Guest Article

Starting a new business is an exciting and exhilarating affair, but it comes packed with a lot of risks and challenges. The ‘newcomer’s luck’ won’t play in favor as one believes, and the overnight success stories you may have heard about were actually of those who were there behind the scenes for years with hard work to pave the way to success. To put in simpler terms, startup marketing can be challenging when you have limited resources, customer insights, and no staff.

You need to ensure that every effort is well planned and perfectly executed to leverage your marketing budget. Many conventional marketing strategies may not be effective to reach your target customer. Below, we’ll discuss the major aspects of startup marketing.

Build a solid foundation

Before you start with any marketing effort you’ll need to lay a solid building blocks, to create your foundation.

1. Identify your target market

If you start something with an objective to market it to everyone, it is simply a waste of your money and time. The key to success for start-ups is to identify the exact target market and aggressively pursue market share. The major factors:

• Market size – Demographics, sex, age, number of potential customers etc.
• Market wealth – Does your niche market have enough money to spend on products like yours?
• Market competition – Who is your competition? Is the market saturated with competitors?
• Value proposition – Is your value proposition strong enough to cut through the competition?

2. Define your keywords

Once the market is defined, you should figure out what words your target customer will use to find your product or service online. Then start on building the potential keyword list. When it comes to digital marketing, keywords play a vital role. Build a core keyword list. Once tested, you can further expand the list by including secondary keywords.

3. Define what success means for your business.

Success measures may be different for different startups. For someone, it may be generating 500 signups to your email list each month, whereas someone else may find success in generating $50,000 in revenue each month. You need to define what success means for you.

You should also know the difference between success and failure especially when it comes to starting a new business. For example, often startup businesses thrive on credit cards and personal savings. However, when several credit cards get out of hand, and high interest rate debt starts piling up, it can be a leading cause of business failure and personal financial ruin.

If it happens to you, debt consolidation could be an answer. It is a refinancing method where you take a large loan to pay off your existing smaller loans. By consolidating all your debts, you just have to pay off the single loan, and deal with only one lender.

Startup marketing is a complex. Even some of the greatest ideas fail simply due to insufficient brand awareness and media attention. It all comes down driving customers You can have the best business concept, but if you can’t sell it, you will be out of business fast.  The sweet spot for startups really lies somewhere between effective content marketing, targeted social media and a great website.

About the Author:

Isabella Rossellini is an author, blogger and analyst, focusing more on business marketing and debt management etc. She has posted many articles on marketing tips for start-ups.