A Beginner’s Guide in Marketing for Startup Founders

So, you are planning to start a business venture.

Awesome!

Thinking about startup marketing?

Without marketing, your startup won’t be possible.

It is just like a baby’s birth.

Think about it; why does a baby cry at birth? Because it wants to hit the bong of his arrival.

And as the ba grows up, it hones other aspects that make him different from others.

Given that all the babies are cute, what makes them different is how their parents show their features.

This pertains to dressing and training. The better they dress and behave, the chances of everybody liking them, cuddling with them, playing with them increases.

Now, take your startup as a baby and think of marketing from this direction.

• How to market a startup?

How do you approach it? What should you and should not do? How to create a product-fit marketing strategy?

The CPC, CTR, growth hacking, launch, marketing tools, viral marketing, acquiring customers, and whatnot. This guide is not about the book definition of these terms and how to implement them.

Instead, we are going to take another route in marketing for startups.

The successful way for how to market your new startup.

Four success factors are critical to a startup:

1. Entrepreneurship
2. Innovation
3. Technology
4. Economics

Marketing a startup must comprise the elements of the four factors.

• Marketing statistics

Campaign Monitor’s survey on startup marketing statistics cites:

• 56.9% of the startups have a marketing team working specifically for this purpose.
• 20.8% of the startups have a one-person team working for digital marketing.
• 15.3% of the startup founders start learning how to market a startup and work with it.
• 4.8 and 2.2% of the founders rely on marketing agencies for startups and freelancers, respectively, for their marketing.

Notice something peculiar?

None of the respondents said ’No’ or answered in “they do not know” how to market a startup business.

Just as any first-time parent would do.

If they don’t know to parent, they learn as they go. But they cannot abandon or miss caring for the baby.

That is exactly what your startup is for you. And during the initial stages, it is very fragile, sensitive, and responds selectively.

Ergo, tread carefully.

Don’t take too hasty steps in the wake of showing off.

You might have loads of money to back you up, but funneling it in the wrong bottle will only benefit the competition and not you.

Marketing for a startup is essential, period. How to effectively market a startup, is the real question that we will address here today.

Shall we begin?

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Basic Concepts of Startup Marketing

What is ICP?

Ok, let’s continue with our baby example.

You won’t share the same things about your baby with a friend, as you will share with your mother. Isn’t it?

Your mom gets to know the uncut and uncensored version of your baby’s daily adventures.

And your friends or colleagues will most probably get the same information but with some furnishing.

So, you have one story, different people, and respective versions.

That is precisely what ICP is.

You share your startup solution with different audiences, but you must know how and what to speak to them before that.

That is the core of ICP in marketing for your startup.

Expanded as Ideal Customer Profile represents an in-depth outline of your ideal customers.

These detailed insights help choose the right marketing tactics and strategies for the individual cohort of the target audiences.

ICP is the core of marketing for startups. It gives the first step to answering how to market your startup proactively.

This is because ICP accounts for the firmographic, environmental, and behavioral aspects of the customers.

Don’t know what it means? Don’t worry!

Here you are.

Concept	What does it mean?	How does it help?
Firmographics	Do you know what is meant by demographics? Yes, you do. Simply put, demographics relate to the people and firmographics to the businesses. So, under this head, we segregate all the data about the organizations. To name a few: Region Client strength Industry and Type Technologies used	For a B2B product, such insights are like the holy grail. They help get an answer to how to market a startup product. It helps develop specific campaigns and content. Firmographics can also include the identification of CEOs, marketing heads, and the client’s audience. Everything is privy to a specific marketing strategy. Ergo, Firmographics is the first step in digital marketing for startups ICP.
Environmental	Environmental factors impact the user’s choice, vis a vis, your marketing strategy for a startup. A volatile market will easily shift its sentiment and product choice in contrast to a market that is rigid and immune to such a stimulus. Rest assured that there is no isolation in the market. Even if it is a monopolistic competition, some factors still play a role in changing the dynamics. Further, environmental factors like social, technological, and economic, affect consumer behavior.	Getting a sense of the environmental factors will help you identify the behavioral aspects. Plus, if you know that a market works under cutthroat competition, your start-ups marketing strategy for a digital product will skew towards the price. In comparison, if a market prefers product value over price, your campaigns will highlight value propositions. Take the market for a hatchback and a luxury sedan. In which segment do you see the price highlighted?
Behavioral	This is the last cog in developing an ICP. Every little thing that can affect the user’s behavior towards your product or service must be understood. Knowing the behavior also contributes to forming the customer acquisition plan, retention, and delight strategies.	If you know how your customer will behave to your product or service, you can build a plan that aligns with their behavior and your goals.

