Growing a startup is a lengthy process that requires hard work and determination.
It's also important that you know what you're doing to avoid wasting valuable time and resources. In today's business world, competition among startups is high, which makes it difficult to successfully build a brand. If you want to get ahead of the pack, you need to sell and market your brand in a manner that appeals to your primary audience while at the same time growing your audience and exposure.
While you may be the expert in your field, the knowledge that you have about the industry might not extend to marketing. Every business needs to have marketing strategies that are effective if they want to experience quick growth rates. By making use of a strong marketing strategy, you'll be able to get the word out about your startup, which will help you build interest, bolster your customer base, and validate your end product.
Once you've built a strong and creative marketing strategy, you'll likely find that your brand and business are receiving a significant uptick in attention and interest from prospective customers. Many people feel like creative marketing is more engaging, informative, and memorable than standard marketing techniques that don't provide the customer with anything of interest to focus on. You need to captivate your target customer and keep their attention focused on your business.
Before you begin to market your startup business, it's important that you identify the main audience or market that your company is going to be targeting. For instance, millennials between the ages of 25-34 purchase Apple products more than any other demographic, which is why the majority of advertising performed by Apple centers around these customers.
When looking specifically at the medtech and bioscience industries, there are numerous startups being formed on a regular basis. Some of the top startups in these industries include Notable Labs, Codiak BioSciences, Medineering Surgical Robotics, and Axonics. If you've formed your startup and feel like it's time to start growing your business, you'll want to begin marketing the company and brand. To do so, find out who your target market is and what your business goals are. With this information in hand, you'll be able to create a robust plan for success before you even pursue a marketing campaign.
Your initial focus when beginning to market your startup business should be to build an effective marketing strategy that plays to your strengths and makes your business or product look appealing to prospective customers or clients. There are many different ways to build an effective marketing strategy when you're a startup, some of which are dependent on the industry that you work in. For instance, the marketing techniques used for a medtech startup are going to be far different than the techniques used to market a smartphone manufacturer.
While some aspects of building a marketing strategy for your startup are dependent on the industry that you work in, there are also several factors that apply to all industries and types of businesses. For instance, it's highly important that you leverage digital marketing as a core component of your marketing strategy. Digital marketing offers an array of benefits that aren't available with other forms of marketing. For instance, your ads can be much more targeted through digital marketing, which should provide you with a high ROI and fantastic customer conversion rates.
You should also focus on going to industry events whenever possible. Doing so will allow you to network your startup to other individuals within the industry, which will invariably provide your startup with more brand awareness. If you already have a strong network, don't hesitate to get in touch with some of your contacts when you want to begin marketing your business in earnest. They can provide you with support, resources, and advice that may be beneficial for your ongoing success.
When you begin to leverage digital marketing for your overall marketing strategy, it's highly recommended that you create some social campaigns with your marketing resources. Around 97 percent of all adults in the U.S. below the age of 65 use social media at least once every month, which gives you a good look at why a presence on social media is imperative for your startup.
The main hurdle that you'll need to get through when beginning to market your startup business is to find the funds that will allow you to create effective campaigns. As such, it's important that you look for marketing techniques that you can perform for free or at a very low cost. If you find that your budget is tight and you don't have time to perform the marketing yourself, you could consider working with freelance marketing on such websites as Fiverr and Upwork.
These communities of freelancers can provide you with work for one-off projects and campaigns. When hiring on Upwork, you can find freelancers for every facet of sales and marketing, which extends from creating a marketing strategy to implementing search engine optimization for your website. When you go this route, you just need to make sure that you thoroughly vet your freelancers to ensure that they provide work that matches the quality of your business. Cheap work will invariably reflect a cheap business, which will most likely result in an unsuccessful first marketing campaign.
If you want your marketing strategy to be as effective as possible, it's important that you spend your money wisely. In order to do so, it's recommended that you create a marketing budget every month. Each marketing budget that you create should be primarily based on your business goals. If you have strong revenue projections for the quarter, your marketing strategy should be aggressive, which will likely be reflected in the budget you create. Keep in mind that marketing is an investment as opposed to a cost. If your marketing is effective, your ROI will be high.
