5 Effective Marketing Tips To Grow Your Startup

By Guest Author, Hugo Morris: 

When running a startup, one of your biggest goals is to get the word out about your brand in an attempt to attract new customers. As such, marketing is an area you cannot afford to ignore when you want your new business to have a fruitful start.

If you choose to hire a marketing expert right away, especially if you have a budget for it, that shouldn’t stop you from exploring your other alternatives. Here are six effective marketing tips you can use to get your startup rolling on the right wheels.

Sell solutions instead of products

For starters, the chances are high that you already have a substantial amount of competition in the niche in which your new business is operating. While competitors are a great motivation, your marketing should avoid comparative information. In other words, design the marketing information in a manner that only sells the unique benefit or solution that your brand brings.

Avoid the common mistake of comparing the features your service boasts over the competition and instead focus on the qualities that make you stand out. Most importantly, emphasize the quick benefits of your products which customers will hardly find elsewhere. You can easily figure this out by reviewing the gap that your service is filling in the market.

Create a referral program

Another practical marketing approach you can use to promote your new company is to ask for referrals and recommendations from your current customers in exchange for incentives. To put this into perspective, suppose you run a web design company and have just launched a new web hosting reseller service. Among the first people, you should share the news with our clients who you’ve handled web projects for before. To motivate them to send you referrals, you could promise them something like three months of free hosting whenever they recommend a buying customer to you.

There are so many other ways to use the referral strategy to promote your startup. Other options include leveraging the large following of social media influencers you have or working with professional reviewers like Hosting Foundry.

Use PR to your advantage

When your startup is still establishing its name in the industry, a simple mention or review by the press media and influencers can significantly boost your reputation. However, these kinds of endorsements hardly prove beneficial if you don’t magnify it.

A smart approach to do this is to feature the publication or part of it on your website’s homepage, blog, or other sections in which new visitors will see and comment. That will be important in helping you build your credibility as a rising star in your field.

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Devise an effective way to measure results

To decide whether the marketing strategy you’re currently using is working, you need to devise a way to measure its results. For a start, find reliable ways to track the conversions that you’re getting from any marketing campaign you could be running.

For example, if you’re using a social media channel as your ad platform, install on your website a traffic origin identifier. With it, you can establish the number of potential customers coming from that particular social platform.

Measuring results also helps you identify the amount of potential and value of each marketing channel you are using. With this information, you can implement more of the fruitful strategies and toss those that don’t work.

Respond appropriately to customer criticism

Customer testimonials, whether negative or positive, are great for marketing your brand to new audiences. First, they prove that you’re authentic while also showing you appreciate customer opinion. However, the most significant marketing gain comes when you respond to your customers whenever they raise their concerns or comment negatively, especially on social media. To the eyes of new visitors, your response markets the personality of your business. It publicly shows the kind of treatment to expect when they engage with you.

A good practice is to ensure that your responses reflect a business that listens particularly to genuine criticism. This way, you’re able to build a trustworthy reputation that encourages new clients to want to use your services.

Learn to build anticipation

A common mistake that even established businesses make waiting until their products are perfect (at least in their eyes) before they can begin promoting them. The problem with this approach is that you can never determine what kind of reception your product will get once it hits the market. After all, you don’t want to invest heavily in new products only for them to flop.

A more appropriate approach is to sell the benefits long before starting work on the product to build anticipation and allow potential users to offer suggestions for improvement.

Sure, you can create a few sample products, but avoid mass production efforts until you’re sure there’s a ready market for your product.

Do you have other innovative marketing tips that are proving effective for your startup? We’d love to hear your feedback.

By Guest Author, Hugo Morris

Hugo Morris is the Content Outreach Manager at ProfitEngine. Hugo wasted no time to get into his role at Profit Engine after leaving his full-time education. He has spent a year in his role mastering the process of content creation. With a background in the English language, he has been able to use his skills to great effect to the point where he is the head of content creation at Profit Engine. He is an avid lover of reading, music, and traveling.