Companies spend a lot of their marketing budgets on paid advertising. Companies must get creative and weave organic approaches into their overall promotion strategy to save on ads and boost profitability. This blog outlines some of the best marketing strategies for startups that result in increased brand recall, customer acquisitions, and expansion of customer lifetime value.
10 Popular Marketing Strategies for Startups
Improve your company’s marketing game with creativity, strategy, and measurability. Here’s a snapshot of popular marketing pillars.
1. Build a Strong Referral Engine
Customers who love your product are more likely to share it with friends. An easy-to-access referral program and attractive rewards will nudge them to proactively refer your product to friends, family, and social media followers.
2. Acquire Early Adopters With Beta Invites
Companies are continuously innovating and introducing new features to their platforms. One effective way to attract new customers is to offer front-row seats to the latest innovations via beta invites. This is a time-tested way to acquire new customers, get feedback and work with real-time data to improve. For instance, you can design an enticing email and social media strategy and offer giveaways to engage customers. Ensuring that your mailing list is comprehensive and authentic is a good investment.
3. Be the Voice of Your Brand
As a founder, you get to advocate for your brand in creative ways. For instance, LinkedIn is an effective platform to share your thought leadership content and grow your network. You can talk about the problem you are solving through your product, along with use cases in authored articles in prominent publications and short videos that can be amplified via your social pages. Be sure to use your product, and engage with customers via your company’s platform and social media pages.
4. Share Profits with Customers
A growing number of brands are seeing the benefit of rewarding customers with cashback on special occasions. Businesses can gamify the process to make it engaging for customers. You’d be surprised how even small amounts of cash or discounts can excite users. For instance, fintech company CRED offers users gamified opportunities to win cashback once they pay their credit card bills.
5. Host a Signature Contest
Consumers love contests that give them a platform to express themselves, showcase their talents, and win rewards. Your brand can launch a significant challenge that comes to be associated with your brand, and the challenge should directly connect to your business. Popular brand contests can develop a cult following, trigger user-generated content, and inspire brand love. For instance, GoPro’s Million Dollar Challenge invited customers to “capture something cinematically captivating that also highlighted a feature on the new HERO10 Black”, feature it on their social media pages, and reward the best ones with a million dollars.
6. Spotlight User-Generated Content(UGC)
Customers love to promote brands they patronize on their social feeds. But one of the biggest mistakes brands make is ignoring user-generated content, which results in customers feeling under-appreciated. The brand must take advantage of the opportunity to leverage this media as core content marketing material. Brands must identify creative ways to spotlight and amplify UGC across all channels and build organic traction around it, regardless of whether it is for a signature campaign. This is one of the simplest and best marketing strategies for startups to fire up their social pages and build brand credibility.
7. Partner with a Complementary Brand
One of the best marketing strategies for startups is to run engaging barter-style co-branded social media and email marketing campaigns with a partner brand. It is cost-effective and can give your business a whole new audience. Ensure that your partner business sells complementary products and does not own a competitor brand, as this would be a conflict of interest and defeat the purpose of your campaign.
8. Design a Powerful Video Campaign
Video has emerged as one of the most popular content formats. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the audience reach for online videos was already 91.4% worldwide. Brands that invest in powerful video content can generate conversations and curiosity around their products much faster. According to a research study, 94% of marketers share that video marketing has helped increase customer understanding of their products and services. The videos need not be about your product but can trigger conversations relevant to the domain. For instance, the travel booking platform Ixigo generated a lot of online buzz when it made a memorable, humorous video series around airline travel etiquette.
9. Fire Up Your Email Strategy
By 2025, the world is expected to exchange 376.4 billion e-mails daily! Brands can turn potential customers into leads by building a personalized email marketing strategy. For instance, eCommerce platforms can share product recommendations based on a consumer’s shopping behaviour and browsing history instead of random products. They can also engage with existing customers seeking useful information and exclusive access, nudging them to go from browsing to shopping.
10. Build an Engaging Loyalty Program
Retaining a customer is less expensive than acquiring a new one, and loyalty programs are a great way to do so. Encourage consumers to stay loyal to your brand from Day 1 with a hard-to-resist loyalty program – offer rewards, exclusive access, and discounts for every step of their engagement with your brand. You can keep updating the rewards program and work on bringing more exclusivity to the mix. For instance, loyalty program members could be offered an additional 5 % discount during online retail sales.
The Takeaway
The best marketing strategies for startups are often triggered when businesses have limited budgets and unlimited reserves of imagination. Bringing strategy and creativity into the mix can be a game-changer for your brand’s image and drive organic customer acquisition.
Are you looking to accelerate the growth of your business in innovative ways? Apply now to join Scalix! Scalix is a Founders platform by LetsVenture where we partner with you in your journey from Startup to Scale.