In today's world, businesses spend an average of 40-45 percent of their marketing on digital marketing, which is due in large part to how beneficial this type of marketing can be to a business. Upwards of 80 percent of Americans now shop online, which points towards the necessity of having a website for your business. With this website, you can more readily promote the services and products available through your company.
Whenever an online user clicks on an ad of yours or notices a commercial on TV for your startup, they can go to your website and find out more about what you offer. Studies have shown that around 75 percent of customers research a company on the internet before they visit the business or make a purchase, which displays how important this form of marketing is for your startup.
Likely the most important aspect of digital marketing is SEO, which refers to search engine optimization. To understand the importance of this online marketing technique, you should know that 93 percent of all online experiences begin with a search engine. This form of optimization involves making sure that your website appears towards the top of search results when a user types in a relevant keyword or key phrase. The vast majority of people using search engines will only select one of the first three results that they are provided with, which is why your goal should be to appear at the top of the results for anything related to your business.
Proper SEO allows you to build long-term and sustainable traffic. It's also a marketing technique that gets much easier to perform over time. While the initial SEO for your website does require some time and money to perform, you'll only need to update it in the future. SEO will also allow you to generate revenue through conversion-driven strategies. Once you've implemented search engine optimization into your website, you should use Google Analytics to analyze the traffic to your site. With this information, you'll be able to determine if your SEO efforts have been effective.
Another effective online marketing technique is pay-per-click marketing, which is an advertising model that allows you to pay only when a user clicks on an online ad of yours. While there are different PPC ad types, the most common is a paid search ad. These ads appear on search engines like Google, which allows you to target search users based on your campaign search criteria. This criteria can include age, user interests, search phrases and keywords, and demographics. Since you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, you won't waste money on an ineffective marketing campaign.
With a primary goal of exposure and driving interest, you should budget for social media marketing. Whether you advertise your business on Youtube or create a profile on Facebook, it's essential that you reach the millions upon millions of individuals who use social media every day. For a smaller startup, likely the best method for implementing social media marketing is to hire a social media marketing consultant, which can be a very beneficial move for startups that don't have the time to handle this marketing on their own. A social media marketing consultant would be able to create and manage your marketing campaigns, which means that a professional would be handling all of the marketing that you place on social media sites.
While you're planning on creating a social media marketing campaign, you should take some time to consider the costs of this marketing. Companies spend an average of $4,000-$8,000 on social media marketing per month, which includes paid advertising and pay-per-click ads. If you want to outsource your social media marketing to a third-party firm that can manage the marketing, you can expect to pay anywhere from $1,000-$20,000 each month. You can also hire freelance social media managers or virtual assistants to manage your accounts through websites such as Upwork.com or Fiverr.com.
The costs that you pay for pay-per-click ads depend on the social media platform that you market on. When you create an ad on Facebook, you'll pay an average of $0.57 for every click. When you wish to create a photo ad on Instagram, you'll be required to pay around $6.70 for every thousand views.
To effectively market yourself on social media and make good use of your marketing budget, you'll first want to establish goals that are specific, measurable, and attainable. Always use analytics to track the efficacy of your ads, which will allow you to change course if some of your marketing isn't working as intended. Another great way to effectively market yourself on social media is by learning everything about your target audience.
If your main audience is comprised of primarily millennials, you'll want to focus on creating content that's short and simple yet creative. You should also research the competition via a competitive analysis to identify what works for them and what doesn't. Remember that social media marketing won't be effective if you don't post content on a regular basis. You should also engage with your customers in comment sections whenever possible.
Among the top social media channels that are beneficial to startups include LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, the latter of which is easily the most popular. Validation of your brand on social media platforms will drive business while also making it possible that your product or idea goes viral, which would allow you to gain exposure to a much wider audience. If the social world loves your product and what your business has to offer, so too will interested investors.
Creating a strong and effective marketing strategy is absolutely essential for any company that wants to realize success in the modern business world. If you are a startup that's in need of a medtech/bioscience incubator to assist with your business goals, contact us or apply now at University Lab Partners -- the first wet lab incubator in Orange County!
Revised 11/17/2020
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