Many founders end up executing a startup marketing ‘strategy’ based on immediate circumstances. This could be a preference for performance marketing based on a desire to show immediate revenue, or a penchant for creating content to educate the customer, or quickly doing PR or influencer marketing to get quick visibility, and because it seems to have worked for a competitor. While none of these are wrong per se, it might be a sub-optimal strategy if your plan is to build a brand for the long-term.
If you can manage to take half a day out, and dwell on just three things (by yourself and/or with your marketing team), it can not only give you a coherent marketing strategy that will help build a brand, but also save you time down the line when you have to take decisions on marketing. So, what are these three things?
What are some of the insights you have gathered? Are there those who seem to have immediately grasped what you’re trying to do? What do you think are the similarities among these people? What are the other brands they prefer? Is there a common value system you share? What are some of the other character traits they have?
Based on these conversations, take a shot at how you would segment your customers. Think a little beyond simple demographics like age, gender, location, income and so on. The image below will give you an idea. (via)
Then, within the segment, try creating a few buyer personas. Here’s an example
3. Understand your business context
Once you’ve done this, get started on your startup marketing strategy. What’s your story? How will you position your brand and effectively communicate it? What is your visual identity, colours, and tone? How can you efficiently reach your target audience? What are your personas, and what are the features you can leverage as benefits and value propositions? How will you measure success?
Remember, at this stage, startup marketing is all about iteration and experiments. Everything in the paragraph above has to be kept a little fluid. What works for your first 10 customers may not scale to 1000 or a million. Let it evolve into its defined state as you grow.
All the best!
In case you need help on this,