Start Marketing Now

Free (and nearly free) things you can do right now to begin your startup marketing machine.

There are many benefits to starting marketing operations for your startup long before you are actually ready to start selling products and services.  Customer acquisition always ends up being harder than you think it’s going to be, so begin the process of building a marketing foundation now.

Here’s my quick list of (nearly-free) things every startup should do, long before you are actually ready to start selling products and services:

Landing Page. Don’t put off building your startup’s website, thinking that you need time to develop content and hire a designer. Just get a quick landing page up! Use one of the many DIY platforms such as Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, etc. Get a nice photo for free from Unsplash, write a few sentences about your startup, and say “Launching soon- sign up here to find out more!”. While you’re at it, make sure you install Google Analytics on your landing page. It’s free. You can get all of this done in less than an hour. 

Collect Emails. Growing an email list of followers is important, so when people arrive on your landing page you want to make it easy for them to enter their email address for future updates. You can use the free versions of MailChimp or HubSpot to create a sign-up form on your new landing page and keep your email list in a way that is fully compliant with all the privacy and spam laws.

Get on the Socials. It costs you nothing to create accounts for your startup on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, etc. Start posting things that are relevant to the sort of customers your startup will be targeting, with links to your landing page. For almost all startups today, a social media presence is important for getting awareness.

Be in the news. As the founder of a new startup, you want to start building your personal brand around being an expert in the field. Write an interesting article on Medium and then post it to all your socials. Publish a LinkedIn article and share it with your network. Find online magazines that are looking for contributors and submit an article to them (here are the submission guidelines for Business Insider, BuzzFeed, Fast Company, TechCrunch, and the New York Times). Always make sure anything you publish has a link to your startup’s landing page, of course. Also, get yourself signed up on Help a Reporter Out (HARO) — if a Wall Street Journal reporter is writing an article about your sector, you want them to contact you for a quote to include in the article!

Find out what people are searching for.Free tools such as Google Trends, Answer the Public, and UberSuggest will give you insight into what people are searching for online. This will help you to craft articles and posts that will align with current search traffic, plus it will give you market visibility that will help to inform all of your marketing efforts.

Be active in online communities. If you’ve developed a new brand of ice cream, you’ll want to join all the different online groups for ice cream lovers. Check out Facebook Groups, Reddit, Slack groups, Quora, and find groups that are relevant to your venture. Join the conversation. It costs nothing, you’ll learn a lot, and you’ll develop leads that will end up being valuable for your startup.

Create content that performs well. Ultimately what matters is not just generating content, it’s generating content that engages well and ultimately drive traffic to your startup’s landing page and email signup. Tools like BuzzSumo can help you to find what sort of content performs best.

Stalk your competitors. Browsing review sites such as G2, Captara, and Product Hunt will give you insights into what consumers are saying about your competitors. This will not only help you to understand the competitive landscape, it will also give you ideas on the sort of messaging and content will resonate well with your audience.

A “sweet” example of early marketing:

One year in this course our fictional venture was “Uber for fresh-baked cookies” – just push a button on your phone and fresh cookies arrive at your doorstep. Our assumption was that young men would be our typical customer persona – they get the munchies at midnight, don’t know how to make cookies, so they will order some from us. We spent $50 on some social media ads, just to test the idea, and upon looking at the demographic that was responding to our ads and were surprised that the core demographic clicking on our ads was women over fifty. So we reached out to some and they told us the reason they had responded to the ad was that fresh delivered cookies looked like something they would like to give as a gift to someone. So, for $50, we uncovered a key insight: we thought men in their 20’s would be our early customers, but it turned out that women over 50 loved the idea of giving our product as a gift to someone!

Not only that, we gathered some key metrics because $50 in ad spend yielded 15,260 impressions, 235 clicks, and 17 direct inquiries. Now we can start to project what our Customer Acquisition Cost will be, based on some actual data instead of just wild-ass guesses. 

The point of this “sweet” story about cookies is that we live in an era where some initial marketing is incredibly inexpensive and the data gathered can be incredibly informative. Don’t wait until your product is complete before beginning some marketing activities. 

Summary:

Even if your startup is many months away from actually having a product or service to sell, executing on some of the ideas listed above will give you insights, data, leads, and online equity that will dramatically improve your odds of success.

Great entrepreneurs know that successful startup methodology means doing customer development while doing product development.