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Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?

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Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?

#11

Post by longneckdeer »

gk1 wrote: post #9

Blogging 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.…

I think a reasonable follow up question is how did you market your blog posts so successfully?

Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?

#12

Post by vdaniuk »

blumkvist wrote: post #4

The 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 relation…

I second the high quality of "Competitive strategy" and "Advanced competitive strategy" and its value for founders. However, ignore "Introduction to marketing" and other courses that mostly talk about offline marketing, the mental model of large brand management/marketing is very different from start-up world.

Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?

#13

Post by alphagenerator »

programminggeek wrote: post #10

1. 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. Sel…

Serious question regarding #1: What if I am the market because I am addressing a need I have that others have not addressed? Is the question then whether others have the same general needs?

Do I get to walk around thinking I have instant validation, or am I rolling the dice on the likelihood that others have the same problem?

Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?

#14

Post by kristofferdk »

1 effective content marketing approach I used with previous company:

1. create a slidedeck with lots of visual & publish on Slideshare 2. create blogpost with the slidedeck embedded - remember to test the headlines (e.g. with KingSumo for Wordpress) 3. change the headline in slidedeck & blogpost according to what works best - after we updated the headline on Slideshare one deck went from 1,000 views the first 24hrs to 10,000 views in the next 24hrs (not only due to being featured by Slideshare) 4. share your blogpost on various channels (niche Linkedin groups, twitter etc.) - and don't forget to submit to Buffer (https://buffer.wufoo.com/forms/buffers-awesome-content-colle...). Buffer can really drive traffic & a crazy amount of shares on Twitter.

Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?

#15

Post by Kequc »

johnmoore wrote: post #3

1) 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.

How do you mean by connect your blog posts automatically to twitter, you mean have twitter link to new blog posts? What tool do you use?

Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?

#18

Post by gk1 »

longneckdeer wrote: post #11
gk1 wrote: post #9

Blogging 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.…

I think a reasonable follow up question is how did you market your blog posts so successfully?

Nothing complicated... Just posting on relevant subreddits, HN, Designer News, etc.

I think the more important (and far more difficult) part is writing an article that's interesting enough that it doesn't need a lot of work or trickery to get visits.

Re: Marketing your startup: What's on your checklist?

#20

Post by gk1 »

alphagenerator wrote: post #13
programminggeek wrote: post #10

1. 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. Sel…

Serious question regarding #1: What if I am the market because I am addressing a need I have that others have not addressed? Is the question then whether others have the same general needs? Do I get to walk around thinking I have instant validation, or am I rolling the dice on the likelihood that others have the same problem?

I was once in that situation, and I learned that yes, you do need to validate that others have the same issue and that they're willing to pay for the solution and that there are enough such people to make this a viable business.

The product I created was a tool for a small niche of artists (of which I was a part). It solved a major problem I had, and I knew that others had the same problem. I even ran it by a few other artists and they loved the idea. What I failed to validate was whether they'd pay for the service. As it turns out, most artists in this niche can't afford to pay even $18/month for a service, and they're just as happy using a manual alternative.

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