marketing tips for startups

6 Dos and Don’ts of Social Media Marketing for startups

There’s much more to social media marketing than it seems and you’ll need a lot of preparation in order to get it right.

Everyone knows that social media plays a huge role in today’s business world. Every company, big or small, needs a social media presence in order to keep going. This is the case because social media is one of the best places to market your business. So, if you’ve decided to promote your company on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, you’re on the right track. Still, there’s much more to social media marketing than it seems and you’ll need a lot of preparation in order to get it right. That’s why we’ve come up with six dos and don’ts of social media marketing for startups, you’ll definitely want to take a closer look at.

DO understand your followers

When marketing on social media, it’s very important that you understand the users who follow your pages. Fail to do this, and you’ll have no idea what kind of content to share. But how do you learn more about the people who follow your social media pages? Basically, you’ll need to do a thorough demographic research and use the data you collect to come up with ideal posts to share on your pages. An important thing to remember is that no matter who your followers are, it’s imperative that you create a strong social media presence for your business.

DO have a plan

If you’re trying to promote a product or service on social media, you can’t just go and share promotional posts whenever you feel like doing so. What you need instead is an entire plan for promoting your product or service. This means you’ll need to come up with a whole set of posts your followers will find interesting and create a timetable for sharing them. If you’re new to social media marketing, this is probably where you’ll want to collaborate with an expert.

DO maximize your bio

When it comes to attracting new followers to your page, they’re always going to check your bio before they actually click that “subscribe” button. That said, you’ll probably want to maximize your bio. This means you should use your bio section to provide important info about your business. We recommend writing a short description of your business and including a couple of relevant facts. Usually, you’ll have some additional space left for a picture you’ll probably want to use for your company’s logo.

DON’T ignore negative comments

One of the biggest mistakes many business owners make is avoid responding to negative comments on social media. When you market on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there will always be some negative comments and it’s critical that you respond to them as politely as possible. This will show your followers that you have absolutely nothing to hide and that you’re open to suggestions. If you receive negative comments about the product or service you’re promoting, use them to improve your offerings.

DON’T use every social media platform

Today, there are just so many social media platforms you can promote your business on. However, if you try to use all of them to promote your products or services, you probably won’t be able to make it. Instead, what you need to do is figure out which social media platforms work the best for you and stick to them. If you’re struggling to figure out which platforms do the trick for your business, turning to experts in media monitoring is recommended.

DON’T post too much

What’s the point of having social media pages for your business if you’re not going to post regularly? Only if you’re consistent with your posts will you be able to grow your social media pages and attract more people to your business. However, this doesn’t mean you should just go and post everything you come across on the web. In fact, it’s quality over quantity, but you need to make sure you post on a daily basis. One or two posts per day during the week and one per day on the weekend should do the trick.

Social media marketing is something your business simply can’t survive without. Have all the things we’ve talked about in mind and you should be able to enter the world of social media marketing with ease.

Top 5 marketing methods that will benefit your business in the long run

Here are 5 essential marketing tips that will be beneficial to your business and help it to grow in the long run.

The one thing to keep in mind when developing your businesses’ marketing strategy is to think carefully about your longer term goals instead of just the short term tactical marketing activations. It is important to develop an effective long term marketing strategy rather than just focussing on short term wins.

There is no doubt that without an effective short-term plan, your business may not be able to make it to the next month. However, you do also need to plan for the future growth of your business. Long-term activities will continue to establish brand awareness and continue to drive results for your business years after they have been implemented. Without a long-term strategy, you don’t know where your business could be in 5 -10 years.

So, how can you ensure that the money you are investing in marketing will drive you a return for your business in the longer term? What are the initiatives you need to put in place now to reap the results later?

Below are 5 essential marketing tips that will be beneficial to your business and help it to grow in the long run. All of them are fairly simple to implement. And they’re all very effective at building awareness for any type of business:

1. Invest in good quality signage for your business shop front that will last for years

Use a reliable printing solution company such as Colour Graphics to ensure that you receive high-quality materials that have the durability factor. By establishing a permanent presence that clearly represents your brand in a beautifully designed shop front will help drive ongoing awareness with passersby.

