Marketing Guide for Startups companies (Seven Practical Steps and Marketing Ideas)
Marketing is a big challenge for the majority of startups, especially in their beginnings, as their marketing budget is often very limited and may not be sufficient. On the other hand, it is difficult to assign the marketing task to an advertising agency or a skilled e-marketer due to the lack of material resources.
For these reasons, we have made sure to provide a comprehensive guide on how to market for startups, and to present the marketing ideas through which you can achieve significant growth in a short time and at the lowest financial cost.
Through this guide, we will provide practical steps and guides away from any unhelpful theoretical aspects, as well as a number of marketing tricks and ideas that are most common in the world of startup marketing.
The Startup Marketing Guide is an A to Z guide for e-marketers who want to learn more about marketing for startups, or for startup owners who are going to be marketing themselves and their products or services.
This guide focuses on e-marketing as the most important, least expensive and most useful, but this does not prevent that there are a lot of marketing ideas that we will review that are applicable using traditional marketing.
How to do marketing for your startup company
Marketing is an art like playing and drawing that requires creativity, but this does not prevent the existence of flexible rules or frameworks that govern this creativity, and we will now review the framework that includes the marketing process for startups.
Through these steps, we will review a large number of marketing tricks and ideas that marketers always use in order to achieve the marketing goals of startup companies.
Step One: Market Segmentation of Your Startup company;
Market Segmentation is a very important step for any economic or commercial business owner, because it is impossible to target all people at the same time, so we divide the market and choose one or several segments to focus all our marketing efforts to attract them.
Segmentation of the market is not a process limited to small brands only, but also that major brands that sell to everyone as Pepsi are targeting certain age segments of society in order to attract them and sell to them even though virtually all groups and segments drink Pepsi.
In fact, the segmentation process is a decisive step in the success of marketing or not, and therefore it is unacceptable to bypass it and launch random targeting.
You can divide the market by:
- Geographical factors: province, city, terrain or climate.
- Demographic factors: gender, age, average income, marital status, educational stage,…etc.
- Behavioral factors: buying and spending habits.
- Psychological factors: lifestyle, ideas, beliefs, attitudes, priorities, personality type.
This division is due to the nature of your startup and the nature of the products or services you provide to its customers.
Market segmentation will help you choose the right niche or even micro niche for your products or services, as well as help you create your marketing messages later.
It will also help you discover other marketing and business opportunities by adding some flavor to your product or services to be more attractive to your target segment.
Second Step: Choose the appropriate segment and prepare the buyer personality for your startup company
After dividing the market into segments, we must choose one or several segments in order to focus our marketing efforts on them. This selection process is carried out according to several factors, the most important of which are:
1) Segment Size
The size of the segment is one of the most important factors in choosing the marketing segment, because it reflects the attractiveness of this segment and the possibility of achieving the greatest amount of profits through it.
The size of the segment must also be compatible with your resources and capabilities, because the first condition for success is to provide services or products with high quality and any pressure that may negatively affect this quality must be avoided.
2) Revenue
The return or profit is another factor that complements the size of the segment, as it is important to take into account the fact that the segment you choose is able to bring returns commensurate with the expenses and effort you make.
3) Competition
Some may neglect the competition factor, but it may be pivotal in choosing a marketing segment. Entering into competition with many other companies and institutions for specific segments may be stressful and futile.
So you need to think from these three angles when choosing a segment for your startup.
After choosing the appropriate marketing segment, comes the step of preparing the customer personality, Buyer Persona, and the customer persona is an imaginary character of the appropriate or ideal customer for your startup who needs your products or services.
The customer personality will help you understand your target audience more as well as it will be an important source of your marketing ideas.
Marketing departments in large companies create a large number of customer personas, and then use them extensively in their meetings, to the point of saying: Will this update like Liza? Will this sentence attract Carl? And so on.
Preparing the client's personality requires identifying a number of characteristics for this personality, which are:
- Age.
- Social, family and educational status.
- Function.
- interests.
- Motives and ambitions.
- General issues and problems that require him/her to purchase our product or service.
- Purchasing power.
- Which channels of communication are most attractive to him.
- His own marketing methods.
Third Step: Set the Marketing Goals for Your Startup company
Before you start planning or implementing anything, you have to determine what you want, as companies, especially start-ups, have different goals and therefore their marketing goals - especially at the beginning -, for example:
* Some startups want to make as much profit as possible to push things to a higher level and therefore, the most prominent marketing goal here will be to achieve the largest number of sales.
