One of the common challenges you would face as a marketer working at a new startup is how to market a product.
The founder has an idea and great ambition, but the budget might be tight.
There are competitors, too, making it difficult to enter a saturated market and convince people to leave existing products and take a chance on a new one.
Of course, using paid ads will deliver better results quickly, provided the advertising campaign is handled well enough.
Sadly, the effects always wear off too fast, leaving the metrics or Key Performance Indicators, like traffic and clicks, to drop tremendously.
In this post, you will learn how to market your startup using long-term strategies. You will find marketing ideas and how to start them even if you are new to marketing.
Read on.
Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.
… It is possible that your work isn’t good as it needs to be. But it’s also possible that you failed to be clear about who it was for in the first.
Seth Godin
There are many studies and research on why people buy a product. If everyone understood them, it would be easier to run campaigns. The ratio of successful businesses to those that fail would be 100000: 1.
There are too many things to consider and too many influences, but at the heart of it, marketing is the process of bringing a quality product to those who really need it. If the product is good, and you take it to those who want it, it becomes easy to convince them.
For instance, you are not just selling toys.
You are selling toys to mothers.
Or you can make it better by selling toys to single mums who work full-time.
Okay, we are not diving into marketing here. You just want strategies that work for your business, so let’s talk about that.
To take a deeper dive into all these steps, check the former blog post on the topic: 5 key elements of a business plan
These are 9 methods you use to create awareness about your products before launching.
They can be effective, depending on how you go about the execution. I will list and explain them below, and we will talk about all the tips that can bring success in each section.
There are many methods you can learn on how to market a product online. These ones are quite affordable:
Starting a newsletter is one of the best ways to build an audience. However, it is not something you can do in a short time.
You have to stay consistent and offer something remarkably important for people to subscribe. Think of something you would normally pay for (an ebook, a course, a template) or something more consistent like weekly lessons on a particular topic.
These are my top 3 favorite newsletters and the value they offer:
You will need
There are many places you can put your email subscription link. The only rule is to put it where your exact audience can see it. So if you haven’t taken the time to know your audience and where to find them, now’s the time.
These are places you can put the email subscription link:
You can simply save yourself time and hire a direct response copywriter. However, if you are confident in your writing conversion rate, write it yourself.
Take a day or two to learn those. You are learning how to market your product effectively, which can influence your decisions during production.
It’s unlikely that one guest post can bring the amount of traffic you need to market your startup.
However, I have seen posts that hit millions in traffic after publishing. So, yes, you can write a single guest blog post and see a remarkable result.
For instance, this post, 7 Rejections, on Medium has 40k + engagements
This post statistics according to Buzzsumo
The Inbound Links according to Moz
Inbound link is another way of saying this is the number of websites or bloggers who think the post is great and decide to link to it.
We will use that post, 7 Rejections, as our example. Why does it have so much engagement?
Now you see that getting a lot of traffic from one guest post is possible, but you can’t just write and publish and expect all of that. If you are not famous, you have to reach out to other bloggers and social media influencers. The post you write should be worth reading a million times. (I have read that single post hundreds of times since it was published in 2015.)
Epic.
The type of blog post you write should be epic. It could be a guide, an interview, a story, an analysis, or a case study. In short, it should be timeless, and other people should want to link to it.
Here are examples of blog posts that have been read many times. They have brought thousands of traffic, backlinks, and shares to their websites. Check them out:
The second post is like a study guide on how Elon Musk founded his companies. The post is an example of what happens when a famous blogger meets a famous founder.
Remember when I said the types of posts you write should be epic? These are specific examples:
This option is a better idea. Instead of writing a guest post, why not write 20 – 200 and publish on different websites.
This is how you market a product for a startup. You want people to notice it in many countries, places, and locations, so publishing many guest posts in several places can help you create a broader awareness. If you link back to your website, guest posting can increase your Domain Authority.
Publish your guest post
These are all examples of websites with a high number of monthly visitors. Of course, it doesn’t mean your post will get all the millions or thousands of visitors, but it will help in gaining visibility to the number of monthly users or people that actively visit those websites.
Domain Authority: All things being equal, a page on an authoritative domain will rank higher than a page on a domain with less authority.
Source: Brian Dean, Backlinko
Google considers some ranking factors even though they don’t admit it sometimes.
Since you are writing it as a guest post, you will be missing out on some things such as backlinks, rating, and google ranking. However, if the post is helpful to the audience and optimized for search engines, readers will find you or your product.
