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Social Media Marketing For Startups

Guest Author — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 05:21:27 +0000

Written by Irina Belsky

Problem

The simple truth is that if no one knows about your business, your business will fail. Customer acquisition and retention are crucial, whether your business is in its infancy or if it’s grown into a international conglomerate empire. It’s a job that’s never finished.

Unlike large companies, startups obviously have scarce resources and limited funding, which can prevent them from effectively marketing their own brands, growing a customer base and forming a meaningful relationship with those customers.

Startup entrepreneurs face two dilemmas when it comes to marketing their product or service:

many entrepreneurs are not marketing experts
they don’t have the money to hire marketing experts

Solution

The easiest way to market your business when you have few resources and little understanding of the marketing world is to turn to social media. We all know that it’s everywhere, we’re all (or most of us) are using it and it’s being incorporated as a separate service in many advertising agencies, both digital and traditional.

Social media marketing costs you nothing, except time and if it’s done right, it can benefit the development of your business enormously.

Why? Because social media has grown to be more than just a channel, it is used for customer service, networking, building the very trust and reputation that entrepreneurs crave for their idea and brand.

This article will provide you with simple, clear basics for establishing a social media presence and guidelines for using social media as a marketing tool.

1. Establish a social media presence

Set up Facebook,Twitter and Linkedin profiles, a Youtube stream and a business blog. These are the staples of your online presence. Google Plus is also set to launch brand pages so keep that in mind for the future.

Think carefully about your brand and the words you use to describe it. The description of your service or product must be consistent across all mediums. The same goes for your brand logo.

Link your blog, Linkedin, twitter and Facebook profiles.

Connecting Twitter and Linkedin will allow you to publish tweets on your business’s Linkedin profile
You can connect Facebook and twitter so that each Facebook status update will also appear as a tweet (make sure you are confident that you want the same content to appear on both platforms before using this function)
Wordpress allows you to automatically publish each new blog entry on both Facebook and Twitter, which can also save opening up different accounts, copying and pasting.

On your website include a social media bar that serves as a gateway for visitors. Make it easy for people to share your content and find you on Facebook and twitter.

2. Digital PR

Once you’ve established your social media presence you can work on on promoting your brand digitally. If your aim is to establish brand awareness and an initial customer base you can engage in blogger outreach. It is an emerging public relations tactic and its worth investing in, especially you can target the right blogs.

Reaching out to bloggers

searching for blogs that are relevant to your product or service and
contacting bloggers with information about your business.

The important thing is NOT to sell your offering to them. Make it relevant to them. If you’ve created a mobile game app contact bloggers who review apps and ask them if they’d be interested in trying it out.

A good strategy is also offering a blogger a private invite to your service (if it hasn’t launched yet) or giving them a free trial of your service.

Give something without asking for anything in return and let your product do the rest of the work. If it’s good and you’ve chosen the most relevant blogs, the chances are that you’ll have a review to add to your media presence belt.

Involve influencers

This is similar to blogger outreach but demands a more active participation from the bloggers. For example you could ask a popular blogger (whose content is relevant to your brand) to create content especially for your blog or website.

Contact journalists

Something else you can do for free is hunt down journalists and publications. Send out press releases, try to get in touch with individual journalists and learn to ’sell’ the idea, or rather, why it would make a good story and why it should appear in the publication. Journalists are always looking for stories and you would only be making their job easier by giving them another possibility for an article.

3. Content

What do you do with your social media once you’ve got it?

Content is really important, especially when you’re trying to entice your target audience to become customers. The best content is valuable, entertaining, visual and engaging. It should be closely related to your brand but at the same time it should be about the viewers.

The same rule of thumb applies: Give without asking anything in return.

Facebook

The Facebook brand pages offer many opportunities to market your brand. Status updates are the most obvious way to engage your audience, but it’s not as simple as just posting something that seems right. Facebook traffic varies depending on the time and the day of the week and in addition, different target groups use Facebook differently. Some like interacting with brands more, others less, some like a frequent flow of updates, others think of it as spam. You must know your target audience and their needs first and take them into consideration when you are planning how to update your Facebook brand page.