* The company's goal may be to capture the largest percentage of the market, and in this case the marketing goal will be to attract and acquire the largest number of potential customers.
* It is possible that the goal of the startup at this time will be to gain fame, so it will rely on Viral Marketing, and its marketing goal will be awareness of Awareness and getting as much interaction as possible.
Marketing objectives will greatly contribute to creating effective marketing ideas for your startup, as you will be able to determine whether you are achieving success or not, based on which you will set the KPI performance indicators that you will adhere to.
Fourth Step : Develop performance indicators KPIs that fit the marketing objectives of your startup
KPI or Key Performance Indicators are a very important part of the marketing process, as through them you can determine the success or failure of the advertising campaign, and for this reason, the company's goals and marketing goals must be determined in order to choose the appropriate performance indicators.
If the company's goal at this time is fame, its performance indicators will be something like:
- Reach.
- Interact with Engagement Publications.
- Shares.
- Compare the engagement rate with the total number of followers.
- viral spread rate "Virality" rate.
If the company's goal is to achieve the largest possible number of sales, its performance indicators will be centered around:
- Monthly Sales Growth.
- Frequency of customer purchase.
- Lead-to-Sale rate %.
- Average Cost Per Lead.
Performance indicators are one of the sources of inspiration for marketers, and through their ultimate goal they can come up with creative and successful marketing ideas.
Fifth step: Choosing the right digital marketing channels for you
Choosing the right e-marketing channels is not easy for anyone, as it is a step that requires a lot of research and experience to reach the effective marketing channels for your startup.
Although this is neither completely correct nor healthy, many marketers start with this step and neglect the four steps that precede it, which results in wasting a lot of time and effort in vain.
By knowing your target segment, you will be able to monitor the effective marketing channels for them, as the presence and online activity differs greatly between each marketing segment and the other, and the professional marketer should be well aware of this.
Among the most popular e-marketing channels are:
1. Social media
Social media has changed the world in which we live and with the passage of time it has become one of the most powerful marketing channels in the modern era, and that is why it is an essential part of any marketing process in our time.
But it should be noted that social media is a big world and cannot be dealt with as a single entity, so we will review the different platforms and tips on choosing the right platforms for your startup and their marketing messages.
One of the common mistakes marketers of start-ups make is to work and be present on all social media platforms without any distinction or focus on the effective platforms.
Facebook is the largest social networking platform ever, and so it is essential to most startups and brands around the world.
Facebook has very powerful targeting tools, so Facebook-funded ads help you reach the ideal customer you are targeting.
In general, Facebook is the most appropriate social networking platform to get your existing customers to interact with visual content such as photos and videos.
Instagram is the most suitable social media for growth at this time, especially if you want this growth to be natural and free and not with sponsored ads.
Instagram is the ideal platform for marketing through visual content such as photos and videos, and this is because it has the highest engagement rate among other social media.
Recently, Instagram stories have shown great importance to marketers and brands around the world for their great effectiveness in supporting the desired marketing goals.
On the other hand, Instagram is the strength area of influencers, so if influencer marketing is among your priorities, you should definitely use the Instagram platform.
Twitter is the most powerful social media platform when it comes to responding to links, for example links to articles.
It is also a very effective marketing channel to reach the residents of the Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Kuwait, so if reaching these communities is important for your startup, of course you should use Twitter.
TIKTok
TikTok is a relatively new marketing channel in our Arab world, but it has achieved amazing marketing results for many brands and small businesses.
Most likely, if your business model is B2C, you will have to use the TikTok platform, especially if you target the youth group from the age of 16 to 35, because most of its active users are in this age group.
Another reason you might use TikTok for marketing is that it is a platform with little or no competition between different companies and brands, which will give you precedence and the opportunity to attract a large number of customers, and Tik Tok is also very powerful when it comes to marketing through influencers.
Other social media platforms
There are dozens of other social media platforms that you should not neglect, and this is because they constitute enormous marketing opportunities far from the fierce competition in the major social media platforms.
LinkedIn is preferred for targeting professionals in marketing, programming, and dozens of other career disciplines.
And Reddit can be a treasure trove for reaching out to those interested in practical, software and economics topics if your startup needs it.
Here is a short list of other social media platforms that may help you market your startup:
- Tumblr.
- LinkedIn.
- Snapchat Snapchat.
- Reddit.
- Pinterest.
- Telegram Telegram.
- Quora.
- Medium.
2. Create a website
Many startups need to launch websites to market themselves, especially if this website includes a blog, as this contributes greatly to attracting customers and pushing them to buy.
