It may be that your startup offers the best product or service in the industry, but without effective marketing, you’re dead in the water. People won’t know your brand exists, won’t understand why they should choose you over your competitors, and won’t want to become loyal customers who recommend your business to their friends and family.
So let’s roll up our sleeves to explore and implement the marketing strategies that your new business needs to become unforgettable.
If you’re just getting started with your business idea, first read the previous article in this series for the mindset, logistics, and marketing checklist, so you have a strong foundation to build on: Three pillars of a successful startup: Ultimate guide for small businesses.
And if you're looking to bringing new ideas to life without any cost barrier, check out the Business Starter Kit – get all this for free: LLC registration, a .com domain, business email, easy website builder, SEO tool to get found online, and social media tool to for fast posts to grow your reach. What’s stopping you?
Before we dive into the strategies you’ll use to attract customers and build brand loyalty, we need to talk about the core factor that steers successful marketing: data insights.
You may be tempted to think this means boring number crunching, which you can put off for later when you’re more established.
But what you need to understand as a small business owner is that without performance analytics and understanding your target audience, you’re flying blind, like a ship with no navigation. This will waste time and money, so getting to grips with data from the get-go is critical.
You don’t need to know the more advanced analytics and metrics, but let’s look at the need-to-know data which will put the wind in your startup’s sails.
These are the most important ones when you’re starting out, and how you calculate them:
This measurement gives you clarity on the total cost of acquiring each new customer. For long-term profitability, you’ll want to keep this number balanced with how much you earn from each customer. Naturally, the lower your CAC figures the better.
Formula:
Total number of sales + marketing expenses ÷ the number of new customers acquired.
Example:
If you spent $10,000 on marketing and sales in a month, and acquired 100 new customers, that would be: 10,000 ÷ 100 = $100 spent per new customer.
This KPI tells you the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service over a specific period of time. If you have a high churn rate, you’ll be losing customers faster than you acquire them, which is obviously not going to be sustainable.
You always want to aim for a low churn rate, because losing customers means throwing away the money you spent on marketing to get them. Low churn means you're doing things the right way, with quality customer experience.
Formula:
Customers lost during a set time frame ÷ total number of customers at the start of that timeframe x 100.
Example:
If you had 500 customers at the beginning of the month and lost 25 that month, your churn rate would be: 500 ÷ 25 x 100 = 5%.
It’s vital for startups to keep a close eye on the rate you’re spending your cash reserves before reaching profitability. Burn rate lets business owners know how long you can continue to operate before needing to raise more funds.
Formula:
Cash at the start of the period − cash at the end of the period ÷ the number of months in that period.
Example:
If you started the month with $50,000 and ended with $40,000, your burn rate would be:
$50,000 − $40,000 ÷ 1 = $10,000 per month.
Without knowing your audience, your sales performance will be patchy and slow to grow. Finding the right audience is crucial for startups, since they typically don’t have lots of money to throw around to se what works. There needs to be a more targeted approach.
The way you hone understanding of your audience over time is to get in the habit of continuously reviewing performance data and adjusting your approach accordingly. In the next section you’ll find some analytics tools we recommend because they do most of the heavy lifting for startups.
While further guides will dive deeper into this topic, here are the top tips for getting started with audience insights:
You’ll want to get some core analytics tools activated right from the start, as these will tell you how users are interacting with your website and other channels. You’ll also get invaluable performance indicators showing where you have weak areas that need improvement to increase customer satisfaction and sales.
So, on the one hand you’ll want to know how your brand and products/services are performing in the marketplace, while on the other it’s vital to know your audience so you can hone your offering to what they’re looking for.
Analytics software will put this information at your fingertips, with reports and stats you can pull up from a central Dashboard. The better the tool, the better it breaks things down so you can take action.
The data they’ll give you is invaluable, because it will guide your marketing strategy to produce great results, as well as tell you where you need to improve.
Now that you have tools in place to measure your performance and target the tight audience, let’s dive into the strategies that will get the word out about your brand.
Good marketing will make people notice you enough to want to learn more, and bring in more sales. Great marketing will build brand loyalty, and have customer recommending your business to everyone they know.
Regularly creating content that educates or solves problems, is a proven way to build trust with your audience. It also positions your small business as a thought leader, and brings in organic (free!) visitors to your platform from search engines.
