How to build Marketing Strategy for

How to build Marketing Strategy for your startup - A step by step guide
June 19, 2015 - Mohammed Lakkadshaw


72

Marketing and selling products and services for your newly created startup can be a difficult preposition. But, it can easily be done if we think about it logically.
Let's Start:-
For the sake of understanding, let's assume we have a SaaS (Software as a Service) startup. We sell something that helps early stage entrepreneurs build their enterprises.
Defining a Persona
What are Buyer Personas and Why do we need them?
Buyer personas are fictional, generalized represntations of our ideal customers. They help us understand our ideal customers and prospective customers and makes it easier for us to tailor content to specific needs, behaviors and concerns of diffirent groups.

-- Hubspot.com
Although, you can create as many personas as required by your business. In this article we are going to target a single specific group of customers, hence we will need to create only one persona.
Some things to consider when creating a persona:
Gender
Age
Martial status
Education
Income
Interests
Aspirations in life.
Employment.
Where does he/she lives
For our startup, our customer is the founder of an early stage startup, and his name is Mike.
Mike is a male
He is 27 years old
Mike lives in San Francisco,
Single and a graduate in business,
Mike has a job and makes around 100k/ year.
He wants to start a startup and make it big in life.
Mike does’t know programming or design and has to rely on other people for these skills.
Now, we have got Mike but, Mike doesn’t know about us nor about our awesome product that is going to help him make it big. We have got to find him and tell him.
Where can we reach mike?
We might be able to meet mike in places where he generally hangs out, like:
On the Social media sites:
twitter
facebook
And Website which provides startup news and updates:
product hunt
betalist
hackernews
inbound.org
Apart from this Mike is also reading stuff about entrepreneurship and success on sites like:
entrepenuer.com
thenextweb
lifehacker
Medium
Forbes
VentureBeat
etc.
Mike also does a lot of things in the physical world:
Mike visits technology meet-ups.
Mike visits coffee shops, building his business plans
Mike visits trade fairs.
What does mike want ?
Since Mike is starting a early stage startup, he is probably looking for ways to:
build a website,
Build his product
Market his product,
Looking for people in his network who might be be interested or willing to help him with his startup.
Maybe he is trying to pitch his idea to investors
Looking for a small office space or a Co-working space among many other things.
Mike might even be looking for his early employees or freelancers perhaps. That might be designers and developers to help him build his product.
At this point in time we have got Mike with his early stage startup and we know what does Mike wants and the places where he hangs-out and the people he hangouts with.
Now we have got to get to Mike and help him succeed in his startup.
Why do we want to do that ?
Because Mike does not want to buy our SaaS product. Mike wants to succeed in his business. And we are not going to sell our SaaS product to him. Mike will buy a resource from us that is going to help him achieve success in his business.
Marketing that does not look like marketing is the best kind of Marketing.

Up till now what we have done is
Customer Profiling: Identifying who our customer is.
Identifying distribution channels: Finding out where our customer is.
From now on, We will help our customer find us. There are two ways we can get this done.
In the physical world.
Over the internet.
We can choose both ways or we can choose any one based on our resources and which we think might work best for our product.
The Physical World
We can go to the meet-ups, where mike is hanging out. To the coffee shops where he is working on his business plans. To the trade fairs where he might visit to sell his product. Out-side Co working spaces where he might be visiting. We can talk to him and tell him about our product and how we can help him.
OR
We can Find out his contact number/email and call him or email him.
Cold calling is an awesome sort of Marketing, you just need to know whom to cold call and how to execute. People out there have real problems to solve and if we can help them. It is going to be great business.
(One of the biggest examples of cold calling working is today’s business environment is AppAftercare app maintenance business by Einar Vollset.
It is an awesome company, He even runs a course explaining how he markets his products.)
And we can speak to Mike, tell him how awesome our product is and how he is going to be huge success by using it.
Over the internet
We have already figured out where Mike hang outs over the internet, We just need to reach out to him and help him out with his Business.
Building a Side Project.
Teaching.
SEO
1. Building a Side project.
A side project can be a website or a tool that does some kind of leg work for Mike. For example Mike needs to get a lot of things done.
He needs a Website, a logo, he needs legal stuff done, he needs to find designers and developers, he needs productivity tools. He needs to learn basics of coding or design. He needs photos for his blog or social media posts etc.
If we can build a tool or a side project that can help Mike in achieving his objective. He is going to come finding us.
One of the awesome companies that are doing this kind of thing is: Buffer
Buffer is company that helps entrepreneurs schedule their social media posts. They need to attract people who are into social media.
They have a side project called:
Pablo is website that helps you design images for your social media posts. This solves a big problem for Entrepreneurs and social media marketers.
When Mike is searching for photos for twitter post and he stumbles-upon Pablo. He gets to know that there is this SaaS company called Buffer which helps him save time on his social media marketing and he is likely to buy from them.
2. Teaching
Blogging is a very well known tool for inbound marketing. But what to blog is thing to consider. We need to only blog things that are going to help Mike.
Actionable content, Content from which mike can take away something from and apply to his life and business and get results.
A study by New York Times, claims that the likelihood of an article being shared is the most for articles with practical utility. articles with actionable content gets shared the most.