The website will allow the company to use marketing methods, such as: SEO and SEM marketing, which will allow to attract many potential customers.
SEO or search engine optimization is a very powerful marketing method for some businesses in which customers search for the product or service, but its only problem is that it needs some time to be effective as required.
In addition to this, SEO may not be suitable for your business and to overcome this problem all you have to do is to understand your customer and how they make their purchases and searches.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective and neglected marketing channels in our Arab world, and some commercial activities have recently proven the effectiveness and success of this type of marketing.
You can create a unique link between you and the potential customer and you can attract a large number of new customers by knowing a little data about them using your website or landing page.
Many experts confirm that email marketing is one of the most important methods of rapid growth in the world of marketing now, which can cause a big shift for your startup.
4. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a very successful marketing channel about which we have written many articles in Winners, and it is done through your agreement with an affiliate marketer to promote your products or services in exchange for a percentage of the profits from each sale.
According to many business owners, this marketing channel is very effective and constitutes a large part of their profits, and according to several articles I have read in this regard, affiliate marketing is an important part of the rapid growth strategies of some businesses and startups.
5. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has become one of the most important marketing channels in the recent period that every online business owner must use and seek to promote his services or products through.
Influencer marketing has led to fabulous profits and returns for many brands and companies, whether large or small.
An important factor that cannot be overlooked here is that defining the marketing budget is an important part of choosing the appropriate marketing channel or channels, and it must be done in parallel with this step.
In the end, I must remind you that these marketing channels are not the only ones, but they are the most famous and used, and this does not prevent the existence of other less known marketing channels that may bring you huge returns and profits.
Step 6: Prepare the right content to market to your startup and use Growth Hacking
There is a very common saying in the world of marketing, which is: “Content is king.” Therefore, any marketing method, whatever it may be, will be based mainly on the words and ideas within it.
For this reason, the step of preparing and planning the content is very important. In the beginning, you have to determine the personality of your company and the reputation that you want to spread about your product or service, in order to create content that confirms and proves it in the mind of the audience.
In the beginning, you can specify a few ideas or keywords, which will help you very much later, especially if you are going to launch a blog for your startup company. Through these keywords, you will be able to deduce the titles and topics of your articles.
These keyword lists will also help you with targeted advertising campaigns if you are going to use these marketing tools later.
By preparing the right content for your marketing campaigns, you can use Growth Hacking, a popular technique used to quickly and steadily increase the growth of startups.
Rapid growth can be used to create marketing ideas in countless ways, but I recommend:
1. Create an email list before launching your product
Many marketers resort to creating email lists that include current and potential customers and presenting them with offers periodically, as well as sending purchase stimulus messages before launching their new products or services.
2. Provide free service or free subscription for a limited time لفترة
If your service or product is electronic, you must definitely provide incentives to attract your customers, such as: free services or free subscription for a short period such as two weeks or a month, and this will lead to an increase in your sales or subscriptions to your electronic services.
3. Allow customers to be a part of your marketing process
One of the most important ways of rapid growth is to make customers an essential part of your marketing process, this will go viral, and you can do this through several methods, the most commonly used is encouraging customers to take pictures or write content that supports your brand.
4. Bribery customers to contribute to the rapid growth of your company
Some companies bribe their customers in order to achieve rapid growth for them, and this bribery includes discounts, gifts or even cash when inviting new customers or when sharing the brand with friends.
One of the most prominent examples of this is what PayPal did when it was giving $20 cash to its customers when an invited person joins so that the new customer takes $10 and the old customer who invited them another $10.
5. Find partners for you from other brands
Many startups and brands resort to collaborating with other brands in order to achieve a win-win situation for both parties, which leads to very significant marketing results over time.
6. Use trends as a pillar of your marketing
Social media has greatly facilitated communication between individuals and brands, and this is because there are many topics on the scene to be discussed and to enter the heart of the customer through them.
Among the most prominent trends that help some brands to grow are football matches, series and current events that give companies and brands a tremendous marketing impetus.
7. Pay attention to customer awareness
There are many companies in the world of trade that attract their customers by educating them about their specialization, and this contributes to creating great confidence in the customer in the company and its brand. You will buy your furniture from her.
8. Pamper your customers
There are many big and small brands that take over their customers and create great loyalty just by pampering them. For example, McDonald's congratulates its customers on their birthdays in addition to offering free meals or desserts.
And this pampering process does not have to require any additional cost to you as a startup, just congratulations and blessings on various occasions and other moral matters will have a great impact on them.
