Entrepreneurs often find themselves with long, never-ending to-do lists – and it’s no surprise, given just how much there is to be done. From finding new staff members and ensuring that you retain them to applying for venture capital and other essential funding to keep the lights on, start-ups are never dull. However, it’s important not to neglect your marketing needs, as good marketing can feed into all of the other goals. Here’s how to get some additional exposure to the world and to potential stakeholders and clients if you run a marketing start-up.
Get featured
Getting your name out there can be done in a host of different ways. One such way is organically: perhaps your CEO has an interesting story, for example, or your product or service is niche and unusual. This is all fodder for a press story, and so it’s worth spending some time finding journalists who cover your field and approaching them to see if they would be willing to cover you. If your strategic goal is to get more online leads, meanwhile, then you could always buy guest blog posts from providers who are able to place them in exactly the right location. This can then help push you up the search results in Google, which is the Holy Grail for many start-ups.
Be strategic
In the modern world, there are lots of marketing opportunities out there. However, the ease with which you can access them doesn’t match the level of effort needed to properly ace them: Google advertising, social media virality and much more are all difficult, and require you to be focused and strategic. By taking a methodical approach to these services, you can whittle down the list of potential marketing destinations and find the ones that are highly converting for you.
Go rogue
Running a start-up is already something a little bit out of the ordinary, so if you’re already in the headspace of innovation, why not go one step further and do something really unusual, such as pulling some sort of stunt? Say you’re developing a consumer health and wellbeing product. Arriving at a central, urban location with 10,000 of your products to give away for free is a real way to drive buzz around your brand and create new ambassadors for it. You can marry this up with your online strategy by announcing it to social mediaso that even those who didn’t receive a free sample will hear about your goodwill.
There’s no magic trick that will turn your start-up into a viral sensation overnight, but there are lots of ways that you can systematize your marketing to the point that it brings customers and stakeholders over the line. From designing some sort of stunt to ensuring that your links and brand are getting featured in all the places that matter, you’ll quickly be able to develop a rinse-and-repeat marketing strategy that gets you to where you need to be.