Ideas to blog about?

We already know a lot about Mike. Lets just think what would be the core idea Mike would like our advice on?
Answer: Entrepreneurship and success.
Well, this is just one thing. What are the other complimentary things we could help Mike with.
Complimentary ideas
Productivity
Marketing
Getting startup ideas
Validating startup ideas
Building an MVP.
Getting funding etc.
Apart from writing an article, you could also make video or podcasts or slide-share. But the basic idea between all these mediums is the same, that is to help the customer achieve success in his/her pursuits.
And writing an article is just not enough. We will have to tell Mike we exist and here is an awesome article which would be a great help to him.
Distributing your Side Projects/Articles and doing SEO:
Well we have a great SaaS product, a great tool to help Mike and we are also writing awesome articles.
How are we going to make Mike come to us?

Well we know where Mike hangs out on the internet. We can just through stuff on the social media and hope and pray that Mike reads OR we can be proactive in our efforts to reach Mike.
Here’s How:

Now, there are certain people on social media who are called influencers. These people have a large amount of following.
We will need to find out certain influencers who would be interested in distributing our free tools and blog articles to their network of people on social media.
How we are going to do that?

With a certain tool called as Followerwonk, which is available at MOZ.com It helps us sort influencers on twitter with certain keywords in their profile or bios.
for example. If our tool is an open source product. we will sort people with open source in their bios and see if they post other people’s open source products on twitter.
Then we will contact them and ask them to distribute our product.
We could do something similar for product hunt as well. Product hunt is an awesome network that lists digital products. Though we don’t have followerwonk for product hunt. Product hunt has hunters and we can contact them on twitter and ask them if they will hunt our product.
This same thing we are going to do with our Blog article. One thing to remember though: The quality of our content should be top notch. The better the quality of our product the more viral it will become.
One very good side effect of this will be people will start linking to our blog or free product page. For example some one is writing some post and they might link to us as a reference. This is going to increase our SEO.
Or someone might be listing free resources for Entrepreneurs and businesses and they might list our product.
Alternatively, we can also search for blogs on google.
Just typing in Open source software blogs or Entrepreneurship blogs and Google will give us a list if blogs and we can contact those blogs and ask them if they can list or add a link to our free product site or blog article.
This is called as OFF Page SEO, More on this later.
Build an email subscription list:

Always try and build a subscription list. The people who are subscribing to your articles really believe in your content. And you should make them search for your articles from time to time. They are a dedicated audience and dedicated traffic to your blog. Do your upmost to make it really easy for them to signup to your mail list.
What is SEO ?
SEO is search engine optimisation. What is means is t

Kết quả (Việt) 1:

