Ways to Market Your Startup

Marketing your startup is generally your focus when the initial product is ready. Nowadays, there a innumerable tools which assist you in this. To simplify it, I feel all these tools can be classified broadly into 3 categories.

You push your message: This is when you push your advertisement to users from your target market. The benefits of this are that you build visibility to customers who do not know about you and that you extend your existing customer base by bringing in new potential customers. The downside is that this strategy has a high bounce rate, i.e. customers looking at your ad and not taking any action on it.

Some popular tools for this include Social Media, Emailers etc.

Customers get pulled to you: This is when a customer is looking for a product/service which you are offering and by putting your ad in the right place, the customer is pulled to your portal/business. The customers in this case would be more interested in your offering as they are anyways looking for it. This tends to be generally more expensive than when you push your message to customers, and rightly so.

Some popular tools include SEO, SEM etc.

You get referred: This is when a third party refers you to a potential customer. This third party generally tends to have a previous connection/relationship with the customer and hence has more influence on the customer. The bounce rates tends to be lower here. Trusting the third party and higher costs are the downsides in this strategy.

Some popular tools include Affiliate Marketing, Ad Placements etc.

Early stage startups must try out different strategies based on their offering. Based on the KPI you are most interested in, calculate the relative costs for all of the strategies and accordingly allocate budgets for them.