Defining the ICP Framework is our next step in knowing how to market your new startup.

Four things matter here:

1. Listing
2. Researching
3. Outlining Challenges and Strengths
4. Documentation

You start by listing the best customer for your product. Analyze who is the best fit for your service or product.

Include their basic details and location on the list.

Then start researching and finding common links between your different segments of customers.

Identify what influences them all collectively and create a better and effective digital marketing for startups plan.

Areas, affinities, cultural impacts, economics, growth rates, and everything else.

Once you have everything ready, start identifying the key people to target.

If it is a company, know whether you want to approach the sales manager or the content manager.

If there are standalone customers, identify whether you want to approach a person related to your target customer or the customer directly.

Lastly, start to document each group with their standard and unique linkages.

To build a credible and authentic ICP for startup marketing, you need to go in the right direction.

So, you have to ask some rudimentary questions. At SpdLoad, we help our clients create a detailed and precise ICP with the help of these questions.

Here are a few of them;

1. What are the customer’s long-term goals?
2. Define their pain points?
3. How does your product add value to the customer?
4. Where do the customers look for to get a product you are selling?

And so on.

Define and Validate Value Proposition

Ok, let’s take a break from our baby example and move a few years ahead when you look for a school for your kid.

What do you see?

• Studies?
• Students?
• Teachers?
• Safety?
• Campus?
• Activities?

Probably all of the above.

So, how do you choose a school?

You look for the school which provides the maximum value? Isn’t it?

It can either be a combination of a few of the factors or all of them. But you look for value.

Similarly, when you learn how to market a startup business, begin by creating a value proposition or VP for your product and your startup.

Because B2B clients work with the product and associate with the startup and its founders.

Take care of 4 things while creating your VP:

• Addresses Customer Needs
• Cannot be Imitated
• Create a Hype in the Market
• Short, Concise, and Easy to Digest

However, to build a value proposition, you will need the ICP ready.

That is crucial to every digital marketing itinerary for startups.

So, this startup marketing guide is a step-by-step process.

One thing follows the other to create a foolproof and comprehensive marketing strategy for startups.

Pro Tip: The Customers are not looking for out-of-this-world type benefits. Their primary concern is not losing what they already have.

After creating the value proposition, you must validate it.

What to do	How to do it	How does it help
Put your VP in front of the customers.	Conduct interviews and, if possible, get those people who are eligible to become the consumers of your product.	Authentic, Raw, and Honest feedback is the first step to creating a successful digital marketing strategy for startups.
Check their willingness to pay	You are not going to run a social service. So, identifying the right price and whether or not your ideal customer is ready to pay for it needs attention. Once you have the results from the interview, ask the interviewee will they pay for the product?	Quote a higher price that you want to charge. This will create an anchor. If the ideal customer does not agree to the price, but also not disagree, they want you to come down a bit.
Test vs. Control	After preparing the original VP, create two more alternative VPs. Put these three VPs in front of the customer and ask them to rank. Also, let them consider the services offered and the prices.	This helps in optimizing the original VP. As and when the customers choose the alternative VPs or show some defects in the original, you can make the requisite changes.

Competition Analysis as a part of Startup Marketing

Sun Tzu once said, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

In the next part of how to market a startup, we will look at how to compare, monitor, scrutinize, and assess your competition.