As signage moves from print to digital, be sure to keep up with market trends and invest in some high-quality digital signage as well. Create stunning and affordable HD and 4k signage visuals in minutes using professional digital signage templates on PosterMyWall. Play your customized on-brand visuals on your signage screens in a few clicks, edit your designs in real-time and start attracting people to your stores!

2. Invest in a well-designed website for your business

Establish your online presence by creating a website that represents your brand in the best way. It doesn’t cost much to get a professional website designer. Create content that is optimised for search to drive traffic to your site on an ongoing basis.

If you have great content on your site that includes relevant keywords, you will find that it continues to get even without any investment. Once a website is designed and has great content, it can be fairly easy to maintain for as long as your business is running.

3. Start to run regular Facebook campaigns to grow your reach

Add Facebook campaigns to your ongoing marketing strategy. They are cost effective and drive great results in terms of awareness for your business online.

You can target potential customers on Facebook using their paid advertising options. It doesn’t cost much and allows you to really target those who could be interested. Since you don’t have to invest much budget, this is an effective tactic to use over the long term.

4. Get on social media to engage with your customers

A good tactic to establish yourself as a brand over the long term is to engage with customers online.

Social media is also a great avenue to post any news or offers from your business. Platforms like Twitter are also really great as customer service channels.

Ongoing engagement and interaction with customers will help build their trust and affection for your business over the years. This will in turn drive long term loyalty that will result in brand growth over time.

5. Get the local community excited about the business if it’s local, using posters and banners

Create a local marketing plan that is more focused on driving ongoing awareness of your business in the neighbourhood. You can use physical marketing tactics such as banners and other more permanent types of signage to establish your presence in the local community.

If you’re looking for quality print solutions in the UK, Colour Graphics offer a range of affordable options for banner printing. Visit their website to find out more.

Strategic marketing tips for startups

Marketing for a start-up is crucial because the public needs to know about the product/service offered and avail them.

Start-ups are usually a little low on budget as they’ve to cope up with the procedures of starting a new business from scratch. However, marketing for a start-up is crucial because the public needs to know about the product/service offered and avail them.

The following effective marketing tips could be implemented by start-ups to hit it off:

1. Positioning your product correctly is crucial

Customers buy the benefit and not merely the product irrespective of the price. The value offered, risks and the demand for the product in the market are factors which boost its sale. However, it is important to position your product correctly in the minds of your customers. If a start-up makes a mistake in the positioning, it will affect the venture hugely.

For instance, Unwanted-72, a morning pill didn’t work well with the women in India because of the negative connotation attached to the word Unwanted. Hence, naming your product also defines its position.

2. The customer is the king

Always stick by “you exist for the customer and not vice versa.” Try and give customers a feel of your product and make them believe that they are special while the use the same. Understand your target audience and then take steps to market your venture; otherwise, you’ll unnecessarily be spamming people which will lead in a negative name for your venture and cause losses in the very beginning. You could use various SEO tools available to understand and then, target your audience.

3. Be innovative

You cannot hope to get customers if you aren’t offering them something new. However, even when you offer them an old or revamped product, it is very essential to bring about changes in the marketing tactics to create new and lasting impressions in the minds of your customers. This can be done only by thinking out of the box and not sticking to the done and dusted marketing tactics.

Ariel, a detergent brand, used a hashtag to break gender stereotypes existing in the country. They denied the age-old belief that laundry is a woman’s job by using #ShareTheLoad. This campaign struck a chord with a billion Indians and it was an immediate success.

4. Use social media creatively

Social media is growing at a rapid rate today and platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are used actively by marketers to promote their products. In the same way, a start-ups could employ various organic and inorganic tools to promote their venture online and target their niche audience.

All brands use social media to promote their products today. However, Hippo took it one step forward by asking people on Twitter for locations where there is no availability of Hippo. Through replies garnered, they improved their sales and distribution channels by providing Hippo to the locations suggested by the Twitter users.

5. Generate exceptional content

It is very important to use inbound techniques like content generation to market your product more. The website of your company should be dynamic and updated with relevant information, ads, success stories and more to attract more online traffic and boost sales.

