We live in the era of start-ups. Thousands of them were burnt just after a short period of existence, while others, however, have succeeded and now represent serious business players.
Let’s revise such advertising platform as Twitter as an example. It was used for communication between several colleagues and co-workers. The idea was not treated seriously for quite a long time. But now it is a new standard for communication on the Internet. What is their secret?
First of all we should start with two universal truths:
- Having a good product doesn’t mean you will be successful.
- Good marketing will not help you if your product is nothing, but rubbish.
Basics
Become viral
Hotmail, Dropbox and some their soul friends have won the audience with almost investment to marketing, their secret is in installing viral element to the product. It means that your product should be worth recommendation to a friend.
Communicate with your clients
You may have oceans of traffics, but low conversion rates. No time for guessing – ask your clients what frightens or dissatisfies them in your offer. There are thousands of ways to start opinion polls, Survey Monkey as a variant.
Note: users will be reluctant to spend their time for no compensation. You may offer your master class available for a specific audience or a trial period with full facilities.
Get feedbacks
New start-ups should be interested in the clients’ feedbacks. They are very short of time to react and improve the product until it is not too late. To be honest, people are quite lazy to fill all the questionnaires, think how you can motivate them.
Start with small audiences
Become mass market is good idea, but public is very reluctant and suspicious about changes. Being a new product, you’d better earn confidence from newbies and innovators. After positive experience with your products, being praised, you can attack mass markets. Try to use different channels to attract your customers – RTB advertising network, social media, video content, PPC ads etc
Paid marketing
It is silly to think that start-ups should use only free means for promotion. It is certainly wise if you spend $1 for attracting one user and he brings you 5 more. The most popular variants are the following:
Paid Search Marketing
If you have a treatment for a common human’s problem – they are very likely to google it. Paid search results are displayed over natural query. Some people may not even notice that small mark “ads”. The principle based on laziness as searching the answer on the 10th page is really long and if your snippet is attractive and likely to offer what your client need – why hesitate?
Main disadvantage is that it will be stopped as soon as you finish fueling it with money.
Affiliate Marketing
This strategy shouldn’t be considered as a main way out, but will suit as an addition. There are good rates at such places like ClickBank.
Earned marketing
Here we refer any type of advertising that was created by your followers, colleagues or partners – anyone who share your ideas and want to help.
One of main ideas here is to show that you are unique from others. It is difficult to say what you should exactly do, but people should understand why they should choose you instead of your competitors.
Implement your own channels
There are thousands of ideas like:
- email marketing;
- blogging;
- create videos about your product;
- content marketing;
- join social networks where your clients hang out.
- Online advertising network
Bottom line
You may get surprised, but all you have read just now is not a universal truth. Nobody can exclude human factor or a wonderful stroke of luck, sometimes perfect solutions for your main competitor can be absolutely not applicable for you. What to do? Test, experiment, take examples and tune them to your situation.