Twitter

You probably already know that twitter has become a customer service mechanism as well as a social network which means there are more ways to use it to your advantage. Instead of just creating a passive account, follow people who may be interested in your business, connect with other businesses that have the potential to become partners and people who have already discovered your business on twitter. Thank every person that follows you and respond to questions, comments and complaints as swiftly as possible.

In terms of content, share links to interesting articles. The more valuable and memorable your content, the more your brand will stick in people’s minds. If you manage to find a free resource or uncover something not generally known by the public and share it, even better.

Make sure you visit your followers once in a while and check out what they’re sharing. If it’s good, let them know! Sincere appreciation is always appreciated.

Note: twitter is a highly visible place where information is exposed for all to see, so be very careful about the information you share on your own account as well as through the account of your business, especially if your connection to the business is also visible.

Youtube

If your business is yet to launch, you should definitely create a sandwich video for your business. A sandwich video is basically a promo of your product; here are some examples. This is the time to stop thinking business and tap into your inner creative. The best youtube videos are viral and the viral means engaging, not boring and dull. Make something funny or something interesting or something outrageous, just something that stands out and you’re not embarrassed to show.

It’s just as important to include the right keywords and meta tags for your video because properly optimised videos rank high in the Google search engine.

Blog

The business blog gives you the opportunity to provide an insight into the company goings on, be more casual and personal. For a startup business blog you could write anecdotes and personal reflections about how the business is developing. People love to feel like voyeurs, looking in on something that is usually kept private and the blog can provide the opportunity to draw them in. Here is how this online dating business used their blog to create entertaining value for the viewers.

Infographics are also a useful tool for capturing attention and illustrating information which might have been otherwise boring to the viewer. You can generate infographics yourself using online tools.

Finally the blog (as well as your website) can be used to give potential customers extra value,to thank them for visiting your site. Free e-books and white papers work brilliantly and allow you to get personal details of the visitor. Many websites already use this technique and ask for name and email address before providing a link to a free e-book download. Copy blogger uses this technique to recruit newsletter recipients for his blog

4. Managing your social media

Juggling multiple accounts can be painful so if you don’t want to waste away in front of the computer screen, get yourself a Hootsuite account. It’s just one of many social media decks that bring together all your social media accounts into a single platform where you can make any changes or updates that you need.

Sign off

After you have created your online presence using the steps outlined above you can support your online marketing with offline marketing by including social media links and QR codes leading to your social media profiles on your business cards and fliers.

There is much more to social marketing that could be included above but hopefully this article helps you to take the first steps in creating a comprehensive online presence and encourage you to learn more about marketing through digital channels.

Useful links

Launch48 - a startup camp overview

Guest Author — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 06:25:08 +0000

Written by Irina Belsky

If you’re thinking of launching your own startup but aren’t sure of how to take the first plunge you should consider taking part in Launch48.

Launch 48 is weekend startup camp where teams of entrepreneur hopefuls had 48 hours to create and launch their online business.

Just think StartupWeekend and BootUpCamp.

The latest Launch48, which I attended, was on from Friday 28th October until Sunday 30th October at the Atlassian office on Sussex street, Sydney.

I’ve never been to a startup camp so I wasn’t sure what to expect (or whether I was even qualified to be there). But I went anyway and I’m glad I did.

It was an amazing learning experience so I thought I’d give you an overview of how it went down and what I learnt in the process.

Brief recap of the weekend

Friday 6 p.m. - 10 p.m

The evening began with a brief introductions and a quick speeches from guest speakers, who included: Bart Jallema, Andrew Laurie and Jean-Michael Lemieux.

Every person who registered their idea, gave a sixty second pitch with the best ideas decided by votes. The four ideas we decided on were:

GiveTeams: an online group gift giving service
SittingSocial: an online service matching pet owners and amateur pet minders
Locongo: a service providing local experiences for tourists
Happy Tribe: an online platform to help you participate in socially responsible and charitable activities

People then chose the idea they wanted to work on most and broke up into teams. I wandered over to join the SittingSocial team because I love animals and I’d never heard of a similar service. After having brief team meetings we finished the evening with casual (drinks) networking at a a nearby bar.

