How to Market Your Startup: A Practical Strategy Guide

Marketing represents a major challenge for most startups, especially in their beginnings, as their marketing budget is often very limited and may not be sufficient. Especially, since it is difficult to assign the task of marketing to an advertising agency or a skilled e-marketer due to the lack of material resources.
For these reasons, we have made sure to provide a comprehensive guide on how to market for startups and to present the marketing ideas through which you can achieve significant growth in a short time and at the lowest financial cost.
Through this guide, we will provide practical steps, as well as several marketing tricks and ideas that are most common in the world of startup marketing.
The Startup Marketing Guide is an A to Z guide for e-marketers who want to learn more about marketing for startups, or for startup owners who are going to be marketing themselves and their products or services.
This guide focuses on e-marketing as the most important, least expensive and most useful, but this does not prevent that there are a lot of marketing ideas that we will review that are applicable using traditional marketing.
How to market your startup
Marketing is an art like drawing that requires creativity, but this does not prevent the existence of flexible rules or frameworks that govern this creativity. Entrpenuerhsip KSA will now review the framework that includes the marketing process for startups.
Through these steps, we will review a large number of marketing tricks and ideas that marketers always use to achieve the marketing goals of startup companies.
Step One: Market Segmentation of Your Startup
Market Segmentation is a very important step for every business owner because it is impossible to target all people at the same time. Accordingly, you need to divide the market and choose one or several segments to focus all our marketing efforts to attract them.
Segmentation of the market is not a process that is limited to small brands only, but that major brands that sell to everyone as Pepsi are targeting certain age segments of society to attract them and sell to them even though virtually all groups and segments drink Pepsi.
The segmentation process is a decisive step in the success of marketing or not, and therefore it is unacceptable to bypass it and launch random targeting.
You can divide the market by:
Geographical factors: province, city, geography or climate.
Demographic factors: gender, age, average income, marital status, educational stage,…etc.
Behavioral factors: buying and spending habits.
Psychological factors: lifestyle, ideas, beliefs, attitudes, priorities, personality type.
This division is due to the nature of your startup and the nature of the products or services you provide to its customers.
Market segmentation will help you choose the right niche or even micro niche for your products or services, as well as help you create your marketing messages later.
It will also help you discover other marketing and business opportunities by adding some flavor to your product or services to be more attractive to your target segment.
Second Step: Choosing the right segment and preparing a buyer persona for your startup
After dividing the market into segments, we must choose one or several segments to focus our marketing efforts on them. This selection process is carried out according to several factors, the most important of which are:
1) Segment Size
The size of the segment is one of the most important factors in choosing the marketing segment, as it reflects the attractiveness of this segment and the possibility of achieving the greatest amount of profits through it.
The size of the segment must also correspond to your resources and capabilities because the first condition for success is to provide services or products with high quality and any pressure that may negatively affect this quality we must avoid.
2) Revenue
The return or profit is another factor that complements the size of the segment, as it is important to take into account the fact that the segment you choose can bring returns commensurate with the expenses and effort you make.
3) Competition
Some may neglect the competition factor, but it may be pivotal in choosing a marketing segment. Entering into competition with many other companies and institutions for specific segments may be stressful and futile.
After choosing the appropriate marketing segment, you need to figure out the Buyer Persona, which is an imaginary persona for the appropriate or ideal customer for your startup who needs your products or services.
The Buyer Persona will help you understand your target audience more as well as it will be an important source of your marketing ideas.
Marketing departments in large companies create a large number of buyer personas.
This requires identifying several characteristics of this persona, which are:
-Age.
-Social, family and educational status.
-Interests.
-Motives and ambitions.
-General issues and problems that require him/her to purchase our product or service.
-Purchasing power.
-Which channels of communication are most attractive to him.
Step Three: Set the Marketing Goals for Your Startup
Before you start planning or implementing anything, you have to determine what you want. Startup companies have different goals and therefore their marketing goals – especially at the beginning -, for example:
* Some startups want to make as much profit as possible to push things to a higher level and therefore, the most prominent marketing goal here will be to achieve the largest number of sales.
* The company’s goal may be to capture the largest percentage of the market, and in this case, the marketing goal will be to attract and acquire the largest number of potential customers.
*The goal of the startup at this time may be to gain exposure, so it will rely on Viral Marketing, and its marketing goal will be Awareness.
Marketing objectives will greatly contribute to creating effective marketing ideas for your startup, as you will be able to determine whether you are achieving success or not, based on which you will set the KPI performance indicators that you will adhere to.
Step Four: Develop KPIs That Fit Your Marketing Objectives
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a very important part of the marketing process, as through them you can determine the success or failure of the advertising campaign. For this reason, the company’s goals and marketing goals must be determined to choose the appropriate performance indicators.
If the company’s goal at this time is fame, its performance indicators will be something like this:
- Reach.
- Engagement.
- Shares.
Compare the engagement rate with the total number of followers.
Virality rate.
If the company’s goal is to achieve the largest possible number of sales, its performance indicators will be centered around:
- Monthly Sales Growth.
- Frequency of customer purchase.
- Lead-to-Sale rate %.
- Average Cost Per Lead.
Performance indicators are one of the sources of inspiration for marketers, and through their ultimate goal they can come up with creative and successful marketing ideas.
Step Five: Choosing the Right Digital Marketing Channels
Choosing the right digital marketing channels is not easy for anyone, as it is a step that requires a lot of research to find effective marketing channels for your startup.
By knowing your target segment, you will be able to monitor the effective marketing channels for them, as the presence and online activity differ greatly between each marketing segment and the other.
1. Social media
Social media has changed the world in which we live and over time it has become one of the most powerful marketing channels in the modern era.
But it should be noted that social media is a big world and cannot be dealt with as a single entity.
2. Create a website
Many startups need to launch websites to market themselves, especially if this website includes a blog, as this contributes greatly to attracting customers and pushing them to buy.
The website will allow the company to use marketing methods, such as SEO and SEM marketing, which will allow you to attract many potential customers.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective and neglected marketing channels in our Arab world, and some commercial activities have recently proven the effectiveness and success of this type of marketing.
You can create a unique link between you and the potential customer and you can attract a large number of new customers by knowing a little data about them using your website or landing page.
Many experts confirm that email marketing is one of the most important methods of rapid growth in the world of marketing now, which can cause a big shift for your startup.
4. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a very successful marketing channel, and it is done through your agreement with an affiliate marketer to promote your products or services in exchange for a percentage of the profits from each sale.
According to many business owners, this marketing channel is very effective and constitutes a large part of their profits.
5. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has become one of the most important marketing channels in the recent period, which every online business owner must use and seek to promote his services or products.
Step 6: Prepare the Right Content For Your Startup and Use Growth Hacking
There is a very common saying in the world of marketing, which is: “Content is king.” Therefore, any marketing method, whatever it may be, will be based mainly on the words and ideas within it.
For this reason, the step of preparing and planning the content is very important.
In the beginning, you can define a few ideas or keywords, which will help you very much later, especially if you are going to launch a blog for your startup company. Through these keywords, you will be able to deduce the titles and topics of your articles.
Final Step: Learn From Mistakes and Improve
Finally comes the role of learning and experience, it is natural that your plans will not succeed 100% in the beginning, so you will make mistakes and learn and rearrange your affairs an infinite number of times, and this does not frustrate you.