulars of how your company presents itself to the world. It's a reference tool that enables your startup to be consistent in delineating what your brand looks, feels, and sounds like.
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The idea of a content marketing funnel is to create content that resonates with your target market at every stage of their buyer’s journey. Those stages, in case you're new to this topic, are Awareness, Evaluation/Consideration, Conversion/Purchase, and Delight/Retention.
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How do you grab your audience's attention and maintain interest in your brand? By employing brand storytelling, of course! But what exactly is brand storytelling and how should you go about telling your startup's story?
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Brand voice is something that we talk about in passing quite often. What we realized is that the one thing we haven’t covered is how you can establish one for your company. Or for that matter, what exactly a brand voice is in the first place.
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The marketing tool known as the "funnel" has evolved into the "content marketing funnel" with the unprecedented growth of this new segment of the marketing world. This new version enables content marketers to better support sales by targeting each stage of the funnel with specific content that helps to qualify, nurture, and convert leads into customers. The strategic use of content can open up a lot of doors for marketers and startups.
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There is nothing inherently wrong with marketing emails. The problem is that most companies don’t do them right. Admit it, you've unsubscribed from marketing emails, marked them as spam, and/or had regrets for having opted-in to the email list.
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The concept of using giveaways as part of marketing campaigns has been around forever, and now, in our age of social media, promotions have been touted as the next silver bullet for marketing. What follows is a general discussion about giveaway planning and usefulness.
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Are you launching a startup and looking to start a blog at the same time? This post is for you. Your startup's blog can be contained within the company website, or it can be hosted somewhere else. Maybe you want to keep the blog more personal to you, the CEO, and link it to the company website as you decide what you want it to be.
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Marketing is the lifeblood of a startup, but there's not a well-delineated "how-to" path. In fact, if you're trying to get your startup off the ground, marketing may seem intimidating at best and impossible at worst. Marketing mistakes happen. There. We said it. They happen to everyone, and they are often unavoidable, especially in your startup's earliest stages. What can you do about it?
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Startup marketing. Words that strike fear in many a new CEO. After all, you’ve invested all of your time, energy, and money into getting the product ready for launch, building your core team, and little things like finding office space. You’ve got nothing left to sink into marketing that shiny new widget you’ve developed. Take it from us, don’t forgo the marketing, if you don’t sell any widgets, what was all that other work for?
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