Saturday 9 a.m.- 9 p.m:

Each team began planning and developing their idea with support from mentors who floated around the office to give their advice.

Mentors included: David Ansley, Domenic Carosa, Stephen Burke, Soren Harner, Venessa Paech, Rebekah Tucker, Tim Batten and Grant Downie.

During two formal board meetings with all the mentors we had the opportunity to:

explain our idea more thoroughly
gain a better understanding of the business building process
ask questions and discuss any bumps on the road

Sunday 9 a.m.- 9 p.m

The goal of the final day was to have a ready product to show by 5 p.m., during the final pitches. More mentors came to visit the office and were able to provide fresh perspectives and advice on each idea.

Additional mentors included: Enjel Phoon, Nathan Mattock, Ryan Bigg, Martin Kemka

During two additional board meetings we:

talked to the mentors about our progress
discussed the content of the final presentation
dealt with last minute problems

The pitches wrapped up at 6 p.m. which concluded the formal part of the event, leaving everyone with time to catch up and get to know members of other teams during dinner and casual networking.

What I got out of it

Networking

Never underestimate the power of community.

I met some amazing people at Launch 48, people that taught me a lot about legal considerations, business models, PR, marketing, monetisation strategies, pitching, business development, funding opportunities, events, useful organisations and much, much more.

The experience and achievements of these people were also inspiring to hear. The story that was most relevant for us as participants was probably Marty’s (Martin Kemka). He took part in Melbourne’s Launch 48 in April and continued working on his idea WeTeachMe to successfully launch and develop it as a viable business.

Knowledge is obviously power and when your time is precious it’s logical to find the best and quickest way to get the information that will help you set up your business. Tapping into the entrepreneur scene is one of the most valuable things you can do if you plan on starting your own business or if your business is in its seed stages.

Monetisation and Marketing - Learn It

We were asked about our business model and customer acquisition strategy again and again. I’m sure every team was asked similar questions but our additional challenge was having a service with a two sided market. This made coming up with a business model that satisfied the needs of both target markets was particularly difficult.

What we learnt (from Dominic Carosa): is that generating revenue from website advertising is probably not the best way making a profit.

Marketing and promoting a new service is always crucial, especially when it’s something that hasn’t been done before. When the success of a service depends on the number of people using it getting a crucial mass of consumers is a necessity.

What we learnt: with a new service, the best way to reach the target market is to approach them directly. This means finding where communities of potential consumers are, informing them about the service and giving them an incentive to use it (free trial for example).

The Importance of the Pitch

The problem I saw again and again during the initial sixty second pitches was that people were unable to concisely communicate their idea and this affected how many votes they received. Some of the time the idea itself was faulty but for the most part people simply didn’t know how to ’sell’ their ideas.

You may never be in a situation where you only have sixty seconds to pitch but I think it’s really worth practicing a sixty second pitch. Record yourself, see how it sounds. If you were someone else, would you understand and like the idea?

Legal considerations

Assume that every consumer can sue you and will, if they have the opportunity. Eliminate that opportunity. For an online business terms and conditions and a privacy statement are the first step. You don’t have to go to a lawyer to create either one, just see what other online businesses include in theirs and customise them to fit your own business.

Useful tools

These are some of the tools used by other members of my team to contribute to the project during the weekend.

To Sum Up

The intensity of that experience and being in a 48 hour lockdown bred amazing creativity and forced people to be as productive as possible, because there was so little time to put everything together.

I was very impressed with Atlassian for lending us their office. They let us raid their free vending machines, use their conference rooms, play table tennis and drink their beer, all for a good cause of course.

What I loved most about the weekend was the support and encouragement that the mentors and organisers gave us. There was no negative judgement passed down only advice, guidance and an overload of useful information.

Last words: Launch48 is the place to meet amazing people, learn bucket loads and get that extra push to put your idea into action.