Competition analysis must go hand in hand with user analysis.

Remember this.

Up until now, your competition is clueless about your product and service.

And this is one of the biggest advantages you can leverage in marketing for early-stage startups.

You know what they are doing, but they don’t know about you. Let’s keep it that way for now.

Why Is Competition Analysis Essential?

There is a lesson in every step of this how-to market, a startup venture or business.

Analyzing your competition is essential for digital marketing for startups because:

1. You are not the only startup providing your product in the market.
2. You need to know your competition’s strengths and weaknesses.
3. You need to know the competition’s market presence, association, and market segment.

The First Step Is Knowing the Market and Key Players

Will your product reinvent the market? Or do you need to enter an existing market?

If it’s the former case, then you need only focus on the users for your startup marketing strategy.

But, if you are entering an existing market that already has players, start detailing them.

What to do	How to do it
Find your competition	Use Google, social media, and the keywords to find your competition. Plus, do not exclude the overseas competition. Especially if you have a digital product. At some point, you will sell to the customers out of your country. So, it is better to analyze the competition there too.
A Game of Strengths and Weaknesses	Before getting ready for battle, every commander notes his army’s best vantage points and protects its weaknesses. Your job is to understand them both. As a future competitor, you must enter the market with a bang or risk getting the attention you deserve. Acquire as much data as you can about the businesses to get help with your marketing strategy for startups. More data means better knowledge about what works and what does not work for your competitors.
Get Their History	You have the names; you have the strengths and weaknesses. What’s left in how to market startup business competition analysis? It’s their history. Gather the changes your competition has facilitated throughout their journey. Record the events, changes, releases, changes, and align them with the market situation at the time of these activities. This will help you understand why they did what they did.

It does not stop here.

As we have talked before, competition analysis is not something that you can ignore.

Every step of your marketing for startups must include the competition.

Legend says, “knowing is half the battle won.”

So, this is your time to know your competition, and the next thing to do in marketing of a startup is to identify the message sharing.

The message you send out needs to inspire action and nurture an understanding between you and your customer.

A leading example of this notion is Apple.

Apple does not share what, how, where, which, etc, about their product.

They answer the WHY and that’s it.

Because if the consumer has the answer to why they should use your product, they will engage with it.

Your startup’s existence, activities, and goals must align with our consumers.

And these things must represent in the tone and message that you send across.

This is the gist of communication; we will talk about it more below in this guide on how to market startup business.

Types of Content You Would Want to Leverage

There is a lot that you can capitalize on in this domain.

But, not everything is essential in the beginning.

To market a startup, you need to know how many content types you need.

The number can vary as per your market segment, product, and customers.

For instance, a product for the younger generation won’t get much traction if you are not using Instagram influencers.

Similarly, for a product that is sophisticated and helps businesses, you will probably need explainer videos on Youtube.

So, here is a list of content types that you will need for marketing a new startup.

• Press Releases
• Whitepapers
• Blog
• Website Content
• How-to Guides
• Facebook Video Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Google Ads
• LinkedIn Ads (for B2B products)
• Newsletters
• Video marketing

We know that your competition is sourcing relevant keywords.

You also understand that they might have also done competition analysis.

But, what tools did they use for this purpose?

Surely, there isn’t a single tool that has become the panacea for all the how-to market a startup needs.

But, some are essential.

Purpose	Tool
Keyword Analysis, Search, and Generation	Ahref
	Semrush
	Buzzsumo
Website Ranking	Alexa
	Similar Web
	Ionos
Marketing Channels	Instagram
	Facebook
	Youtube
	LinkedIn
	TikTok
	Google

Think Through the Metrics

It is all about conversion.

If your blog, ad, video, post, or anything that you have posted on the web is not getting a conversion, it means that you are not able to reach your users.

Simply put, without conversion, every step of the startup marketing will look dull.

Plus, if you know that a post is not getting traction, you can modify your approach.

Because the first thing for solving a problem is accepting that there is a problem.

So, what’s your problem?