6. Make the customers a part of your team

This is a fool-proof, effective and simple marketing tactic through which an entrepreneur can build loyalty amongst customers. Once, they feel like they belong to a group, it is very difficult to switch from it. So, give preferences to loyal customers and try and incorporate them into a group.

MI did a brilliant job at this as the first few customers were given the status of MI pioneers who initiated discussions of the websites and spread goodwill about the brand.

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How Indian startups of today can become successful brands of tomorrow

Branding in India still finds itself in the nascent stage, largely confined to visual identification and communication, despite several incidents proving its importance in the Indian market.

The bygone 2015 was a year of both challenges and opportunities for startups – it posed a time of diminishing barriers to enter the marketplace and increase avenues for reaching and serving new potential customers than ever before, however, at the same time it also paved way for cut-throat competition.

In an already crowded marketplace, setting your startup apart is therefore crucial to survival and success.

However, branding in India still finds itself in the nascent stage, largely confined to visual identification and communication, despite several incidents proving its importance in the Indian market. It does not only help startups survive tough times, but also regain the trust of stakeholders afterwards.

We have listed 6 branding and marketing tips that every startup in India should follow for a bright future. Here’s what they are:

1. Focus Should Be Consumer Oriented

Most startups in the country are product or tech startups, where the founders and team are tech-oriented. What they tend to forget is that tech is merely an enabler and not the end goal in itself as opposed to a consumer oriented approach, which can guarantee a greater brand appreciation.

2. Product And Brand Should Go Hand-In-Hand

Idea of brand today is very look and feel. It’s something that is made to latch on to the product. It’s must for startups to realize that branding is essential to one’s business objective. Young startups don’t understand this very well despite several case studies. Say for example, Paperboat, which is a great case study of how this company thought of brand right from the packaging. They are thinking product and brand hand-in-hand rather than separate entities.

3. Activities To Build Equity, Garner Sales And For Immediate Gratification

Big companies know the importance for such activities, however, when Think Rasta works with startups, we break down their spends into three parts: Purpose spends (key-metrics for a young startup), equity spends (what to spend to build a brand’s equity over a period of time), and spends over experimenting (allocate a budget so that you can do activities on the brand just for fun, and hope that it works with your audience). Startups should not make the mistake of focusing on short term results, but focus on long term results and experimentation for better insight.

4. Build Content Over Campaigns

The best thing is to do both, but considering the cash constraints with startups, campaigns can be an expensive deal and a wasteful method of reaching out to the target group (TG). So the focus should be on creating customized content that is important for your consumer rather than merely talking about your brand. This is how your content will resonate with your audience. For eg, on your social media pages, do not focus on having 8 posts in a day around your brand, rather the idea should be to focus on the kind of content you create such that it is loved by your customers, even if you are making one post in a week!

5. Strategic Alliance: Associate With An Established Entity

One of the most sought after strategy in furious markets, it is a mutually beneficial alliance between two brands to reach out to their TG in most fruitful and economical way. It is imperative, as startups do not have financial bandwidth to do it all. Also, alliances with another market player might fetch you the most desired credibility factor that a startup requires at the nascent stages. For example, Hokey Pokey was a parlour-based model in Mumbai. After Think Rasta worked with them, today they are present across 2,000 stores as majorly an FMCG player. What Think Rasta did disruptively for them last year looking at their young target audience, Think Rasta tied up with NH7 and released a NH7 flavour as partnership marketing. NH7 is targeting exactly the same audience that Hokey Pokey is looking at.

6. Build Tight Framework, Be Decisive About Budgets And Get Professional Assistance

Identify a TG that is not broad (that one person who likes your campaign or content every time) and work towards it. Startups also has resource crunch and they simply can’t do ‘everything’. Professional assistance might be required at the time of implementation as it will bring more thoughts and resources that could do it better on your behalf. You may continue to focus on your product development while they take up on the assigned job. Being clear on what you want, how you want and the time frame you want it in will help you take decisions quicker and at the same time helo you stay within a framework.