Làm thế nào để xây dựng chiến lược tiếp thị cho khởi động của bạn - một hướng dẫn từng bước19 tháng 6 năm 2015 - Mohammed Lakkadshaw72Tiếp thị và bán sản phẩm và dịch vụ cho của bạn khởi động mới được tạo ra có thể là một giới từ khó khăn. Tuy nhiên, nó có thể dễ dàng được thực hiện nếu chúng ta nghĩ về nó một cách hợp lý.Hãy bắt đầu:-Vì lợi ích của sự hiểu biết, chúng ta hãy giả sử chúng tôi có một khởi động SaaS (phần mềm như một dịch vụ). Chúng tôi bán một cái gì đó giúp doanh nhân giai đoạn đầu xây dựng doanh nghiệp của mình.Xác định một PersonaNgười mua Personas là gì và tại sao chúng tôi cần chúng?Người mua personas là hư cấu, tổng quát hóa represntations của khách hàng lý tưởng. Họ giúp chúng tôi hiểu khách hàng lý tưởng và khách hàng tiềm năng của chúng tôi và làm cho nó dễ dàng hơn đối với chúng tôi để chỉnh các nội dung nhu cầu cụ thể, hành vi và mối quan tâm của diffirent nhóm.--Hubspot.comMặc dù, bạn có thể tạo ra như nhiều personas theo yêu cầu của doanh nghiệp của bạn. Trong bài này chúng tôi sẽ nhắm mục tiêu một nhóm cụ thể duy nhất của khách hàng, do đó chúng tôi sẽ cần phải tạo một persona.Một số điều cần xem xét khi tạo một persona:Giới tínhTuổiVõ tình trạngGiáo dụcThu nhậpLợi íchNguyện vọng trong cuộc sống.Việc làm.Nơi nào anh/cô ấy sốngCho khởi động của chúng tôi, khách hàng của chúng tôi là người sáng lập của một đầu giai đoạn khởi động, và tên của ông là Mike.Mike là một phái namÔng là 27 tuổiMike sống ở San Francisco,Đĩa đơn và một sau đại học trong kinh doanh,Mike có một công việc và làm cho khoảng 100k/năm.Ông muốn bắt đầu một khởi động và làm cho nó lớn trong cuộc sống.Mike does't biết chương trình hoặc thiết kế và phải dựa vào người khác cho các kỹ năng.Bây giờ, chúng tôi đã nhận Mike nhưng, Mike không biết về chúng tôi, cũng không về sản phẩm tuyệt vời mà sẽ giúp anh ta làm cho nó lớn. Chúng tôi đã có để tìm thấy anh ta và nói cho anh ta.Chúng tôi có thể gặp mike ở đâu?Chúng tôi có thể gặp gỡ mike ở những nơi nơi ông thường treo ra, như:Trên các trang web xã hội truyền thông:TwitterFacebookVà trang web cung cấp startup tin tức và Cập Nhật:sản phẩm sănbetalisthackernewsInbound.orgNgoài Mike này cũng đọc công cụ về tinh thần kinh doanh và thành công trên các trang web như:entrepenuer.comthenextwebLifehackerPhương tiệnTạp chí ForbesVentureBeatvv.Mike cũng có rất nhiều điều trong thế giới vật lý:Mike thăm công nghệ đáp ứng-up.Mike truy cập cửa hàng cà phê, xây dựng kế hoạch kinh doanh của mìnhMike thăm hội chợ thương mại.Mike muốn gì?Kể từ khi Mike bắt đầu từ một khởi động giai đoạn đầu, anh ta có lẽ đang tìm cách để:xây dựng một trang web,Xây dựng sản phẩm của mìnhThị trường sản phẩm của mình,Tìm kiếm người trong mạng lưới của mình có thể được quan tâm hoặc muốn giúp anh ta với khởi động của mình.Có lẽ ông cố gắng để pitch ý tưởng của mình để nhà đầu tưTìm kiếm một không gian văn phòng nhỏ hoặc một không gian làm việc hợp tác trong số nhiều thứ khác.Mike có thể thậm chí tìm kiếm của mình đầu nhân viên hoặc dịch giả tự do có lẽ. Đó có thể là nhà thiết kế và nhà phát triển để giúp anh ta xây dựng sản phẩm của mình.Tại thời điểm này chúng tôi đã nhận Mike với khởi động giai đoạn đầu của mình và chúng tôi biết những gì hiện Mike muốn và những nơi nơi ông bị treo ra và người ông hangouts với.Now we have got to get to Mike and help him succeed in his startup.Why do we want to do that ?Because Mike does not want to buy our SaaS product. Mike wants to succeed in his business. And we are not going to sell our SaaS product to him. Mike will buy a resource from us that is going to help him achieve success in his business.Marketing that does not look like marketing is the best kind of Marketing.Up till now what we have done isCustomer Profiling: Identifying who our customer is.Identifying distribution channels: Finding out where our customer is.From now on, We will help our customer find us. There are two ways we can get this done.In the physical world.Over the internet.We can choose both ways or we can choose any one based on our resources and which we think might work best for our product.The Physical WorldWe can go to the meet-ups, where mike is hanging out. To the coffee shops where he is working on his business plans. To the trade fairs where he might visit to sell his product. Out-side Co working spaces where he might be visiting. We can talk to him and tell him about our product and how we can help him.ORWe can Find out his contact number/email and call him or email him.Cold calling is an awesome sort of Marketing, you just need to know whom to cold call and how to execute. People out there have real problems to solve and if we can help them. It is going to be great business.(One of the biggest examples of cold calling working is today’s business environment is AppAftercare app maintenance business by Einar Vollset.It is an awesome company, He even runs a course explaining how he markets his products.)And we can speak to Mike, tell him how awesome our product is and how he is going to be huge success by using it.Over the internetWe have already figured out where Mike hang outs over the internet, We just need to reach out to him and help him out with his Business.Building a Side Project.Teaching.SEO1. Building a Side project.A side project can be a website or a tool that does some kind of leg work for Mike. For example Mike needs to get a lot of things done.He needs a Website, a logo, he needs legal stuff done, he needs to find designers and developers, he needs productivity tools. He needs to learn basics of coding or design. He needs photos for his blog or social media posts etc.If we can build a tool or a side project that can help Mike in achieving his objective. He is going to come finding us.One of the awesome companies that are doing this kind of thing is: BufferBuffer is company that helps entrepreneurs schedule their social media posts. They need to attract people who are into social media.They have a side project called:Pablo is website that helps you design images for your social media posts. This solves a big problem for Entrepreneurs and social media marketers.When Mike is searching for photos for twitter post and he stumbles-upon Pablo. He gets to know that there is this SaaS company called Buffer which helps him save time on his social media marketing and he is likely to buy from them.2. TeachingBlogging is a very well known tool for inbound marketing. But what to blog is thing to consider. We need to only blog things that are going to help Mike.Actionable content, Content from which mike can take away something from and apply to his life and business and get results.A study by New York Times, claims that the likelihood of an article being shared is the most for articles with practical utility. articles with actionable content gets shared the most.Ideas to blog about?We already know a lot about Mike. Lets just think what would be the core idea Mike would like our advice on?Answer: Entrepreneurship and success.Well, this is just one thing. What are the other complimentary things we could help Mike with.Complimentary ideasProductivityMarketingGetting startup ideasValidating startup ideasBuilding an MVP.Getting funding etc.Apart from writing an article, you could also make video or podcasts or slide-share. But the basic idea between all these mediums is the same, that is to help the customer achieve success in his/her pursuits.And writing an article is just not enough. We will have to tell Mike we exist and here is an awesome article which would be a great help to him.Distributing your Side Projects/Articles and doing SEO:
Well we have a great SaaS product, a great tool to help Mike and we are also writing awesome articles.
How are we going to make Mike come to us?

