I was sitting in a cafe, a random girl came to me, perhaps because I was the only person there with a laptop and few stationary on the table. After an introduction, she told that she is also a marketer and working for a startup.
A few minutes later, she got a call and got to know that her friend for whom she was waiting was not coming. But she stayed back to chat with me about marketing and startup things. I agreed and said, it would be nice, let’s go ahead.
So, we ordered two coffees and few cakes again and continued the discussion. She started telling about how she is marketing a B2C food startup and her company culture etc. I also shared mine and finally we agreed upon a quick project. After a long discussion we decided – how can any founder market his/her early stage startup without hiring marketers.
We started with when they should start marketing, then basic requirements and finally the easiest way to get traction of early adopters. And here is the conclusion of our discussion that I am going to share with you in a series.
There are many things you can do but you have lots of to-dos on your list to make your product damn awesome before launch. So, I have created a series of blog posts so that it will be easy for you to focus on one thing first then try other. I have personally tried and tested all of these before posting here. Go ahead and start taking your venture to the next level before you are going to be too late.
How Grow Early Stage Startup?
Ideally, a startup is the process of building something unique as a solution to a real problem that people accept as users or customers and everything happen faster than fast. There are many examples of real startups which have been thriving and going from scratch to the next level. Some of them have become great companies which are making our life easier.
But, still, there are many and many entrepreneurs who are struggling to build such ideal startup. Therefore I am creating an ongoing series of simple and quick guide to help such smart people build something great.
If you are tech savvy, you can do most parts yourself without hiring highly paid marketers or growth hackers.
Note: This is highly recommended for early stage and bootstrapping startups who want traction and quick early growth with limited resources. Otherwise, you will need a real marketer to grow your startup even faster as soon as you can afford some.
Here is quick but detail list of all possible marketing and growth Hacking techniques. Please note that as it’s all possible techniques, so all are not going to work for every startup, the only set of some unique and common will be more than enough. So, select them wisely.
For more detailed and step by step process of each and every technique, please subscribe to my blog and get one strategy every week directly in your inbox.
Why Weekly:
I have built and used the same techniques for dozens of successful and thriving startups. In many cases, most of them end with nothing by trying everything at the same time. So, to make this strategy useful and valid, I would like to send it through email at the end of the week so that you get enough time to test and try the previous one.
P.S, let’s get started!
Pre-Marketing Home Work
When you start working on a great idea to build a product, you must consider the market and the real user who will use it. Building a successful startup and product 100% depends on the acceptance of its end user. You don’t need to launch your product to see whether people will love it or not.
There are so many smart tools and techniques to find out tentative and nearly accurate success potential even far before launching the product. Two most popular and effective ways are Product Market Fit and launching MVP.
Product Market Fit
Product market fit is simple way to define, understand, measure the market potential and forecasting using some suitable tools and techniques. There are different ways to perform the product market fit experiment, in both cases before and after building the MVP.
In short, it gives you a detailed overview and actionable insights whether you should go ahead to build the product or not. Every startup should perform a perfect product-market fit research before building and launching the final product.
Great resources to learn more how to do product market fit.
MVP Marketing
The Minimum Viable Product is a product with just enough features that early adopters use to gather validated data and understandings about the product and its continued development. Every smart startup founders start with MVP then collect learning from early adopters to build a more accurate final product.
So, before investing more time and money, just build the MVP and give it to at least 5-10 people for free, I don’t think you need to market your product to find these 10 people. Just explore your network you will find more than this.
Now, improve your product continuously and ask them to give feedbacks regularly. Do this again and again, until you find out your product is stable now and more people can use it.
Learn more how to build a magnetic MVP
1. Marketing Foundation
Using product market fit data and insights collected from MVP users build a solid marketing foundation. A detailed marketing plan and strategies to take your startup to the next level.
If you are thinking you don’t have any marketing background and its the job of the marketer, don’t worry you do not have to be known the ABC of marketing to do this simple task. Here is a quick way to build a solid startup marketing foundation exclusively for non marketing founders.
Start With Marketing Message
This time define your product from the reverse direction, assume yourself as your first customer. What and how a customer should know about your product that will help him/her to start using the product.
What they should know: The Key Features and benefits.
List down key features of the product and write a short description of each and every feature using minimum words and more visual data. Then make a list of all benefits that customers are going to have after using your product. Again this time write the short description of every single benefit.
Know Your Audience (Future Customers)
Now understand the market, where customers are roaming and how you can reach them. Before firing Marketing message in the air, build a detailed list of audience who will hear your message and become the customer.
You can do it just building a segmented list of audience across the different channels, but there is a very smart way, that is building buyer/user personas.
Building user persona is a great way to understand who is your ideal customer, what’s their problem, how they are solving that, how you are going to benefit them through your product. It also helps in the selection of the most suitable marketing channels and activities in advance.
You can create as many as users Persona you want. Ideally, you should build 3-5 to kickstart the startup marketing. If you want to learn more about users Persona and how to build it perfectly, here are some useful resources.
2. Start The Fire: Grow The Early Stage Startup Fast
You have a great product- more than just MVP, you know what do you want to say- Marketing message and you also know your future customers. Now, it’s your turn to go ahead and kick some asses. Start with least effort and resources taking activities that just one or two people can and then go beyond one man army.
Before we will go ahead: Hope you have already installed basic analytics and tracking code on your website. There is no need to use more than just Google Analytics and social media open graphs for now. Setup Google Analytics and basic tracking setting.
Here is the master list of startup marketing and growth Hacking techniques to help you grow your early stage startup even without hiring the marketer.
#1: Twitter Blast
Twitter is filled with a crowd of active influencers and early adopters who are always ready to help you grow your startup further. If you have a great product and perfect magnetic pitch to convince them, you are the rock star. Just go and use this technique to leverage your early stage startup growth. Continue Reading…
#2 Facebook Marketing Hacks
Coming on December 31, please subscribe to know first.
#3 Grow With Quora
#4 Medium Growth Formula
#5 Leverage Instagram
#6 Email Seeding
#7 Forum and Community Posting
#8 Influencer outreach
#9 Grow Integration and Partnership
#10 Giveaways and Sponsorship
Now it’s time to go viral with more aggressive marketing strategies to take your startup to the next level.
#11 Know Your Audience
#12 Website redesign and CRO
#13 Create a Blog
#14 SEO Seeding
#15 Content Seeding
#16 Viral Marketing
#17 Conversion Optimisation
#18 Email Marketing
#19 Marketing Automation
#20 Measure the growth- Analytics and Metrics
#21 Leverage Paid Channels
#22 News and PR
Conclusion:
Marketing an early stage startup is a very challenging job, as nobody knows you so you have to let people know your product first then approach them to become paid customers. Along with this, the bigger challenge is the lack of resources and money, but you want to take the startup growth further anyway, right?
So, use above techniques one by one which is perfectly suitable for your business and product. Want to do it in a better way, please subscribe to my blog to get this all as weekly email course to take your startup to the next level.
Want to do it in a better way:
Please subscribe to my blog to get this all as weekly email course with this strategy directly in your inbox, to take your startup to the next level.
Are you startup founder looking for better and faster ways to grow your startup, please share your startup below in the comment below. I will reply to each and every comment personally with great insights!
The post How to Grow Early Stage Startup Without Hiring Marketer appeared first on Openthrive.