Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a series of posts that go into fair detail on startup marketing. Most of the techniques will be low-cost, quick, and templated solutions, although I’ll go into a bit more detail on the items I’m more comfortable with. I’ll do my best to provide as many tools, resources, references, and hard data as possible. The purpose of these posts is primarily to help me organize my thoughts, but I figured I would do it publicly in hopes the series might be helpful to others. I’ve found it very difficult to execute without a plan or process, so these posts will act as a marketing process template for us moving forward. We’ll have many followup posts so you can see how un/successful these strategies are. I’m hoping that you will participate and add value to these working posts in the comments.
Marketing encapsulates a whole slew of topics, including positioning, pricing, segmentation, branding, customer relationship management, public relations, etc. Although I’ll touch on some of these points, I’ll primarily be focusing on these three topics:
- Generating traffic
- Creating landing pages
- Converting visitors into x*
If you need more, I’d recommend picking up a few books:
The New Rules of Marketing & PR
Guerrilla Marketing
Duct Tape Marketing
And highly recommended: The Four Steps to the Epiphany
Also, if you’d like to get started with a good read now, I’d highly recommend Balsamiq founder, Peldi’s, post on startup marketing. I’ll actually be borrowing a couple of his techniques throughout the series.
Here’s an outline of what’s to come:
Generate Traffic
Type of Product or Service
This is likely one of the most important topics covered. The type of market you’re entering will determine which methods, or marketing channels, will work best for your product. We’ll look at the way Steve Blank approaches this problem:
- A New Product in an Existing Market
- A New Product in a New Market
- A New Product Resegmenting an Existing Market
B2B or B2C
Although most of the topics covered will be applicable to both categories, there are still some major differences between the two, especially behind the motivation of a conversion. I’ll cover some of these upfront and then touch on them throughout the rest of the series.
PPC (Pay Per Click) or Display Advertising
Believe it or not, there’s more out there than just Google Adwords. PPC advertising can vary greatly depending on your product type and general campaign goals. This will cover different display advertising channels and how to approach each. We’ll also cover some keyword research techniques to get you started with search advertising and monetizing intent.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Just because you’re a startup doesn’t mean you can’t play with the big boys. Well written articles, link building, and on-page optimization can be a great way to get free (organic) traffic. This will likely be jam packed with external resources, tools, and articles because this is an area I specialized in. We’ll cover keyword research, and on-site / off-site optimization.
Social Media
I am SO SICK of everyone referring to social media as just Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. Yes, those are some of the big guys, but there is SO MUCH MORE OUT THERE!! We’ll find where your customers hang out and how to reach them without spending hundreds of hours lurking around the web. This will be more of a “how to automate your social media efforts” post than anything else. This will cover external blogs, forums, boards, Ning, Twitter, bookmarking, and how to leverage a few really powerful tools from Google.
PR (Public Relations)
Building relationships with bloggers and the media is important on many levels. I won’t cover how to write press releases and such, but I’ll cover some methods we use to find and reach out to bloggers and web communities. This is where I’m least capable, so I’ll be relying on most of you to help me put together some additional processes.
Viral Content
This is a more hit/miss marketing channel than the others, but if you can pull it off, it can be one of the least cost and most effective methods of them all. We’ll cover and reference some external viral marketing campaigns, including video, sweepstakes, giveaways, widgets, and more. I have some good tips here from one of Andrew Warner’s first interviewees as well.
Email Marketing
Still one of the more popular web marketing methods, email still works! Our inboxes are definitely getting more cluttered, but list building and highly targeted campaigns are still some of the more effective and lower cost marketing methods there are. We’ll cover building your own lists, which ties into the landing page section, and advertising in others’ email campaigns.
Landing Pages
Squeeze Pages or Mini-Sites
For most of you engineers, creating landing pages might not be too difficult. But if you’re like me and don’t know how to code a site from start to finish, some of these will definitely help. We’ll cover some tools and resources that help automate landing page creation. This post will help you get a page up quickly with minimal effort and allow you to start testing your hypotheses and is exceptionally helpful if you’re a fellow leanstartuper.
Design Best Practices
There is extensive research on this topic, yet most people fail to create compelling layouts and content. I’ll cover some of these research pieces and explain how visitors typically scan web sites, referencing some of the more popular websites, like Basecamp and Freshbooks.
Tracking Mechanisms and Analytics
There’s no point in sending (and paying for) a bunch of traffic to a page if you don’t know how visitors are interacting with it. Although I’ll mention several different options, the focus will be on using Google Analytics to accomplish most tasks. We’ll cover tracking the correct metrics, or KPIs (key performance indicators), creating and defining goals, and automating reporting.
Converting Visitors to X*
* Leads, signups, sales, subscriptions, etc.Flow and Funnels
So you’ve paid $$ to have this visitor look at your website, now what? It’s important that you clearly define the flow, or funnel, of your site and take your visitors through it one step at a time. This topic will be closely related to the design best practices mentioned above. We’ll cover different funnel mechanisms and strategies to help you get the most out of each visitor.
Split and Multivariate Testing
Also known as conversion optimization, this is probably one of my favorite topics. This seems to be a trending topic among marketers and has been the focus of many of the new tools showing up every day. We’ll cover several different tools and resources that will help turn your page into a bear trap.
If you have anything else you’d like added to the list, let me know in the comments. From the looks of it, this will be a long series, so I’ll do my best at covering the important pieces of each topic and linking out to additional resources for those of you who want to learn more.