Lean and Digital Marketing Secrets to Growth for 2015
You turned your ideas into a Minimum Viable Product and acquired some customers. Now what? Investors want to see traction, and you feel that you need to ramp up your marketing efforts but don’t know where to start. As our conference is drawing near, I asked some of the Startup Marketing Conference speakers to share their expert advice.
1. MARKET TO INFLUENCERS
“Group your potential customers around the problem you’re solving and the depth of problem. Next figure out who influences members of the group within the problem context and where do members of the group “hang out” together? Whether doing customer development or trying to scale, leverage the influencers and market to where they are.”
Brant Cooper, “The Lean Entrepreneur”, New York Times Bestselling Author
2. FOCUS ON SOLVING YOUR CUSTOMER’S PROBLEMS
“Stop thinking about your business. The absolute focus must be on problems that your potential already customers have, and how you might help them solve them. The are not looking for your features or “solution” – they are trying to avoid or minimize a specific pain.”
Tim Ash, CEO SiteTuners, bestselling author of Landing Page Optimization, and chair of Conversion Conference
3. INVEST IN YOUR SOCIAL CAPITAL, NOT SOCIAL MEDIA
“We often misinterpret the true value of social media. It is not about “likes”, comments or money. It is all about relationships and people. It is not about business to consumer; it is not about business to business. It is people to people and how you make them feel.”
Brian Solis, Principal Analyst, Altimeter Group
4. LOWER THE FRICTION TO INCREASE GROWTH
“It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on marketing; the secret weapon people don’t think about is how long it takes to sign up for a service. The lower the friction the higher the growth.”
Michelle Zatlyn, CEO/Co-Founder, Cloudflare
5. GROWTH IS ALL ABOUT WORD OF MOUTH
At the end of the day, growth is all about word of mouth. People tell their friends about your product after they have a great experience using it. Before you invest in testing your viral funnels, digging into your SEO strategy and spending precious dollars on marketing campaigns, make sure that you have a product that delights your user.”
Zack Onisko, Head of Growth & Marketing, Creative Market (Autodesk)
6. PROMOTE OTHERS
“Promoting others is one of the fastest paths for growth for a startup. By promoting others, you’re giving them a reason to promote you – making the growth rate exponential. One way is to show how others have used your product to their benefit, this teaches people how to use your product and markets it at the same time.”
Shira Abel, CEO, Hunter & Bard
7. BUILD ORGANIC GROWTH FIRST
“There will always be dozens of email marketing and other software vendors trying to get your business as you grow. Before you go and burn $12k or $24k signing up for a 1-year contract with them, be sure that you know how to grow your SaaS company by 5-7% week-over-week organically. Until you reach that point, it could be detrimental to your company to spend this budget.”
Adam Metz, VP BD, Pandadoc, (Amazon #1 Marketing Author)
8. THINK GLOBAL ACT LOCAL
“When you are considering to open your service / product to international markets, think locally.
Marketing is different from one culture to another, from one country to another. Google is far from being the first Search Engine in Russia, Facebook is not even available in China etc.
Strategy for your Search, Social and Content Marketing need to be unique for every country you are entering.
Acting locally is the first step in being global.”
Anji Ismail, CEO & Co-founder at DOZ.com
9. ADDRESS USER’S OBJECTIONS
“Ask users who say they would *not* buy your product what their objections are during moderated user testing. Dispel, or at least address, those objections explicitly in your home page or landing page copy. Watch conversions increase dramatically.”
George Revutsky, Founder, ROI.works Digital and Conversion Nerds
10. FIND YOUR STORY
“Find your story. Studies show that 63% of people remember stories, and only 5% of people remember facts. When you want to educate or inspire your customer, give them a story… a pointed story that will evoke a targeted emotion (joy, fear, inspired, etc.) that will support your call to action.”
Olivia June Poole, Director of Community Development, RocketSpace
11. LEARN WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS LOVE AND HATE
“Building a demand for your product can take time. To speed this up, start right now to build thought leadership content/blog-posts/white-papers, network with experts in your industry and learn what customers LOVE and HATE in your business niche. Most importantly, make sure everyone knows who you are.”
Michelle Regner, CEO and Co-Founder, Near-Me.com
12. KEEP IT SIMPLE
“At the core, Marketing is not that complicated. We are the bridge between the audience and the brand. What makes it complicated is that we get in our own way and we want to talk about ourselves. Marketing gets really simple when you understand what you can bring that your audience really wants. If you live through that lens, 50% of your problems go away right then and there.”
Todd Wilms, VP, Digital, Neustar
13. TRY. FAIL. LEARN.
“Don’t be afraid to fail. The only true failure for a lean startup is not tryingnew things. No-one gets it right the first time – even if they say they did after the event. Try. Fail. Learn. Repeat. But do it FAST – that’s the lean approach.”
Martyn Crew, Founder and CEO, Bootstrap Marketing