Way back in January while I had some free time and was contemplating my next job, I decided to start a meetup group. And in contrast to my usual style I decided to give it a name that actually makes sense: The Boston-Area Startup Marketing Group. At the time, I was consulting out of betahouse in Cambridge and I was inspired by all the entrepreneurial energy surrounding me. I was watching insanely talented people building amazing things, and I asked “what’s your number one challenge in turning ____ into the next big thing?”
The answer I heard most: “Nobody knows about it.”
It’s true. Most solo or small team tech entrepreneurs don’t have the time or resources they’d like to devote to marketing and promotion. There just aren’t enough hours in the day or people to do it. Startups with dedicated marketing people are in a better spot, but still face the same problems of time and resource allocation. With thousands of sites to promote a startup online, the following questions arise:
- Which sites are worth the time?
- Where’s my audience?
- What kind of content are they looking for?
- After taking the time to blog, podcast, etc., how do I put it where my prospective users will see it?
With those questions in mind, I decided to present “Getting Your Startup Found Online” as our first meetup. Since the presentation is very tactical and focused on content promotion and light on strategy, I took a step backwards:
Though blogging, podcasting and promotion are fun, they need to take place in the larger context of a marketing plan. Otherwise you’ll drive yourself nuts by just throwing content out there to see what sticks. In our case we started with a list of our main objectives. In short: what is the goal? For example, if you’re a B-to-C startup focused on user acquisition, give yourself a target user number.
After we had solid, actionable objectives, we moved on to the buyer personas. At this point we wanted to really get to know our prospective buyers. We looked into things like:
- Age
- Industry
- Title
- Online behavior
- Goals
- Day-to-day tasks
- Decision-making abilities
Of course, this is different for all startups, but the goal is the same. You want a deep understanding of who your targets are, where they go online and how they make the decision to buy (or join/subscribe/download) what you have to offer.
We then focused on our Company Persona, giving us a clear picture of:
- How we want to be perceived by our customers
- What tone we’ll use
- What colors we’ll use
- How we’ll set ourselves apart from everyone else
The persona exercises then led into our keyword research, which fed into our content plan. And with the majority of our content planned, we moved onto my favorite part: SEO + Promotion or Getting Noticed Online.
Well, you need to start somewhere, and I can’t think of a better place than google, yahoo, crunchbase, killerstartups, vator.tv and the like. These are directories that usually take some time to index your site, but are important sources of residual traffic.
Next, you’ll want to grab some land. We’re talking about twitter accounts, flickr accounts, friendfeed, vimeo, youtube, stumbleupon, delicious….the works. These will be important when it comes to promotion.
Now it’s time to find your audience. Where do they go online? Do they participate in LinkedIn groups? Ning networks? Facebook? Reddit? Forums? Go out there and find out where your target users are hanging out, and find out what they’re talking about. This is NOT an open invitation to spam people. Instead, find out what problems they have. Find out what they’re looking for. Find out how you can help with what you’re going to offer.
Now get out there and create some compelling content! Shoot some video. Get blogging. Fire up a podcast. Start producing content and you’ll start to see what works.
Now that you have a great blog post, video, podcast, etc. it’s time to promote it. Go get a bit.ly URL so you can promote the link on twitter. Bookmark it in delicious and diigo. Add it on stumbleupon. Submit it to reddit and digg….but only in relevant categories.
I must admit, this is the oversimplification of the decade, but you’ll find more information in the video below. The goal of this presentation was to give a quick overview of my workflow when it comes to content creation and promotion. It’s definitely not one-size-fits-all, but it’s close.
If you’re interested in joining our meetup group, you can find out more here.
Here’s the presentation:
