Developing your brand, marketing strategy and marketing plan are key stages when creating a start-up. Your marketing is key to growing your company, not only will it help you gain customers and generate sales, your marketing will also help you attract potential investors and collaborators.
Here are some tips to use when beginning to build a marketing strategy for your start-up.
What makes you unique?
Define what problem you are solving for your customer. How does your solution differ from alternative ways of trying to solve the problem? The definition of how your solution is unique should run through your branding and marketing strategy.
Define your brand
How do you intend people to perceive you? The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines a brand as “The set of physical attributes of a product or service, together with the beliefs and expectations surrounding it - a unique combination which the name or logo of the product or service should evoke in the mind of the audience.”
There are many building blocks to developing your brand. When starting out the first key step is defining the elements of your brand design.
In this digital age any choices you make early on when defining your brand will leave a lasting digital footprint on the internet, so don’t rush into it, take your time, however, you probably won’t get it 100% right straight away. Over time you can tweak and evolve your brand but always try to be consistent with your look, feel and tone of voice.
Know your audience
It’s pointless to develop a marketing strategy without really understanding your target audience, who they are and how they learn about new products or services. By knowing your audience it will help you develop an on point brand ‘look and feel’. It will also help you create and deliver relevant and engaging content through the most effective and efficient channels.
As a team try sketching out at least 3 marketing persona templates.
There are lots of persona templates on the internet, some more complicated than others, so to start with keep it really simple.
Name of the persona
Job title
Details about their role (day to day responsibilities)
Reporting structure (think about their purchasing power)
Key information about their company (size, industry, geographical coverage)
Demographics
Age
Gender
Location
Education level
Social media platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc)
Goals and challenges
Primary way of learning (in person, online, social media, exhibitions, seminars, journals)
How we can help (list 3 ways you could help this persona overcome their challenges)
Study your competition and peer groups
What is your competition doing? What’s working for them and what isn’t? If they are having success in an area how could you learn from them and build on their ideas. Alternatively what isn’t going well for them? It is always good to learn from someone else’s mistakes. Learning from competition will save you time, resource and money.
Content, Content, Content
Content marketing materials help to attract prospects and can then aid in transforming leads into customers.
For a start-up finding time, budget and resource to produce content can be a massive challenge. Producing scientific application notes or white papers can carry significant research and development costs compared to non-technical marketing content, so maximising the return on investment for these pieces is of the utmost importance.
Using a content atomization strategy is a resource efficient approach that allows for your content to have a greater reach.
Try utilising the expertise of an external marketing agency. As a start-up you will be handling many, many aspects of your business, so using an outsourced marketing agency can bring you many benefits:
New and different creative ideas
Marketing expertise
External perspective
Extra resource
Cost efficiency
Increased productivity
Polymorphic Marketing offer special introductory rates for start-up companies - contact us to see how we can help you build your marketing strategy.
Telephone: +44 (0)207 4594201
Comments