The answer might lie in the metrics or what you can also call Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

KPI	Benefit	Formula
Return on Ad Spend	The return on each dollar spent on marketing in terms of sales and revenue.	Conversion Value / Cost = Return on Ad Spend For instance, the ad spends on one product is $100, and the conversion rate is 1, with a revenue of $50. The RoAS will be 0.5
Click Through Rate	CTR provides the quality of the ad posted and tells you how many people have engaged.	Clicks / Impressions * 100 Your ad shows 1000 impressions, but only 200 users have clicked on the ad, the CTR will be 20%.
Customer Acquisition Cost	CAC answers the major question of every startup marketing effort. How much do I need to spend to get one customer?	Cost of Sales + Cost of Marketing / New Customer Acquired. Let’s assume the cost of sales and marketing to be $1000. While the number of customers acquired is 100. The CAC will be $10.
Retention	Retention complements Acquisition and helps your startup marketing strategy budget. Not focussing on retention can increase the acquisition cost easily.	Spend on Customer Retention / Number of customers retained. This means that in a year if you are spending $1000 on this aspect and ten customers did not leave you, the retention cost is $100 per customer.
Churn	Churn can have a different meaning as per the product. But, in general, churn implies the number of items sent out in a specific time.	For a customer churn rate, the formula is: Lost customers / Acquired Customers * 100% So, assuming the lost customers to be 20 and acquired customers as 200, the churn rate will be 10%.
Lifetime Value	The monetary value that a customer provides to your business over life is the LTV of that customer.	The formula to figure out the LTV is complex, but imperative for startup marketing. LTV = Customer Value * Average Customer          Lifespan Here: Customer Value is equal to the Average Purchase Value divided by the Average Purchase Frequency Rate. And the Average Customer Lifespan is derived by multiplying the number of customers with the sum of customer lifespan.

You know how to get and understand your customer.

You also know how to measure your progress.

What’s left?

Money, you ask.

Well, then let’s jump to it.

Here’s how you set up a budget with digital marketing for startups.

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Set up the Budget

Setting up the budget succeeds in knowing your business direction.

Plus, metrics and budgetary allocations work simultaneously.

You set your course under the ambit of one or more than one KPIs and work to achieve them.

There are two types of budget conducive to marketing for startups:

• Profit-First Model corresponding to Fixed Budgets.
• Reverse Engineering the Budget

Both these statements will sound confusing and complex.

Let’s break them down.

Budget Type	What it Means	Yay or Nay?
Fix Budget	This means that you allocate a fixed percentage of the budget for your marketing of the startup. It can be anything, 5%, 20%, 17%, whatever you like. But, we would suggest that you keep it under 20. As a new startup, a lot is going on, and money flows like the Niagara falls. So, use it judiciously.	Fixed budgets keep things simple and effective. You always know that at the end of the month, you will be x% short to spend on other tasks. However, flip the coin and you will see that fixing the budget means may breed lethargy. Plus, you might be answering how to market your startup with the same words as your competitor. This takes out the uniqueness of your strategy.
Non-fixed Budgets	Reverse engineering the budget means that you first fixate on one or two KPIs and work to achieve them. For instance, your ultimate goal is to acquire 1000 new customers by the end of the year. Now calculate the sales proceeds from these 1000 customers. You have the final goal; you have the sales. From this, you can figure out the marketing budget.	A better approach, but if you are running an agency or work in the marketing team, getting approval for such a budget strategy for startup marketing can be tricky. Work-wise you might have to go the extra mile, but when it comes to approaching your stakeholders and introducing your core objectives, this format gets a good response.

Some other tips for creating a budget for digital marketing for your startup are:

• Always keep an eye on your Return on Investment.
• Don’t limit yourself in terms of testing and validating new ideas. Explore A/B testing.
• If the need arises, update your marketing plan.
• If you are unsure about your approach, hire someone.

This is it.

With the budget, we can claim that you have now understood the major part of marketing for your new startup.

But, it does not end here.