The seventh and final step: Learn from mistakes and improve
Finally comes the role of learning and experience, it is natural that your plans will not succeed 100% in the beginning, so you will make mistakes, learn and rearrange your affairs an infinite number of times, and this should not frustrate you.
Many marketing myths have become what they are now thanks to the failures and mistakes they made in the past, and all companies and brands have their marketing pitfalls. The most important thing is not to despair and keep trying.
There are no limits to marketing ideas for startups
We have presented many marketing ideas throughout this article, but these are not the only marketing ideas. The world of marketing is a large ocean full of irreplaceable opportunities.
Make sure that you think outside the box or in some other language that you tweet outside of the flock, because that is what will have the most impact in attracting customers to you.
Here are some innovative marketing ideas that you can use to market your startup:
1. Build a community for your startup on social media
This idea is suitable for many startups, especially those that provide services, as many of them are marketing themselves by creating an effective community of professionals and individuals interested in these services, and this strategy has proven successful globally.
2. Launching online contests
This is one of the marketing ideas that is not widespread in Arab world, but many startups and foreign brands use it to attract new customers and create an aura of attention to it in the market.
3. Provide a referral program or recommendations
Referral or recommendation programs are a very smart marketing idea, which has made many startups grow exponentially by acquiring a large number of customers that can sometimes reach tens of thousands.
Although this may be costly at first, the startup will soon start reaping its rewards after several months.
4. Using customer loyalty programs
Gamification is a marketing method that has become widely used in different brands, and this is because of its great impact on customers by linking them to the brand and making them re-purchase and use it.
This marketing idea is usually done through a system of points that the customer obtains when purchasing or when doing certain things, and then the customer exchanges these points for other products or services, and this is one of the most successful and new marketing ideas currently in use.
5. Podcast Marketing
Podcast marketing is something new to the Arab business and financial world, and this is what makes it a great marketing opportunity for your start-up company, due to the lack of competition and the great opportunities to lead this marketing method.
You can use podcasts to indirectly market your services or products by providing specialized content about your startup industry, and providing advice to interested listeners who sooner or later become your customers.
Marketing podcasts will be an easy and cheap way to open a market for you in the Gulf countries. Most of the Arab listeners to podcasts are from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar.
6. Marketing Webinars
One of the most successful marketing ideas in the COVID-19 period is to offer webinars to customers or target audiences, an idea that marketers have been turning to since the beginning of the pandemic until now.
7. Marketing Courses
Marketing with educational courses is one of the most successful marketing ideas in America and Europe in recent years, which has not been sufficiently paid attention to in our Arab world.
However, one of the Arab digital marketers used it by offering a free course to write content on his website, which led to a significant increase in his profits by placing his name as one of the most prominent experts in Arab digital marketing.
This is, of course, in addition to the demand for those enrolled in the course to buy its other paid courses, and the books that it offers from time to time.
Final tips that can help you in marketing your startup
1. Don't market to everyone so you don't lose everyone
A mistake that many make, especially at the beginning of startups, is to market to everyone, most likely thinking that they will sell more, but the results always show the opposite.
Even brands that are suitable for everyone focus on a limited segment or segments of consumers to market to them, and this is because they are the most profitable groups and they can create brand loyalty in these groups.
2. MVP is always the best solution
You can start the marketing process before launching your startup and before working on your product or service, through an MVP or Minimum Viable Product.
This is a product that has minimal functions and tasks that you can market to customers and get feedback from them.
Through the MVP, you will know the potential reactions from your customers, and you will also be alert to modifications or additions to your product, and in the worst case scenarios, you will know that your product or service will not achieve the desired turnout before it is too late.
3. Don't just focus on marketing, also focus on customer service and after-sales services
Marketing alone is not enough to retain customers. If a company has impressive marketing, but its customer service is weak, this will cause customers to become alienated from it or not to buy from it again.
So, you should take care of developing the customer service department and making their first goal to win customers and create loyalty to the company with them, even if this is less profitable for the company in the short term, the real assets of any startup company is its customer base.
Customer service and after-sales services are the most powerful way to create word-of-mouth marketing for your company and therefore in the long run it will bring you incredible profits.
4. You should focus on Public relations
Many startups, especially in the Middle East, neglect PR departments, despite it being a powerful way to position a startup in the business world.
The public relations department is the department responsible for communicating with third parties such as the media and the press, and therefore it is responsible for creating the impressive image of your startup or your products and services.
No matter how small your company is, an article or news item in a newspaper will contribute to increasing your customers and profits, and will also give you a very great marketing weight.