When search engines see people engaging with your content, their algorithms know to boost it higher in search results. So good content is also great for SEO (getting found online).
The classic saying among experienced marketers has long been ‘Content is King’. That’s because building trust and audience engagement naturally translates to conversions.
This continues to be true, and here are some stats to prove it:
Top Tips for startups:
Bear in mind that with generic/samey AI content flooding the online space nowadays, and people having shorter attention spans, be sure to make your content:
The stark fact is that social media platforms design algorithms to keep users engaged for as long as possible, by supplying them with content they show interest in. While this is a double edged sword, the up side is that almost every type of audience uses social media.
These recent stats by Demandsage demonstrate why every startup needs to take social media marketing seriously:
A few posts a month promoting your product or service isn’t going to cut it anymore. Social media is worth consistent effort for these reasons:
Tool Tip: check out RelateSocial to make all of the above easy. It even creates social posts for you, and let’s you schedule when you want them to go out.
Top Tips for startups:
Start by focusing on one or two platforms where your audience is most active. It’s better to excel on fewer channels than to be mediocre or erratic on many.
If you want to learn more about social media marketing, read these guides for small businesses:
By optimizing your website and other marketing content with the keywords that best describe your product or service, as well as the keywords that people use when looking for your type of business, search engines know to rank your pages high for relevance.
The beauty of SEO is that once setup, it’s the gift the keeps on giving. You’ll continue getting organic traffic (free page visitors) without any further effort, apart from maybe making a few small tweaks occasionally to update links or add some new keywords.
Here are some stats from Respona that show how important ranking higher in search engine results is for businesses:
And since Google currently has 85% of the search engine market, read this guide to discover how to make them happy, while also boosting trust in your brand: EEAT: learn about quality content to boost your long term SEO success.
Top Tips for startups:
Keep in mind there is no single way to rank high on Google search results, since their algorithms are always changing, and there are a variety of factors they take into consideration.
This lack of clear action for tangible results has traditionally had small businesses scratching their heads in confusion, with most having to bite the bullet by making space in their budget for an SEO agency.
Tool Tip: an easier and more affordable suggestion is RelateSEO. This tool gives you a To Do list of SEO tasks tailored to your website, along with step-by-step video tutorials to walk you through it. Also get the optimization keywords done for you.
If you have a Google ads account, you can also try the Google Keyword Planner tool, although it’s not as simplified.
Paid ads are important for startups because building brand awareness in other ways takes time. This strategy guarantees insistant visibility among people that are already looking for what you offer, so it significantly increases your chances of sales.
It’s best to start off with the two most popular platforms, Google and Meta (Facebook, Instagram), since they have the largest audiences. Many small businesses only need these two platforms, although if you’re looking for a business audience, LinkedIn will be crucial.
The following stats, based on research done by a range of companies, give you a clear idea of why paid ads are well worth the spend:
Top Tips for startups:
Tool Tip: while PPC can offer great ROI if done right, they can be quite daunting for newbies, and it’s easy to fall into a runaway budget. That’s why we recommend RelateAds.
This tool that can do most of the heavy lifting for you. From flexibility and transparency on what you spend, to even writing the ads for you, based on successful competitor examples.
Emails let you to build a more personal relationship with your customers, making it good for building brand loyalty.
And unlike search engines or social media platforms where an algorithm change can wipe out your visibility unless you’re paying for ads, your email subscriber list is owned entirely by you.
Let’s look at some recent research stats from GrowthList and ColoursUI which show the value of email marketing:
Top Tips for startups:
This strategy is a powerful tool for startups to grow their brand awareness, because you get to connect with audiences that are already engaged. The credibility and trust is baked in.
Research by the Influencer Marketing Hub and All Tech Magazine demonstrate why you’ll want to invest time in this strategy:
Top Tips for startups:
Encouraging your customers to recommend your business to the people they know is a powerful strategy, because just like influencer marketing, it carries with a high trust factor. Referred customers tend to be loyal.
Let’s look at some 2024 survey stats from DemandSage, Truelist, Winsavvy, and TrueList:
Top Tips for startups:
Tool Tip: platforms like ReferralCandy can automate and manage your referral program, including tracking and payouts. Some website builders like Shopify offer inbuilt tools for this.
