Growing a Startup has its fair share of hardships, but you’ll have to push through. The main question is, how do you overcome these hardships? Well, let me tell you.
What you will learn:
- Competitive market analysis
- Lean and Agile workflow
- A/B tests
- SEO, SEO, and SEO!
- Create a mailing list for stakeholders
- Digital Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- Conclusion
Over the years, startup world has become crowded to such an extent where unique selling propositions are just a bunch of replicated features. In such an ecosystem, let us discuss some tips to stand out.
Competitive Market Analysis
A competitive market analysis is essential for a startup, how are you going to progress, if you don’t know what your competitors are doing? In short, you will need to do extensive research into your major competitors to understand how they promote their products, how they get sales, what their marketing tactics are, and more. This will allow you to understand the ins and outs of your competitors, which you can then, capitalise on, AND it will allow you to make sure you’re constantly one step ahead of the industry standards.
Now, you’re wondering, how do you create a competitive analysis report? Don’t worry, I got you:
- Find your Competitors: Make sure to differentiate between direct competitors and Indirect competitors!
Direct competitors: Offer a product/service that’s very similar to yours. Indirect competitors: Offer a product/service that is not the same but, could solve the same issue your company is solving. - What products/services do your competitors offer and price: Identify all their products and evaluate the quality of the products +++ don’t forget to evaluate their pricing.
- Look at their sales tactics and how well they do: What’s their sales process like? Are they are expanding? Why don’t some customers buy from them? What is their revenue per year? Are they constantly discounting their products?
- Analyse how they market the products/services: Are they using a blog? What social media channels are they using? Are they using any unconventional channels? Do they have any case studies? Do they have a FAQs section?
- What content do they make on social media: See what content their audience likes better and see what content they don’t make, so you can capitalise on that.
- What ads do they use: Make sure you see what they use and don’t use, look at the keywords they use and what type of content they use for different advertising services.
- Complete a SWOT analysis: A SWOT analysis is pretty simple, here’s an example I found online:
Lean and Agile Workflow
Time is very important for startups, which is why implementing a Lean and Agile methodology is KEY. BUT, don’t get Lean and agile mixed up, they are very different.
Lean: This encourages teams to focus on projects that deliver value to the customer — focus on launching small, trial campaigns and learning from them.
Agile: This is a shift from how marketing teams work. It is a value-driven approach that helps marketing teams quickly adapt, adjust, and optimise their strategies.
Why should YOU start implementing an Agile Workflow? Here’s a couple reasons why:
Efficiency: You are required to constantly measure your work, which will allow you to track what campaigns do better, in order to improve the quality of your campaigns quickly.
Alignment: Agile Marketing will allow you to align your work with the other departments better, in order to have everyone on the same page.
Productivity: It makes the employees work in smaller, more cross-functional teams, in order to create better decisions and improve productivity.
Customer-focus: This makes the customer the center of every single project or idea you have.
A/B tests
This links with having an agile workflow, as this improves efficiency and productivity. You might also know this as split testing, this is an experiment to uncover what your customers better prefer. It involves creating two or more versions of a single variable (web page, email content, email subject, etc.) which are shown to different sections of your audience at the same time, in order to determine which version gets better metrics. From this, you can start producing more campaigns that get better results and you should definitely continue to do more, as times change, and people may be looking for different things.
You want more benefits? No worries…
- Reduced bounce rates: A/B tests allow you to see what content or elements on the page keeps users on the site for longer.
- Increased conversion rates: We all love seeing conversions, so why not do more A/B tests?
- Reduced risks: If you’re unsure whether a change may lead to a decrease in conversions, why not A/B test it, instead of changing it for everyone. Simple.
SEO, SEO, and SEO!
You’ve probably heard SEO way too much in your life, but that just proves how important it is. Let me just explain it, in case you weren’t sure..
SEO: Search Engine Optimisation (ez pz). In order for people to find your website on Bing or Google, you need to improve your organic search results. For example, If I typed “how to find influencers for my brand”, I would like “FuzeMon” to appear. Wouldn’t you want your business to appear at the top of the search too?
Now, how do I do that? First, you should know how Google ranks a page:
- Relevancy: Keywords are very important for Google to understand what your website is about.
- Authority: If you have a popular website, it will automatically be ranked higher as, it assumes more people will want to go on it.
Second, keep your URLs short and make sure your page is quick, Search engines really don’t like lengthy strings of words and slow load times (it’s an indicator of quality).
Third, Blogging is a great way to improve your website’s SEO. Blogging boosts your website’s position, as it appears as a relevant answer to a customer’s question. Blogs that include many on-page keywords can give you a higher chance of ranking better and makes your site look more appealing to users.
Lastly, make sure that the keywords you use relates to what your customers would search AND you place the keywords in the URL, Page title and make sure the Images include keywords in the filename.
Create a mailing list for stakeholders
Stakeholders generally have a great pool of knowledge and tips for your growth. Equipped with a set of “external” eyes, they bring cross-industry knowledge to the table. So, you would want to keep them updated and keep them involved to certain extent for your business’ growth.
Create 2 mailing lists — one for updates and one for requests. This makes it easier to reach out to the bunch of stakeholders right for the job.
Digital Marketing
You see your competitors have a bunch of different social media accounts, but should you do that? (quick answer: no).
Imagine you had Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit, do you think you have time to post GOOD content on all of these, as a startup? Probably, no (unless you get some people dedicated to creating content), it will take up too much time.
So, the next best thing is to simply stick to one or two channels. Since you’ve already evaluated your competitors and what content they make, their engagement and what channels they get most of their customers from, this should make your choice much easier. See, whether they’ve forgotten about any channels that you can capitalise on and see if they have any content that YOU can make better.
EZ PZ, right?
Influencer Marketing
Finally, my favourite part… Influencer Marketing. Influencer marketing was estimated to be a $13.8 billion market in 2021 [1], but what is it? Simply put, it involves using product placements and endorsements from influencers or content creators.
However, finding Influencers that fit your budget and dealing with Influencers can be very difficult. BUT, we have a solution for you… FuzeMon. Ever heard of it? It’s the best way to find a list of influencers and reach out to them, all at once + a dashboard that gives you all the analytics for the promotion.
Conclusion
These tips are not a one size fits all, you will have to evaluate what tips will help YOUR business and understand that bumps are normal in a startup, you just need to learn to overcome them and become become better.
Did I mention FuzeMon is affordable? Check it out: https://fuzemon.com/