A Successful Marketing Strategy for Startups: 8 Ideas and Tactics

Starting up a business as an entrepreneur demands hard work – a lot of it! If you are producing a new product or rendering a novel service, you may need to put more effort than other business startups.

One of these efforts is setting up a good marketing strategy. Doing so will improve your business drastically. However, your success is not entirely dependent on how much you can spend or outspend your immediate competitors.

Start-up capital can go down the drain when you don’t have an effective marketing strategy. Your amazing business idea won’t yield profit for investors without a strategy.

Therefore, you need to employ the right hands in your business. You have to come up with the right ideas, have a bit of instinct, understand your target market, and execute the ideas perfectly. You also need to strike a balance while doing all these things.

If this advice makes sense to you, here are some ideas and tactics that will help you grow your business.

1. Create a Good Brand

If a startup entrepreneur asks how to grow his business, you may come up with different important points. However, for startup businesses, creating a good business identity or brand is the most important step of all.

Since branding is a confusing concept in marketing, there is an easy illustration to make you understand:

Take the top bottled water business in Vancouver as an example. There are different producers, designs, and packaging styles for its product. However, buyers still opt to patronize their product over other brands.

Why do you think that happens?

It’s because the top bottled water company in that area has already established its brand. The brand is clear from the logo design, identity color, quality, cleanliness, and values.

As a whole, consumers see this as reliable, making them opt for it. And even if there are 30 other bottled water brands in Vancouver, customers will still choose this top brand over and over again.

Branding is the feeling created for consumers about a product. And how your brand gets this sense of reliability heavily depends on your marketing. The best bet is that the top bottled water company hired the best branding agency in Vancouver to help them achieve its status. And there’s completely nothing wrong with that.

In fact, companies and marketing agencies should work hand in hand. A good startup branding agency will help you create a brand that will resonate with your target customers. They will be the ones responsible for how the market perceives your brand.

Thus, it is vital to choose a branding agency that provides quality output.

2. Have SMART Goals

Smart goals are important for any business and are much more important for startups. Therefore, it is crucial that you set some and create time frames for them.

However, you must also note that not all goals are smart. You must set goals that are in touch with reality and are attainable.

These SMART goals can be:

• Increasing product sales by 10% by the end of the third quarter of 2022.
• Increasing organic traffic on the company’s websites by 60% by the start of 2023.

Goals give a sense of direction and target which will push every employee to work better. SMART goals are invaluable to startups because resources and personnel are limited. It is easy to lose the sense of direction if they are not in place.

3. Try Using a Referral Program

Referral programs are one of the most criticized marketing methods over the past decades. However, it is equally one of the most simple and effective methods to grow your business online.

Research shows that 37% of customers brought in through referral programs become frequent customers. And about 81% of the customers brought in ended up engaging the brand or product.

Therefore, consider setting up a referral program with a reasonable reward system. Ensure the reward will not negatively affect the daily running of your business, wages, or salary of your employees.

4. Study Your Target Market

For startups, this strategy is not negotiable! You need to do the best market analysis. Know the age range of your target market, market price, customers’ reaction to changes in price or package, etc.

If you don’t study the market about the location of your business, you may be at a great disadvantage. In some locations, there are existing superstitions that may put your product at a disadvantage or advantage. You need to know these key factors.

You may also need to employ marketing companies near your area, to save you the stress of market analysis. Some of these companies may have already done an analysis of your product previously. Take time to tailor-make your products for your customers after seeing the analysis!

5. A Social Media Presence is important

In this time and age, a social media presence is important for your business. After you tell anyone about how good your products or services are, they still confirm by checking reviews on social media.

Therefore, make sponsored advertisements and post regularly. Social media posts can go a long way in branding your business and giving it the exposure you want.

6. Create Optimized Contents

Whether it is organic content or pay-per-clicks, engage your potential and loyal customers with content that will keep them educated about your product. The content should also remind them of your brand.

Content creation is an important part of online marketing. It should not be taken for granted. Customers want to be reminded that the product they are using remains trendy, in vogue, and easily accessible. If it is not so, you will gradually lose the customers you worked hard to get.

7. Target Users of Competitive Brand

One of the easiest ways to advertise online or anywhere for that matter is to target those who already know how a product works.

For startup businesses, all you need to do is to sponsor an ad (emails, Facebook posts, etc.) that targets users of such brands. Add something to your ad that will make them choose you over competitors.

Advantages you may have over other businesses can be price, texture, delivery method, or customer care service. Be sure to include them.

8. Buy One, Get a Gift Free

Any legal method you can use to attract customers is great, even giving freebies. You can apply it in selling household products or items for example.

You should also ensure the gift is valuable. Buying one and getting another free is like buying a book and getting a pen. They depend on each other which makes it a useful gift.

There is no better way of attracting customers than giving another useful or attractive product for free.

Conclusion

A successful business startup is not built in a day. However, you need to have good marketing strategies in place if you want your startup to grow. We have highlighted some of these strategies. You can talk to a marketing agency about how to implement them for your business startup.