Since we are on the topic, it would be great to discuss the integral parts of every marketing strategy, the media channels, and concepts.

Marketing Channels

Everything that you read above is a part of the analysis.

This analysis is essential to tell your story via various media channels.

Not only how you tell your story matter, but where you tell it also matters.

The debate on digital marketing for startups is endless.

There is a tremendous amount of diversity in every single approach.

For some businesses, LinkedIn becomes their Noah’s Ark, while others cannot get the desired result even after implementing the world’s best and highly tested strategies.

At SpdLoad, we always say that marketing is not for a by-the-book-person.

You need to be as dynamic as the market. You need to change, edit, modify, and alter with the market.

Having said that, you cannot ignore the core basics of the marketing channels.

That is why let us take a stroll through the major marketing channels and concepts for startups.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The best part about SEO is that you don’t need to push a continuous stream of funds for implementation.

SEO is almost free, but it takes time.

However, it is highly effective and can bring a great amount of change in your marketing strategy for a startup.

SEO includes getting the relevant keywords, building strategies for these keywords, understanding the marketing trends.

Four Key Aspects of SEO

Aspect	What does it include?	What’s the Benefit?
Analyze Competitors SEO	Ahrefs is magical. This SEO tool has helped millions of businesses develop highly sophisticated marketing strategies for startups. It helps conduct research on search engines, provides the number of clicks on every keyword, and explore the search traffic estimations. The best part is that Ahrefs gives you information about the competitor domains. Keywords Backlinks Traffic Rankings Ahrefs is your best tool to identify the market competition and build your own strategy.	As we have discussed above, answering the question of how to market a startup product will not suffice. You need to make your strategy unique, scalable and propelling. To achieve this, Ahrefs is a great tool in every marketer’s hand. If you can’t afford $179 for the Standard plan though, you may want to consider some Ahrefs alternatives too.
Define Relevant Keywords	Keywords on Ahrefs are ranked as per their difficulty. Difficulty provides the triage of keywords ranking. It helps you know which keywords are easy to rank for and require more time, effort, and money. Apart from Ahrefs (which is paid), add Google Keyword Planner to your startup strategy-making schedule. It is free, accurate, and helps develop result-oriented content plans.	You cannot blindly target any keyword and expect results. High-ranking keywords (80 to 100) are not easy to tackle. Trying to rank for keywords with this level of difficulty will be futile. So, by using Ahrefs for keywords research, you can build a content planner and organize your goals.
Build Content Funnels	Note that SEO and Content will not get you results overnight. It takes time, effort, but it is cost-effective. So, you need to take some time and build fabulous content funnels targeting every type of customer persona. Awareness, convert, and delight. Make sure to provide content that addresses the customer’s pain points. For instance, if your product is about weight loss, then writing about why the users need to lose weight will not do. They already know and are working on it. You need to highlight the issues faced by the customers, resonate with them, and write content that addresses those pain points. For this, you need relevant keywords and optimized content. SpdLoad offers a free content funnel template with all the imperative subjects required to build a content funnel.	Content funnels give us the right direction to approach content. SEO and Content are the foundations of your business and the marketing for startup strategy. A stronger foundation means you can sustain for much longer and can also launch the product with better chances of interaction.
Build Backlinks	Do you know what a vote of confidence is? Backlinks is yet another way to build credibility and find your island in the vast sea. These do-follow links that will bring users to your website from another website that vouches for you. More importantly, authentic backlinks are one of the many factors considered by Google for SERPs. However, Google also punishes paid backlinking and fake backlinks generation. So, tread carefully here. Building authentic backlinks include: Commenting Guest Posts Quora Press Releases Social Media Mentions	Backlinks are not only good for traffic generation, but they also enhance the website’s authority. Both of these will certainly help you build a better answer to how to market your startup. Furthermore, backlinks also help build a better ranking that is ultimately good for conversions.

Even though SEO is a never-ending topic, we think that you do not need to indulge in the intricacies of core SEO concepts at present.

Just stick to the basics and build your marketing for startups strategy.