Google search
Input the following in your query
Cold outreach
A few websites will ask you to pay to write about you, but that’s an option that has changed a little from guest blogging. My understanding of guest blogging is adding value to another platform so that the reader gets educated by someone who knows better. It is like inviting a specialist. Therefore, it should be free or pay the writer. But check with the website and see if you want to pay for that.
This blog is an example of an SEO blog. It is a process of consistently creating Search Engine Optimized content on a blog, increasing traffic, and growing a business. The commonest way is collecting an email list. When it is time to launch, both the blog and the email list will serve as a marketing medium.
Imagine you created a blog. You start writing content on the blog using the best SEO practices. Six months down the line, you have a million visitors. 100 000 people subscribe to your blog, and 80% always check our weekly newsletter or visit your blog.
You decide to discount the product and start informing your 100,000 newsletter readers about it. The response can be quite positive. You can get a lot of sales when you eventually launch.
Many businesses can leverage blogging to market a product for free. This blog is about SEO and storytelling (how to get traffic and write words that make you feel something). So you can stick around and learn one or two things.
It is easy nowadays to start a blog. My blog is hosted on WordPress, and the domain is from Namecheap.
It looks simple, but there are many things you need to learn. You can read this guide on how to start a blog to understand the foundation of things.
The three other important things:
This is one of the best ways to market your online business for free. However, you shouldn’t expect a great turnaround at once. Do your research based on
I found this list of platforms where you can launch your products for free.
Some names on the list include:
There is a lot that goes into podcasting. For starters, you can’t do it alone. You need someone who has an impressive online presence, someone whose voice people want to hear.
It all depends on the podcast’s theme, but the overall goal is consistency and growing an audience. It could be through email, social media followers, or consistent subscribers who get notified of your content.
Approximate cost of starting a podcast:
Podcasting isn’t really one of the ways to market your online business for free, but it is quite affordable.
You will need:
You might spend about $2000 for the first month and half of that for consequent months.
Try to reach out to people who have successful podcasts to ask questions.
Starting a youtube channel is also one way you can market your startup. However, it has the same weakness as starting an SEO blog or podcasting. It takes time.
The good news is that the YouTube conversion rate was 70% in 2021. It is the second most visited website globally and takes 25% of all mobile traffic.
So when you ask how to market a product for startups, consider starting a YouTube channel.
What you will need
When startup founders ask how to market a product, sometimes, it is not that they don’t know. Most times, they want the one channel that kind of drives results. Guess where many people would hear about your product first?
Social media
According to Hubspot data for 2021, social media is the number one place for marketing, while websites come second. So, it is a wise thing to include it in your plan.
I wish I could give some personal anecdotes on this, but my social media following isn’t a good example at the moment. However, these are the things that are worth talking about
Each platform has a different approach to them, and you’ll probably need a course or two on how to market a product on social media. You can find free courses on Hubspot academy.
Slack or telegram is one of the ways to promote a product. This community looks more private than social media pages. You can invite your social media followers and use it as an early form of promotion. The audience can ask questions, and then you answer them.
You can also share your products in other people’s slack or telegram communities. Ask for permission to avoid being kicked out.
You know why social media gets a lot of visitors per day.
Everyone is a content creator.
Unlike many websites or blogs, social media allows anyone to create content.
User-generated content is content about a product created by the users of the products.
It is one of the best if you’re looking for how to market a new product. You can end up starting a trend that will last for days.
My name is Ade, and I just launched a game app called STORY. The game has 100 levels. I posted on social media that people should sign up and play. I added that I’m sending some gaming accessories to hundred people who first reach level 10.
Don’t forget to use the hashtags #gamingwithSTORY
Now, you get how it works. People will start sharing the hashtags and posting them on social media and ask their friends to retweet so that the words will spread.
You have probably seen hashtags like that before, and maybe you have participated. The idea is to spread the news about a product or brand.
It depends on what you’re giving in return. I have seen book authors giving copies of books to people who participate in challenges. I have participated and won copies of the book this way.
As a brand, what are you offering in exchange for the winners among the participants? How many winners? These are the things that will determine the cost of this marketing strategy.
If you ask experts how to market a product, they might give you clear and specific pieces of advice. One of those will be “use multiple channels.” For example, as you publish an SEO blog, start an email list and create social media content from your blog post.
This post has covered how to market your product. Yes, there are other amazing ways you can market your startup. I hope this post will help you understand what options you can start with, especially if you’re launching in the next 6 months.
PS:
You can bookmark the post and check later. I will explain some of the marketing strategies in the coming week.
You can contact me for writing services. For Upwork users, you can check my project catalog.
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