What you need to know to create an effective marketing strategy for your Startup.

Many startups are born from the union of businessmen and engineers that share and believe in a brilliant business idea. It’s common to find small businesses capable of developing extraordinary and highly functional digital products or services ready to be sold but feel hesitant on how to reach the market effectively.?

If you feel considerable unfamiliar with basic marketing concepts and principles and are not sure how to start creating your business marketing strategy, the following will help you:?

Learn about your market.?

Learning and understanding what’s going on in the market you want to reach will give most of the information you’ll need to create and align products or services that truly impact the consumers.?

Market research is defined as the process of evaluating the feasibility of a new product or service, through research conducted directly with potential consumers.

Among the benefits of executing market research you’ll find:?

• It helps businesses strengthen their?position. Knowledge is power.
• It?minimizes?any investment?risk.
• It identifies potential?threats?and?opportunities.?
• It helps to discover your’s and your?competitor’s?strengths and weaknesses
• It facilitates?strategic planning.?
• It helps in spotting?emerging trends.?
• It assists businesses to stay?ahead of the competition.
• It provides?revenue projections.
• It?focuses on customer?needs and demands.?
• It helps to?evaluate?the?success?of a business against benchmarks.?

By starting with the market research, you’ll make sure that you are carrying out your project based on real market needs allowing you to define where and how you should reach out through a marketing strategy.?

There are innumerable ways to execute market research but you’ll find there are only 2 types of information gathering:?

Primary:?is information that comes?directly from the source--that is, potential customers.?

Secondary:?this?involves gathering?statistics, reports, studies,?and other data from organizations such as government agencies, trade associations, and your local chamber of commerce.

Define your company's personality for marketing.?

I often imagine marketing as a way to express a company’s personality. This personality should be based on the principles and core concepts such as:?

• Mision - what you want to achieve with your offer.?
• Vision - how you want to achieve your mission.?
• Core offering - what you want your company to be known for.?
• Values - beliefs and principles that drive your company.?
• Processes - how you do your everyday work.?

Having these concepts well defined will allow you to delimit the most basic traits of your company’s personality.?

Here’s a quick example: let’s imagine that you’re developing an online event platform, your mission is to connect more people, your vision is to give people the opportunity to easily attend online events through the functionalities of your platform. Your core offering is to offer anyone in the world access to an event they could never attend in person. Some of your values are communication, union, and happiness. Your processes are based on small challenges to achieve goals as fast as possible.?

To project these traits your company’s personality should be socially skilled and communicative, fun and easy-going, casual, loving, and encouraging.?

Another vital trait to define your company’s personality is your brand guidelines. These are usually composed of 2 areas:?

Visual guidelines: It includes your logo, typography, and color palette.?

Communication guidelines:?Includes tonal principles, voice (what the company is and is not), tone according to channel, and public and stylistic guidance (punctuation, lexicon, formatting, and more).?

It’s easier to produce copy and messages for your prospects if you're clear on your company’s personality and how you want to be known in the world.?

Get to know your buyer persona and define the ideal buyer journey.

The?buyer persona?is a basic concept used to create well-targeted marketing campaigns. It consists of creating a profile of your company’s ideal buyer. This profile will contain detailed information on?

• Geographics: region, country, state, and zip code.
• Demographics: gender, age range, family, education, annual income, and location.
• Psychographics: personality, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyle.?
• Behavioral: career, hobbies, interests, communication, channels preferred, and activities.?
• Goals: personal and professional goals.?
• Challenges: all kinds of difficulties to achieve their goals.?
• Fears: everything that provokes an unpleasant state of mind regarding their future.?
• Common objections: worries and barriers to acquiring a product or service.?

Most marketing campaigns are based on making an offer to solve a challenge, achieve a goal, overcome fear, generate a behavior, or connect with people’s interests through the functionalities of a product or attributes of a service. Knowing your buyer’s persona profile will allow you to make outstanding targeted campaigns that would truly reach a potential client.

The?buyer journey?it’s the path your future client should follow to acquire your product or service. With a complete marketing strategy, you can influence their decision from the moment they find out about their current need to the moment they make their purchase.?

It’s important to have a good understanding of the?buyer's journey and understand the stages it goes through to align every strategic effort.?

Buyer’s journeys usually have 3 stages with primary objectives:?

1. Awareness - This is the stage where you educate your audience about the existence of services, products, or core value propositions.?
2. Consideration- This is the stage where you show them how your potential client problems can be solved and the benefits they’d receive by hiring us
3. Conversion - In this stage, your goal is to help them make a positive decision and become a client.

As said before, most marketing campaigns are based on the needs of the buyer persona but they’re also developed to meet the objectives of each buyer journey stage.?

Make a highly functional website.?

A company’s website is the backbone of its marketing. Whether they can make a direct purchase on the website or just contact you (mostly for services companies), all marketing campaigns should lead to your website where you’d be able to convert from only interested into a buyer.?

Your website is your company’s online profile that everybody can see and consult at any time. Besides providing direct contact, It should have the objective of answering every single question your potential client could have about your company, your product or services, and the way you work.?

A complete website should be showing the following:?

• Home: who you are, how you work, and an immediate way to contact you.
• Services: all kinds of services you offer and what are they about
• About us: Mission, vision, values, core value, case studies, testimonials, contact, board members, and their tech bios.?
• Blog or Resources.
• FAQ.
• Join us / Recruitment page.
• Contact form.

Your website should be the final door for your potential buyers to contact you. The contact form is indisputable on every existing website, and marketing good practices suggests having it on display on every sub-page of your website. Try to avoid annoying pop-ups that block most of your information, but make sure to make it highly visible and easy to find.?

Consider consultation from a user experience expert to make your website path easy to follow and easy to lead visitors to take the action that will bring the greatest benefit to your business.

Build your KPIs?

A Key Performance Indicator is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. Getting to define your KPIs will allow you to be clear on how well your strategies are being made and deployed online.?

Since you could be creating marketing campaigns for both website and social media, you can have KPIs from both, here’s an example of the indicators you could be using:?

Audit your KPIs at least every 3 months or after every targeted campaign to readjust your strategy and get better results every time.?

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Even if your company does not have a marketing department or at least someone in charge of it, these are the very basic marketing principles you should be aware of and consider to develop an effective marketing strategy for your startup.?

My advice is to always start on be clear on who you are as a company, what you want to achieve, and how you want the world to see you, once you have all this your marketing efforts should flow more easily.?Best of luck with your next marketing success!?