Humans have an inbuilt need for connection and community. This has been increasingly moving online over the past few years, as like minded people can connect with each other globally from the comfort of their homes.
Taking the time to build community through forums, social media groups, or events has a number of great benefits, from creating brand loyalty to giving you valuable insights that improve your business. This is especially important for startups.
Here’s some recent research by Socialplus and Business2community proving this strategy is well worth the effort:
Top Tips for startups:
Tool Tip: platforms like Discord, Facebook groups, Reddit, Circle.so, Mighty Networks, and niche LinkedIn groups are popular for building early interest.
Once you have your community up and running, you may want to charge a subscription fee for exclusive content. Patreon and Substack are good for this.
These days there are two main strategies to build your brand reputation:
Here are some stats from recent research by a number of companies to underline why you ned to take brand reputation seriously:
Top Tips for startups:
Tool Tip: the RelateReviews reputation manager puts all customer feedback from across the web into a simplified dashboard, where you can also get Sentiment Analysis to take the pulse of how people feel about your brand. It even helps you reply to customers.
If you’d like to learn more about reputation management for small businesses, we’ve created these guides for you:
Startups are like a young tree, they’re vulnerable. By forming joint ventures or co-promotion alliances with complementary businesses and organizations, you can give your fledgling business a strength boost.
You’ll expand your audience reach without a big budget increase, gain more credibility, and get access to extra resources. For example, if you have a coffee shop it would be a match made in heaven to partner with a nearby bakery, offering combined discounts, referral programs, and local events.
A 2024 report by Allbound explains that partnerships now often outperform direct acquisition, with many startups prioritizing collaboration strategies because of the cost-efficiency, and because market reach would otherwise be hard to achieve.
There’s also a 2024 study by Partnero which shows that collaborative efforts can lead to substantial revenue growth and brand credibility, especially in the SaaS and ecommerce sectors.
Top Tips for startups:
Whether virtual or in-person, hosting or participating, events like webinars, trade shows, and pop-ups are an excellent way for startups to directly engage with the marketplace, showcase your offering, ramp up brand awareness, and connect with your audience.
Let’s jump into some 2024 stats from Event Academy and Eventcube to see why this type of marketing is worth your time:
Top Tips for startups:
PLG boils down to using your product as the main driver of customer acquisition and retention, by offering free trials, freemium models, or demos. That way, customers get to experience the value firsthand. This cuts marketing costs and makes sale conversions easier.
For startups that offer services instead of products, the equivalent to PLG would be a free trial so customers can try it out before they buy a subscription.
Let’s look at some recent research demonstrating the benefits of PLG marketing:
Top Tips for startups:
This guide gives you a comprehensive list of the marketing strategies that every startup needs to build brand awareness and customer loyalty. Plus, instead of just telling you about their benefits, we’ve hunted around to give you real-world statistics, proving how well they work.
We know how busy startups are, so instead of giving you loads of advanced information to wade through, our goal with this article has been to offer practical top tips, so you have the know-how to dive right in and get your feet wet.
The key takeaway here is to continuously gather audience and competitor performance data from a number of marketing channels, because this will give you the insights to consistently make profitable decisions.
We recommend you try out all these strategies, to see which ones work the best for your business. And most importantly of all, each channel will give you valuable insights on what your customers want. Knowing how to keep your audience happy is ultimately how you’ll achieve long term success.
For more of a steer on easy tools that can help you achieve your goals, including a short Quiz that offers recommendations based on what stage your business is at, check out the Build & Grow Hub.
And if you're looking to bringing new ideas to life without any cost barrier, check out the Business Starter Kit – get all this for free: LLC registration, a .com domain, business email, easy website builder, SEO tool to get found online, and social media tool to for fast posts to grow your reach. What’s stopping you?
What is digital content marketing, and how does it work?
This is the umbrella term for regularly creating online content (like blogs, videos, and social media posts) that educates, or solves people’s pain points. The goal is to build awareness of your brand, and boost interest in your products or services, not to overtly sell.
You should have a blog on your website, and also look to publish your content elsewhere, like on YouTube or other websites. Also link to your articles on social media.
How can content marketing help a business?
Content marketing is a proven way to build trust with your audience. It also positions your business as a thought leader, and brings in organic (free) visitors to your platform from search engines. Building trust and audience engagement naturally translates to conversions.
What is content marketing in SEO?
