How to do startup marketing

You have started a startup and want to lead it on a growth course? A good business idea alone is not sufficient for this, too, and an incentive for marketing is indispensable. Here are five tips, which must be taken into consideration from this point of view.

1. Product-Market Fit: Make your product a must

At the beginning, your product or service must first prove and a clear target group has not yet crystallized. That is why you have to ask yourself again and again whether the people out there really want to spend money on your product and whether it really is a must-have. For this, it is necessary to maintain close contact with existing and potential customers.
Is the advantage of the product really recognizable to them? If the product no longer exists and your customers could not use it, would they be disappointed? To answer these questions, I find the limit of Sean Ellis very helpful: He says the product market fit is achieved when at least 40 percent of the users claim that they are "very disappointed" when the product no longer exists.

2. Analytics and Business Intelligence: Ask the right questions

Knowing your own key figures and understanding your customers is one of the most important challenges at all. Nevertheless, the many companies are still extremely difficult. First of all you have to be aware of the metrics that are important to your startup. What reflects the real customer value? How much does a new customer (CAC) cost you and how do you reinstate these costs? Which channels do best to attract new customers? Where do customers jump in your product? What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)? Do you consider your metrics per cohort, per country / region, per segment, per channel or per device?
Only when you ask the right questions, you can identify how well your business really goes and draw the right conclusions. This is the main basis for making decisions, making changes and assessing trends. Once these questions are settled, you need to take care of a tracking plan. This should define what events are recorded and where they should be included in the code of your product.
When it comes to measuring, there are many useful tools. In the web area, this is primarily Google Analytics and the Adobe Marketing Cloud. For app data, I recommend Adjust and Appsflyer. With segment and Mixpanel one can connect very well different interfaces and then use tableau for the visualization of the data.

3. Organization: Find the right people for the right tasks

Your employees are one of the most important pillars for the growth of your company. Founders must ask themselves: What roles do I need in my company? Which skills must be covered? And how do I allocate my scarce resources?
Teamwork is great, but a process or product owner must always be defined, so that clear structures prevail. The core channels for the marketing should be internally recorded, less important channels can take over external partners. In the long term, however, it is better to regulate as much as possible internally.
External resources such as coachings or sparring partners are important add-ons. You should, as far as possible, take advantage of them, because they can give good tips, train your employees and draw attention to things that you might not have noticed internally. This gives you a steeper learning curve.

4. Marketing Channels: Trust and do not lose the focus

Find the right channels, where you can target your desired customers. When it comes to a new or rather emotionally filled product, push marketing is the right way, for example through large-scale discounting campaigns. In the case of products with which people are already familiar, on the other hand, one should rely on pull channels, ie the targeted approach of customers.
It is best to start with less elaborate methods like listings, basic SEO or Adwords, and use viral marketing to lower the CAC. In short: channels, with which you can quickly try things out.
You should test different methods and if you find some potential for scaling, you should focus on the channels that are most profitable and most scalable. To be able to discover these potentials, the above mentioned topic Analytics is so important.
In order to find the right channels, it is important to always remain curious, try out new things, think the corner, but also observe competition and role models. Tools like Similarweb, SEMRush, Whatrunswhere or Whichadswork are helpful.

5. Testing and learning: Create a system for experiments

Test two or more variants against each other. Always define how a success in the test would look like and what the next steps would be to react quickly. Increase your success rates on the basis of real user behavior, with Landingpages and e-mails are, for example, A / B test under real conditions indispensable. To find out which versions of your product are better, use split tests that highlight the different features. Thus, the cohort can be used to identify which customers prefer which version.
For this type of tests, there are numerous tools. Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, Optimize360 are among the most popular. Unbounce is useful for creating landing page variations when you do not have large technical resources available.