Well we know where Mike hangs out on the internet. We can just through stuff on the social media and hope and pray that Mike reads OR we can be proactive in our efforts to reach Mike.
Here’s How:

Now, there are certain people on social media who are called influencers. These people have a large amount of following.
We will need to find out certain influencers who would be interested in distributing our free tools and blog articles to their network of people on social media.
How we are going to do that?

With a certain tool called as Followerwonk, which is available at MOZ.com It helps us sort influencers on twitter with certain keywords in their profile or bios.
for example. If our tool is an open source product. we will sort people with open source in their bios and see if they post other people’s open source products on twitter.
Then we will contact them and ask them to distribute our product.
We could do something similar for product hunt as well. Product hunt is an awesome network that lists digital products. Though we don’t have followerwonk for product hunt. Product hunt has hunters and we can contact them on twitter and ask them if they will hunt our product.
This same thing we are going to do with our Blog article. One thing to remember though: The quality of our content should be top notch. The better the quality of our product the more viral it will become.
One very good side effect of this will be people will start linking to our blog or free product page. For example some one is writing some post and they might link to us as a reference. This is going to increase our SEO.
Or someone might be listing free resources for Entrepreneurs and businesses and they might list our product.
Alternatively, we can also search for blogs on google.
Just typing in Open source software blogs or Entrepreneurship blogs and Google will give us a list if blogs and we can contact those blogs and ask them if they can list or add a link to our free product site or blog article.
This is called as OFF Page SEO, More on this later.
Build an email subscription list:

Always try and build a subscription list. The people who are subscribing to your articles really believe in your content. And you should make them search for your articles from time to time. They are a dedicated audience and dedicated traffic to your blog. Do your upmost to make it really easy for them to signup to your mail list.
What is SEO ?
SEO is search engine optimisation. What is means is t