marketing, website, brand, lean-startup, contentIncreasing, with content based marketing becoming important, how should startups go about it ? How much amount of time should we devote on working on blogs, news letters, articles, tweets etc along with working on the main product. As a founder it can be hard to focus on doing this along with your product, is it advisable to outsource some of it?
Fwiw, it’s frequent for startups to waste inordinate amounts of resources chasing vaguely qualified traffic in rather dubious locations. And they invariably do so by devoting ridiculous amounts of time on “working on blogs, news letters, articles, tweets,” etc. And SEO.
So first off, make sure you’re chasing qualified leads instead of essentially random users from Google, Twitter, etc. What are your clients trying to solve or fix or whatever? What are your ideal clients like? Where do you find them? Target that, and worry about less qualified leads later.
Next up is why should these leads buy from you types of questions. Because you’re probably not differentiated well enough to make any difference. If you blank out the names on your competitors’ website and your own, you’ll often have difficulty telling them apart.
The follow-up is revisiting the marketing copy, and occasionally your site’s looks, since the previous step will usually make you painfully aware of how much it sucks. In plain English, that means making things clean and clear and compelling in order to convince qualified traffic to try the product, schedule a demo, subscribe to an auto-responder, call or email you, etc.
It helps here to have some kind of interesting freebie such as an ebook or an info-product at this stage; that right here is useful content marketing.
Put another way, get rid of pointless traffic, and get a decent conversion rate on the good traffic. As an aside, an industry standard conversion rates (2.5%) is not OK in this respect; it is abject. Well above average (5%) is anywhere between bad and good enough depending on what you’re selling and how.
I cannot stress the importance of qualifying leads and having good marketing enough. I’ve seen well targeted, “pre-sold” traffic sent by affiliates get 50% conversion rates on a crappy landing page that normally gets 3%. Which basically means that half of the visitors went straight for the buy button, while the other half scratched their eyes off, fully arrested by the abomination they were explicitly instructed to not read.
A/B test your progress and optimize your conversion rates. If your traffic is low, use low-cost keyword ads to get some. (Read this on that topic, and don’t land this traffic on your front page – get it on landing pages that are geared towards it.) You’ll get to test your future ads in advance as a bonus.
This type of activity is not something you can wave a magic wand and throw cheap labor at. It takes blood, sweat and tears to develop the needed skills. It also takes time. So hire someone who can do it the moment you can afford it. Or find a cofounder who can.
Once the conversion rate is in order, set the rest of the lead generation machinery in motion: partners, affiliates, ads, PR, etc. And blogs, and Twitter. Basically all of it. And track what works best.
Consider the tips below to help you create startup marketing strategy.
Using this tips will not only lead to a better user experience and ranking but it will eventually lead to increased conversions and sales.
Content marketing is said to be the best method of getting leads and nurturing them across the marketing funnel. Your focus shouldn’t be solely on publishing large quantities of content. In fact, quality of your content, more in-depth pieces of content (2000 words) are more likely to be shared than generic 400-word blog posts. Here are some tips on creating shareable content.
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