There are many ways to promote your startup. What are some tactics you've used that were effective, that you'd recommend to others?
Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?
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Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?
#2Blogging. I'm not really a good writer, so I tend to do a lot of interesting data things. My startup is also Reddit based, so the content gets pretty decent attention.
Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?
#31) Set up a Twitter page.
2) Set up a facebook page.
2) Have your branding the same on all social media.
3) Connect to relevant followers or potential customers.
4) Connect your blog posts automatically to twitter.
Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?
#4The very first thing that should be on everyone's marketing checklist is understanding what marketing is and what it is not. A lot of people use marketing and promotion interchangeably. Promotion is just a part of your marketing strategy.
Marketing is the science of bring a product to market. A good marketing plan includes (among other things) initial market research, analysis of the marketplace (the dynamic relationship between companies, products, segments, distribution channels and consumers), finding a product-market fit (defining product design and specifications based on the market analysis and your short,mid and long-term goals), pricing strategy, and finally - promotion strategy.
There are some great (and free) MOOCs on marketing strategy on coursera. I recommend "Competitive strategy" and "Advanaced competitive strategy" by Tobias Kretschmer, if you are not looking to change the world with this great new app you and your friend are hacking together. Checking out "Introduction to marketing" is good if you want a checklist for consumer-driven philosophy. A rule of thumb when taking MOOCs is to use the videos simply as general pointers. If you want to really learn - use the recommended literature.
Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?
#5We tried Stumbleupon PD for getting quite cheap traffic, when we were on initial stage - it helped us to validate the concept and move further. Advantage - you will also get a free traffic just as regular stumbleupon submission.
Betalist is quite hot now as well - we got 100 subscribers to beta from it.
Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?
#6Use something like quickmvp.com to tweak yout branding. Before you finally decide for a brand name consider pusruing an Adwords campaign to find out which branding and marketing slogans convert the most.
Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?
#7Not a checklist, but I put together a fairly comprehensive spreadsheet of all the top marketing resources I've come across when I worked in a startup doing online marketing:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag_fyIIMSJ6DdGt...
If you're wondering what should be on the non-technical guy's checklist, start here.
Includes absolute gold from Mint.com, Neil Patel, Patrick McKenzie, Kissmetrics and more, covers many areas of marketing such as:
- getting press coverage
- SEO
- Link building
- B2B Marketing
- Blogging
- social media
etc...
Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?
#8[deleted]
Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?
#9Blogging is always on my list.
It's almost like cheating. A well planned and written article can get you thousands of visits from relevant people to your site. Then some of them visit your main site, some of them sign up for your service, some share your site with their colleagues, etc.
For example, a recent blog post I wrote to help promote my own consulting service brought in ~15,300 visits over this past weekend. The post before that brought ~10,000 visits. A post for a company I work with brought them ~30,000 visits in a day... You get the idea.
Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?
#101. Figure out your market before you build anything. Talk to them, get to know them, figure out what they need.
2. Ask them for an intent to purchase or to reserve a spot in line or whatever.
3. Build landing pages and advertise them so that you can validate your ability to acquire customers before building anything.
4. Create a human machine that looks/feels like the real machine you are going to build later.
5. Sell your fake, semi-terrible, human powered machine that pretends to be your real system until you have enough sales to justify building the real product.
6. Build and sell your real product.
If you do #1-5 before you ever build what you would normally start by building, you'll already have experience selling and marketing your product before you ever actually build it.