“Stop thinking like a marketer or advertiser. Start thinking like a publisher and socializer” – Mike Volpe
As a startup you most likely don’t have the huge budget needed for a great advertising and promotion campaign. However this doesn’t mean that you can’t make great marketing. It means that you need to be creative, innovative and cheap. So how did companies such as Dropbox, Xobni, Mint, Flipboard, or Shopkick make it?
1. Create a great product
When we say a great product we refer to a product which will make customers switch from current alternatives to yours. Dropbox, a web – based file hosting service which uses clouding computing to enable users to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet, is an example of a product which was successfully launched in a highly competitive market with dozens of cloud storage companies battling for users. Why did Dropbox outperform them? Because founders realized, through forums and reading blogs, that customers are not satisfied with current alternatives. Despite the hard competition, they could not rely on offered solutions, thus a great product was missing. In one of his presentations, Drew Houston, one of the founders of Dropbox, shares his experience with a VC regarding this: -VC: “There are a million cloud storage startups!” - Drew: “Do you use any?” – VC: “No”. Then Dropbox made a difference.
2. Build your community before launching your product: create the buzz
Many startups begin with building their community after product launch. But that is too late. You have to create the buzz beforehand. How do you do that? Blog posts can be very effective at this point. Moreover do not blog about your product only. Think of your blog as a media company and write about things your customers want to read about and share. Mike Volpe, VP Marketing at HubSpot, says: “One of the smartest things the HubSpot co-founders did was start blogging before HubSpot had a product to sell, helping to build an asset”. Another example of this is Mint, personal finance software which helps you to manage your money, financial planning, and budget planning tools. Its founder, Aaron Patzer says that they hyped- up the product launch with a personal finance blog. He says: “We didn’t have enough money for writers, so we went to the other personal finance blogs and asked them to lend us a guest blog post. The gambit worked. Each blog post ended with the teaser “The Mint revolution is coming,” leaving readers guessing. It was enough to lure 30,000 pre-registrations and when the alpha product did launch, about 6,000 signed up to use it”. So start teasing before you launch – that doesn’t cost you much.
3. Learn without launching
In other words this means: Talk to people and get their feedback before you launch because this will bring you a lot of valuable information about your customers at a $0 cost. Release demo video, create a simple and teasing landing page, and use some Adwords tests. Try to get your early adopters before you launch the product. Show them your minimum viable product and learn how to upgrade the same. This is what Xobni and Dropbox did. Follow this link to learn more on how Xobni and Dropbox got from zero to a million users and this and this link to watch their demo videos. However, once you learn something you better store the data because data drives decisions. Here is what Volpe says about HubSpot: “Tracking our business each month (or day) helps us optimize and evolve faster. If you track your business monthly, you optimize and improve your marketing 3 times faster than a company that measures quarterly. Measuring in smaller increments is key to evolving your startup marketing faster, by experimenting more and learning more quickly”. Data will help you understand what works and what doesn’t work. Learn quickly and learn often.
4. Viral marketing
Make people talk about your product. Word of mouth is the cheapest and most effective way to make your product viral. Blog posts, social networks (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are a must), e mail subscriptions, inbound links, mock up videos and teasers could rapidly create and spread the buzz. If possible tie yourself to a bigger trend and make journalists write about you. This is the best free of charge advertising. Flipboard, a social magazine that aggregates web links from your social circle, i.e. Twitter and Facebook, and displays the content in magazine form, is an example of a product with great viral marketing. Its team “lined up numerous notable tech commentators and press from Walt Mossberg to Robert Scoble to Ashton Kutcher who saw the product in Beta and started buzzing about it prior to launch”,says Tom Loverro, entrepreneur and technologist, in one of his blog posts.
5. Engage and reward your customers
In other words build a model that will enrich your customers’ experience with your product and reward them for that. Shopkick is a great example of this. It rewards its users for just walking into partnering retailers’ stores. Moreover it cooperates with big and famous retailers such as Best Buy, American Eagle, Target and others, thus it gets a lot of attention and buzz. It is a great business model since it allows three parties to benefit out of it: customers get rewards, good deals and offers for walking into a store, retailers get foot traffic and increased purchases, while Shopkick takes a percentage of the awarded points in revenue since its business model is 100% performance based with “cost per visit” and “cost per action = purchase”. Dropbox is another example of similar approach. It rewards its users if they convince their friends to install it through their referral program. Each new friend brings the user additional 250MB for free. Another way to get more space without being charged is completing a quest which will bring you additional 250MB.
There are certainly hundreds of great websites, mobile apps or products in general out there that never get “picked up” partly because of lack of good marketing. Thus, web marketing is of an essential importance for any startup. Even though a great product is a precondition for achieving success, a good marketing is what sells.