9 Marketing Hacks You Can't Afford to Ignore

Why this decade is obsessed with the 'S' word?

What do the new-age startups have, that the businesses earlier did not? All startups want to succeed, obviously. The difference is in the way of doing things and the uniqueness of their ideas.

If I use the simplest of terms, the way to get to this done is through effective marketing. Getting great exposure for your brand starts with knowing your contacts, your audience, and your competition. Without them, you might as well throw in the towel now. However, the last thing you want to do is drain your entire budget on marketing.

Here are some marketing secrets. Check them out below and decide what works best for your startup-

1. Stay Focused on One Marketing Channel
Stop trying to be everywhere, and focus on one marketing channel that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. You can expand out later, but when you are first starting out, you must focus on the most important channel. That channel will likely differ depending on your goals, which you and your team will need to figure out, but start with one channel only. Be it a Youtube channel, Twitter or outdoor marketing, choose and focus; yielding results takes time.

2. Understand Your Customer’s Problem Better Than Your Competition
The easiest way to create breakthrough marketing in any industry is to understand your customer’s problem better than competition and your customer do. By being able to see this problem from multiple angles, you will have a long-term advantage when it comes to creating high-performance marketing campaigns. Meet, survey, take feed backs, make the customers feel cared about. Think from their perspective, this will go a long way.

3. Have In-Person Conversations
In-person networking and developing long-term relationships work: do customer interviews, meet with marketing influencers in your field and go to conferences. Relationships you develop now may take years to show return on investment, but it will be worth the investment. Good relationships get you your customers. Network, build the experience for the people who approach you.

4. Build It Into the Technology
If you are able to devise a few clever ways to build marketing efforts into your product, you are effectively eliminating a variable cost and turning it into a one-time fixed cost. If harnessed correctly, your user acquisition costs will exponentially go down as you as you scale. Technology can help you do many jobs in one go; such as tracking digital traffics, devising content strategies, building a customer database etc.

5. Segment, Schedule, and Measure
Are you trying to drive sales, build awareness or build technical credibility? Once you’ve ‘segmented’ your desired outcome by answering that simple question, build a detailed schedule for your social media platforms that includes the message and campaign duration. This prevents the ‘see what sticks’ method and provides a road map on what and when to measure. Don't bore your customers with old ways of social engagement, feel free to design activities for a target audience and hence, measure the results.

6. Focus on PR
As Google demands high-quality inbound links from trusted sources, organic SEO is rapidly morphing into PR. A few media mentions can rapidly increase a site’s authority and visibility. Wasting money and time on low-quality SEO campaigns will not yield results, and investing in paid search or display requires an ongoing investment. Start with great PR, and enjoy the results for years to follow.

7. Utilize Your Employees’ Social Media
It is important to have your current employees market using their social media and contributing to the company’s social media. This is the cheapest and most authentic way to market your startup. Most of them won't have a problem but if somebody does, you can introduce promotion targets and rewards.

8. Sell Results, Not Services
When marketing my video marketing company, I focus on the results and benefits we will provide, rather than the service alone. Rather than talking about the cameras or the editing software we use, we highlight the online results our videos have achieved for our clients, teach them why video marketing is important and how it will affect their bottom-line. People buy success stories not the protagonist, the message should be loud and clear. An exceptional services builds the brand.

9. Have a Consistent Online Presence
Whether you’re marketing your startup through blogs or social media, you must stay committed to your online presence. When our company first started, we published a blog post three times a week covering topics from how-to articles to mobile marketing news. By publishing content consistently, we built our reputation and positioned ourselves at the top of search rankings. This will allow customer engagement with your startup 24x7.