In addition, there are special SEO tools that automatically improve your website’s SEO. For example, one such tool is SEO Checker by Sitechecker.

SEO is covered, now we have another incredible traffic generation and conversion-ready concept; Email Marketing.

Email Marketing as a part of Startup Marketing

If you hear anyone saying that email marketing is dead and will never respawn.

Ignore them!

Yes, turn a deaf ear to their argument and read this.

Email Marketing is not dead.

As per Barilliance:

Year	Open Rate	CTR
2016	44.22%	8.31%
2017	45.59%	8.69%
2018	43.95%	8.84%
2019	41.85%	8.31%

Where else will you find such vital metrics?

Email might be like a cherry on the cake for your marketing strategy for digital startups, but sometimes, the cherry saves the cake.

In Email marketing, we want you to focus on four things:

Focus Area	What is does	How to do it
Capture Leads	Leverage the power of emails to capture leads at the top of the funnel. In other words, create awareness with your emails and inspire action from your potential users. Lead capturing has become highly personalized today. So, you will need several campaigns for every target audience. Here too, the concept of ICP will prove to be beneficial. That is why we are saying that follow this guide on how to market a startup from top to bottom.	We recommend using a tool for this purpose. Drip Tool. Drip allows you to create personalized and user-specific email sequences and automate the process based on certain triggers.
Email Marketing Plans	Here we recommend you making different email content sequences. Onboarding, Introduction, Welcome, Walkthrough, Abandonment, Thank You, and so on, all these are email sequences. There cannot be a single email in these subjects. For instance, the Welcome series will contain different emails for when the user: Joins Starts Building the profile Completes the profile Similarly, create such email plans for every step that is relevant to your business.	Drip has templates on their platform. These templates will have the core content. You can either write new ones or modify them to produce a better correlation.
Email Remarketing and Retargeting	This is the major part wherein you will leverage the creation of multiple emails. Ever since the arrival of email automation, marketing for startups has become cost-effective. Retargeting involves re-approaching the users which have either missed your previous emails. Remarketing involves sending emails to the users for additional products to what they have already bought. For instance, if a user has bought an office table from your website. The next email can be a Thank You message combined with some chair recommendations.	Use pre-made templates on Drip or any other email marketing tool you want to use.

Email marketing is not the panacea for how to market startup business.

But if you work in the right direction, it is magical.

From building email lists to the specific targeting, retargeting, and sending personalized messages creates a better conversion strategy.

Your end motive must be to get more leads and start converting them.

From the top of the funnel, we want you to bring the leads to the bottom of the funnel and build loyal customer history.

SEO and Emails are covered.

What’s left?

Don’t worry, we didn’t forget Social Media. How can we?

Social media is like the Magna Carta of startup marketing today.

Without an effective social media strategy for your startup’s marketing, you are missing out on a lot.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Remember and note down this line: “Not all Social Media Strategies Require Money.”

Got it?

Let’s move ahead now.

There are two main things with SMM:

• The Community

• The Influencers

The community part is free, but the influencers require funding.

Here’s how it goes.

Community means your customers and your strategy for marketing while approaching them on your own via social media.

It can be from anywhere, Facebook Business, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, and so on.

A beach clothing company in San Francisco approached their potential customers from Instagram, got their email addresses, and then sent personalized product recommendations.

Their strategy worked, and they bagged high conversions.

So, social media is like an open season.

You try. You Fail. You Try Again.

Coming back to the Community part, here’s what you must do.

