Five Tips for Picking Your Startup’s Marketing Channels
What are the best marketing channels for startups? The answer to this is complex, and there is no one answer. It depends on many factors, like the industry, market and customers. For instance, channels that work best for B2B companies are often different than those that B2C companies thrive in.
Selecting a startup’s first marketing channels can feel like complete guesswork. With a lack of historical marketing data, how can you know what will work? As someone who has set up the marketing practices at a number of different startups, here are a few of my suggestions for how to approach this challenge
1. Start by looking at your key customers.
Get to know the most valuable customers for your organization, either from a strategic perspective (where these customers would attract other customers) or from a profit perspective (where these customers would value your product most and therefore pay the most for it).
Create in-depth personas for these customers so you really understand their motivations and behaviors. This should include some customer research, either primary or secondary. From this exercise, you should learn where they spend their time and where they get their trusted information from. Marketing in these places can be the best way to reach them.
2. Look at your competition.
Larger or more established competitors can offer great clues as to which channels might work well to reach your target audience, as they likely have already tested and learned, and you can take advantage of their experience. If you’re able to gain some traction in a channel a competitor has a hold in, you can offer an alternative to customers who have already been educated on the need for the product and potentially steal some share of voice.
However, a smart tactic can sometimes be to go where your competition is not. This allows you to access a fresh audience with no preconceived notions or anything to compare you to, sometimes even at a lower price point if there is less competition.
3. Consider your marketing funnel.
As a startup, you’ll need to invest in awareness as you’re starting from scratch and few people have heard of your company or product. That said, you still also have to bring in leads and revenue for your business, which can grow the company and eventually even be reinvested in marketing. This requires a full-funnel marketing approach that has at least one marketing channel for the top, middle and bottom of your funnel.
Often, startups focus on the bottom part of the funnel because of the need to bring in cash quickly, but it can be harder, take longer and cost more to try to convert leads further down the funnel, especially if you’re not marketing throughout the different stages of your consumer journey.
4. Compare costs to your expected goals or ROI.
At most startups, marketing budgets can be tight. Therefore, every dollar spent should be carefully calculated to deliver results. To compare paid channels (if all things are equal), think about the goal you want to accomplish and how much it will cost for each channel to achieve that. For instance, you might be looking for a certain amount of traffic to come to your website or a specific number of leads.
Make an educated guess about what you might be able to achieve in each channel (based on industry standards or by leveraging expert and agency proposals) and then select the ones that are most efficient for reaching your goals. Free channels that require more time than investment (like social media) can be great places for startups with no budget to start.
5. Test and learn.
As a startup, you’ve likely never run a marketing campaign for this company, audience and market combination. This means that you can’t be sure that any specific channel is better than another, so running small experiments on various channels is a low-risk way for you to see where there’s potential traction with all these variables at play.
Once an experiment in a certain channel proves successful, it can then make sense to invest in larger campaigns on that same channel. This should be a practice that continues as you cycle through all of your various options.
Since new marketing channels are frequently introduced, the choices can seem increasingly overwhelming for any marketer. However, with a systematic approach to customer discovery and competitor and industry research, and by aligning your channel selection with your marketing strategy, goals and budget, you can make an educated guess and shortlist potential channels that might work well for your startup.
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