Marketing Strategy for Startups

Every business, either a well-established or a startup requires proper marketing strategies to ensure continuous growth and not having a downfall. For a startup, having a proper marketing strategy often becomes very crucial to set-up their feet on the stage of the product they are running into. The success of any startup will often depend on what marketing strategy they use. Unfortunately, the majority of startup founders have absolutely zero or little to no experience of marketing. This gives birth to a question, “How to make a proper choice from the pool of available startup marketing strategies?” Well, it’s in the planning of how to market a startup business! Make sure that you’ve got your marketing strategy in line with your product.

Successful startup marketing demands that you should not only have a great product but also a great marketing strategy. In our previous article  Business and Technology, we explained how a business can have adverse effects if they do not use a proper marketing strategy or a strategy that ends up hurting their end users sentiments in any aspect. So if marketing works that way, what is the best marketing strategy for a startup business or new product launch?

How to Market a Startup Business

In today’s world of Social Media and Virtual presence, it is of utmost importance for a startup to market their product properly. This does not only includes digital marketing, but also a proper sales and social media marketing. This can be properly planned and implemented in the following phases:

1: Proper Positioning and Presence: – This is the very initial phase of a proper product launch. One can start by defining the ‘category’ that your product/service or startup business exists within. Once done with the defining, then map the product to its key product benefits, the core value proposition and establishing a competitor benchmark – right down to its core messages, values, launch strategies, plans, perceptions and objectives – at least for the first 12-24 months.

Also for the very initial phase, for any startup or new product, focusing on user needs is not as much important as taking the reviews and resolving them. In the time of growth, it is very crucial for any startup that they must resolve all the issues reported to them through reviews or implement most of the changes that come to them from reviews.

Sales and marketing strategy for a startup must also revolve somewhere around the mentioned keywords from this image. The digital marketing aspects are well explained in the next step.

2: PR, Video, Blogging and Piggybacking Competitors: These days Blogging and Video ads are quite a thing for the digital promotion for any startup. Blog is considered to be the marketing front foot among all the marketing strategies for startup. One must ensure that the blog supports and fulfils this purpose. Proper editors, blog writers must be hired for this purpose and handed the job of continual maintenance and updating the blog.

To support the social presence and digital marketing of the startup, Word Of Mouth very popular by the name WOM must be considered. This can be maintained by having a proper Digital PR set and not just driving communication through various platforms but also monitoring conversations using handles like Twitter.

Advanced digital PR marketing techniques such as viral, crowdsourcing, community reviews and WOM should be mastered in order to enhance day-to-day digital PR and partnering mechanisms.

‘Now that you know a great deal more about your brand, product/service, market, prospects, users, clients and partners post launch, you are in a better position to develop an effective advertising program.’ (Source)

3: Advertising:  Phase 1 and Phase 2 put in place, highly firm and cost-effective launch program for a startup with basic viral ingredients. Once these phases are adopted and effectively running, the process of marketing for the startup or newly launch product/service should be further extended and enhanced. This is what Phase 3 is about – kicking off with online and strategic online advertising program.

A Google AdWords program is the best place to start with the online marketing as it is cost effective, flexible, completely results oriented and highly scalable to any limit that the business desires. Following this Yahoo/Bing, Facebook ads and banner campaigns can be taken into consideration and developed. Also, PR initiatives to strategically drive concerts or events, or research is driven, high profile wide range awareness campaigns with big media and socially high impact events can be initiated once your startup brand and business/product are established. This way any startup is most likely to get the response and recognition necessary for the establishment of their business channel.

Once your image/reputation and awareness has been developed in your consumer market a highly targeted and well-planned speaking and analyst/media briefing program should be brought in place to ensure that your brand remains top of mind and get as much WOM as possible.

4. Find a Proper Influencer: Once the startup is done with establishing the brand and gaining significant Word Of Mouth (WOM), it should then find an appropriate influencer or become one itself. Many online places can help to escalate the marketing strategy by channelling dedicated ads and access to hundreds among the target user. This can, in turn, increase the reach of business. Also having proper public Influencer’s can also be of utmost importance.

For instance, consider the promotion of Byjus, the eLearning app. They brought into picture, one of the most famous public figure in India, Mr Shahrukh Khan. His face on the advertisements and Byjus sponsoring the cricket matches in different series. These had quite a huge impact on the business they witnessed after the implementation of these strategies.

Having an influencer that suits well the idea of the startup or is highly acceptable to the target audience has a direct impact on the business.

Once done with these phases of digital marketing for your startup, you are ready to have a wide-scale launch of your business. When all the marketing is done, the product or startup must have a huge launch to ensure it gets all the attention and success. There’s no shortage of marketing strategies and techniques to try here. But the most important thing to be pondered is that you figure out how to help your potential partners first. This will give the startup a huge increase in the consumers of the product.
With all these things discussed, one can choose which strategy he wants to incorporate in the marketing of their startup and how they want it to go through. But one must always remember, the only way to stay in the market is “ADAPTATION”.