What to do	Why to Do It?
Find Relevant Communities	Do not make the mistake of making your business account on every big or small social media channel. This is not the right way to approach marketing a startup. You need first to find out where your users are. Use competition analysis for this purpose. Follow your competitors and observe their social media handles. Added to the consumer-specificity, every social media channel has its own unique set of properties. Facebook gets users preferring visual content. Twitter is useful for link sharing and blogs. So, first, identify the type of content you will share, then identify which channels your customers are using. Crossmatch the results and make accounts of those social media platforms.
Create a Social Media Posting Calendar	First, create a social media calendar and identify the raw format of posts for startup marketing. Then create the posts and use an automation tool like Buffer to streamline the things. This will help you focus on other stuff and only keep an eye on the engagement levels of the posts. Make sure to identify the patterns and modify your content plan as per the user response. Remove the posts that are not getting responses continuously and work on the ones which are getting better responses.
Start Communicating	You cannot automate anything here. Plus, it is a great thing for digital marketing plans in startups. Creating personalized communication plans for every user is the best approach so consider building communication plans templates that are easy to personalize. Save all the leads and start talking to them. Understand their issues, pains, and give recommendations for their benefit. Always remember Apple’s approach here. Do not convince them to buy the product. Instead, inspire your leads to engage with your brand and vision.

Community-based social media targeting can be slow, but it is rewarding, nonetheless.

For a faster response, you can start working with the influencers.

Social media influencers are individuals with a specific cohort of fans and followers.

Leveraging the power of the influencer to inspire action in their users can turn out to be beneficial for you.

Here’s how to approach it.

Goal	Approach
Definition of an Influencer	Define who is an influencer in your industry. He/she will probably be someone who has the same set of vision, ideas, concepts, and understanding. Yes, you can always pay an influencer to promote and endorse your product. And this is one of the answers to how to market a startup product. But, if the influencer does not believe in your product, they cannot promote it. Anything that goes against the influencer’s personality, they won’t risk promoting it. Ergo, find influencers looking for a symbiotic relationship and add to your strategy for marketing a new startup.
Find Ways to Reach Them	Most of the influencers you find on social media channels provide their contact details on the profile page for collaborations. So, look at their profiles. That is the best way to reach them. You might also get offers on platforms like Fiverr. Something like, “I will get you, 50,000 followers, on Instagram for $20.” The offer is tempting, but will it work? Most probably no. Because you are not looking for followers, but authentic, loyal, and interested leads. So, always take the right approach.
Cooperate	Influencers might have some of their own set of conditions before they collaborate with you. It can be in terms of money, schedule, or anything else. The best way is to keep your ground, but leave some leverage to negotiate. Always remember that this is a quid pro quo. If you are getting leads, they are getting paid for, which goes into your Customer Acquisition Cost. So, building a marketing plan for your startup needs smart budgeting.

That’s it!

This is how to market a startup.

We have shed some light on every major aspect of startup marketing and its strategy building.

Before we go, let’s revise everything.

Test, Measure, and Iterate

Congratulations!

Reaching here means that you have set up everything, and the train has already left the station.

Now, you need to identify the stops, halts, and track changes.

In other words, test, measure, and iterate.

As digital marketing for startups is progressing, you will start getting results.

But first, make a great and unique strategy.

Everything from the ICP to the keyword generates, and content strategy needs personalization.

Once you have the strategy ready, implement it with modern and smart SEO aspects.

Leverage the ability of smart tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Keywords planner, and others to make your plans.

After putting the plans in motion, turn towards social media and email marketing for your startups.

Identify what does your startup need and at which stage the target customers need the most attention.

Define your strategy before you start writing emails.

Get a list of all the social media channels, get a list of influencers, and start building strategies conducive to everyone.

But don’t forget to Check-Check-Optimize.

What to do	Meaning
Check the Metrics	There are a lot of measurable aspects individual to the marketing channels. Identify the ones that are privy to your campaigns. Start measuring them from the beginning. Uplift the metrics that are performing and filter out the ones which are not performing.
Check the Budget	Either you fix a budget or reverse engineer it, do not cross it. Sticking to your budget doesn’t only mean that you will save money, but it is also about management and accountability.
Optimize	If you see anything deviating from the startup’s original marketing plan, nip it right there and optimize the campaign. You don’t want to go haywire when nothing seems to work because you could not take the right direction. From what we have learned in your years of experience is that every business is unique. Even if the product is the same, the approach is unique. And that is what we find out within our discovery workshop and idea validation stage.

That was all!

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