Startup marketing is a tricky thing. It might seem easy – just be active in all the possible social media and people will find you, right?

The challenge is that when you are building an image from a scratch, you really need to nail every step of the way. First impressions count and before the consumers turn into fans, they are not loyal to your brand and all the details matter.

Choose Your Battles

Firstly, in order to succeed, you need to choose your battle. Do not waste time trying to market it for everyone everywhere – that is pure waste of money and time. Take only one bite at the time, so identify a niche target market and fight for it. Most important things to consider according to Kissmetrics are market size, market wealth, market competition and value proposition.

SWOT Up

For the marketing strategy and plan, there are a few basic marketing theories that can be very useful. Start with a SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It will be a helpful tool also with sales. Also, define the 4 Ps – product, price, promotion and place. Before you go all in with marketing, make sure your website is easy to find, informative and cool. Choose a couple of good keywords, to lead some traffic to your pages. Stay out of too generic ones – in search engines like Google, it is extremely hard to compete against global companies and with keywords that are as specific as possible, the results are more likely to show you amongst the first options.

Consider the channels that would work best for your target audience and product. It is better to focus on a few and do it well, than to set up an account on every single one but not get much out of it. Facebook and Twitter are the number one options for many – it is easy to reach a large audience and good channel for news related to the company. If there is a visual aspect in your business or your product just happens to be very photogenic, consider Instagram and Pinterest. Which ever you choose, decide the tone you want to communicate with and brand guidelines so that all the channels are in line and the brand is easily recognizable. In order to boost the efforts, there are some tools that can help to widen your spread with a small amount of money. Facebook has its own Facebook Ads that is very easy to use and there are services designed spefically to help with this. When you create a marketing plan, remember to include goals and a budget into it. It is easy waste a lot of money on non-important things, little by little, if the activities are not planned well ahead.

How to Land

When the traffic starts to flow in, consider where you want them to land, and what you want them to see? It is important to engage visitors and make it easy to get to know you – if they do not yet quite know you, why would they bother to spend time trying to figure it out? Engaging does not only mean designing a great website. One of the most important factors with marketing is the communication with the target audience. Show that you are interested in them!

Lastly, perhaps the most important thing is to be genuine. Personality is always interesting!