When search engines see people engaging with your content, their algorithms know to boost it higher in search results. So good content is also great for SEO (getting found online).
How to create a small business content marketing strategy?
Use a content calendar, to schedule new content at least once a week. Read these guides to simplify things, and learn how to do content marketing like a pro:
What is social media marketing or SMM, and why is it important?
SMM is a type of content marketing, but it purely focuses on using social media platforms to grow brand awareness, engage your audience, and increase your sales.
If you’re a small business, check out RelateSocial, because it’s designed to simplify things, at an affordable price. It even writes posts for you.
Why is SEO important?
SEO is about getting found online. In marketing jargon, it drives organic traffic (visitors that are already searching for what you offer) to your website.
By optimizing your site and other marketing content with the keywords that best describe your product or services, search engines know to rank your pages high for relevance.
Is SEO worth it for small businesses?
SEO is a way to level the playing field. While large companies with big budgets can pay for lots of ads, if you have relevant keywords and quality content that people find interesting, search engines will rank you high up on search result pages.
What is the cost of SEO for small business?
Understanding how to optimize your website so that search engines rank it higher has traditionally been tricky, so most businesses used to have no other choice but to pay an agency or specialist.
But now there’s an easy, more affordable tool to figure it out for you – RelateSEO gives you a list of optimization tasks tailored to your website, and walks you through it with step-by-step guides.
What are the mistakes small business owners make when doing SEO?
Read our guide to get rid of the complexity: Make sure your new website gets found: SEO need-to-know
What is influencer marketing?
Your brand collaborates with people who’ve built trust and credibility as experts in their niche, so have a big social media following. This helps you introduce a wider audience to your brand
How does influencer marketing work?
Do some research to find influencers who are a good match for your business. Reach out to them to see if they’d be interested in promoting your products or services.
How much does influencer marketing cost?
You can pay influencers either a base rate, or a bonus payment if they reaches certain targets. The amount varies from $100 to crazy amounts like a million, depending on their platform and following. Learn more: How much & how to pay influencers in 2024.
What is paid advertising, and why is it important?
There are two main types of digital paid ads – search where you place ads at the top of search result pages, and social media where ads appear in people’s feeds. Most of the time, digital ads are pay-per-click (PPC), meaning you set a budget on the advertising platform, but only pay an amount each time someone clicks on the ad.
Paid ads let you target your audience with precision, such as by keywords people search for, their age, likes, location etc. Because of this, paid ads give you valuable insights about your audience over time.
When to invest in paid advertising?
If done right, paid ads deliver valuable return on investment at every stage of your business. They can be especially beneficial when your brand is unknown, as they guarantee your ad will get seen by the right people.
If you’re worried about how to write successful ads, or your spending getting out of control, check out RelateAds, designed to simplify things.
How does email marketing help small businesses?
Email marketing delivers a number of great benefits, from owning your audience subscriber list (unlike search or social platforms), building more personalized relationships with your customers, increasing brand awareness with helpful information, automated campaigns to save time, and valuable insights on customer behavior.
When is the best time to send a marketing email?
This depends on a number of factors, like your industry, audience, type of email, and time of year. But generally, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays have higher open rates than Mondays and Fridays.
What is referral marketing?
Create loyalty programs that encouraging people to spontaneously promote your business to their friends, family and colleagues.
What is affiliate marketing?
You setup an affiliate program that pays commissions to people who promotes your product or service with a link. The affiliate gets paid when someone clicks on the link, or when they visit one of your landing pages and buy something.
What is community building?
Community-based marketing is where you build a sense of belonging to a like-minded tribe, around your brand or product. Making people feel supported builds loyalty.
What is PR in marketing?
Public relations encourages customers and journalists to think and speak positively about your business. Described in two words, it’s reputation management.
How to do PR for a small business?
If you have big news about your business, and want to get the word out, these are two popular platforms for press releases
But for small businesses, PR is mostly about staying on top of customer feedback so you can build trust with customers. To make this easy, check out the RelateReviews tool.
What is product lead growth?
PLG is a business model that uses a product to drive customer acquisition, retention, and expansion: The main approaches are to focus on the product instead of sales campaigns, deliver value quickly so the product ‘sells itself’, and use free offerings so people want to try it.
From starting up to creating your site, here’s everything you need to make big splash online.
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