10 essential marketing tips for start-ups

It’s no easy feat to run a business, which is why so many small businesses “fail” by industry standards just as quickly as they were started. Add in the extra pressure from accounting, operations, business strategy, and marketing, and it’s no surprise that start up business owners can become overwhelmed. Furthermore, knowing what needs to be done versus being able to act on the knowledge can be the make-it-or-break-it for your start-up’s success. We don’t want you spending time reading about what to do with no actionable plan or measurable result, now do we?

Rather than letting you go in circles, not quite sure what to do or what is best for marketing your business, we will be giving you 10 essential tips for marketing your start-up in this written piece. Continue reading to learn more and make changes to your marketing strategy that will improve your start-up’s recognition and audience reach.

10 Essential Marketing Tips For Start-Ups

Start Small

If this is your first time trying out marketing (it probably is since you’re reading this), you don’t want to dive in only to drown in the details, options, platforms, strategy, etc. Instead, take a breath, identify one small area/piece of content which interests you and dip your toe in the proverbial pool that is marketing. Remember, you don’t have to build your entire strategy, create content, and post all that you have to offer in one day. Take the time to start small, build audience engagement, and grow from there.  

Understand Your Audience

One of the most important tips we can offer to you that is so often lost with beginner marketing is understanding your audience. You’re not going to get anywhere if your product is milk but you’re only advertising in a way that interests cows. Know who your audience is and define key phrases, hooks, and areas of interests that will draw prospective clients who are willing to commit, rather than scrollers who won’t give more than a few seconds of attention. 

Craft Your Message

This tip really plays off of tip #2 - if you don’t identify your target audience, you can’t craft an effective message. Remember, with marketing and social media platforms, you want to catch the viewer’s attention and convince them to commit to your company’s offered services. Craft a message that is simple, easy to understand, and embodies what you offer, the benefit to the customer, and what makes you different so the viewer knows they’re making the right choice.

Define Your CTA

Let’s start with defining CTA. CTA stands for Call To Action, in other words, your big flashing sign to your audience to work with you and try your services because you offer something they need. Define what your difference is to competition and weave that throughout your CTA’s to grab your audience’s attention. You want to entice your prospective clients to make the leap and work with your company, so make it engaging and relevant to your business as well as the content in which it’s nestled. 

Brush up on Marketing Speak

Marketing is an ever-evolving field with much to offer. Chances are, you will never know everything, but you can do your part to stay on top of relevant trends, key words, catch phrases, and strategy so you can present your company in a compelling, modern way. Brushing up your marketing speak can be as easy as Googling topics such as “Marketing 101,” “Marketing Trends,” and “Marketing for Beginners.” Take the time to stay abreast of what’s happening and you’ll feel more confident in your approach to start-up marketing.

Study Your Competition - but not too much

Just like in business, you want to know your competition and take note of their approach to marketing campaigns so you know how to counter and hold your own, but you don’t want to study your competition too much. If you avidly check the competition’s social media platforms and read into their marketed content, it’s inevitable that what you produce will begin to mirror their approach. We don’t want you making this mistake. Study your competition just enough to know what you’re up against, then take a step back and create something original to showcase your company. Don’t be a copycat, it’s not a good look on anyone. 

Set Your KPIs

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are your quick and easy way to evaluate the success of your marketing efforts. Since marketing is it’s own initiative (and should be treated as such) you’ll want to create metrics that you can refer to as you continue to market your start-up so you know how well each effort is performing. As you track each individual activity, you can better gauge what your audience likes/dislikes, what draws in new viewers, and what converts a viewer from a prospect to a customer. Dedicate the time to marketing that you would to any other effort in your business… trust us, it’s just as important.

Hire a Team

This may seem like an odd course of action to take at first, but it will mean the least amount of work for you, with the highest return on investment. Using a professional, tenured team to lead your marketing efforts when you’re starting out will save you the time and headache of watching trends, creating content, uploading to multiple social channels, etc. In the end, the investment in a reliable team (such as Krohn Marketing) will remove the extra work required for start-up marketing so you can dedicate your efforts to the other aspects of your business.

Press Go

We understand how much pressure there is when it comes to beginner marketing, especially if marketing isn’t your strong suit. However, if you never start, you’ll never learn. Our best tip to overcome the fear of starting? Press Go! Just start with something simple, see what happens, reflect on the outcome, and learn from it. Try the marketing tactic that makes you nervous and see what happens. With support from the right team, you’ll start tackling marketing in no time… as long as you Press Go. 

Measure Your Results

Last, but certainly not least, measure your results. You set performance indicators in tip #7, so don’t let them go to waste. You have metrics that spell out success to your organization, so track them. Many social media platforms have built-in metrics related to audience engagement and post success. Use these features. Since the work is already done for you, brush up on how the platforms gauge this (hint hint… there’s going to be data on this if you Google the platform), and utilize it to track what works and what doesn’t so you know what to keep doing and creating. 

Next Steps

We truly hope you’ve found value in the 10 Essential Marketing Tips for your start-up that we outlined in this piece. However, we also recognize that marketing your business is no easy venture, especially if marketing is outside of your forte. This is partially why we wrote this piece - to outline easy to follow, actionable tips for you to try out marketing for yourself, but also to let you know that you are not alone. Krohn Marketing is a marketing consulting team geared toward helping companies succeed, no matter their shape or size. 

Our services are designed to make your organization stronger and enable you to tackle the world of marketing and content strategy for as long as your company needs. To learn more about our marketing consulting services and how hiring us can help you (remember tip #8?), schedule a discovery call with our team to make sure that we can start your marketing efforts on the right foot.