Marketing Tactics for Startups: The Top 8

Marketing is only one part of starting a business – but without it, sales will be an uphill battle. At the beginning of your startup journey, market research, branding, content, and social media may not rank high on your to-do list, but don’t wait too long to develop your business’s startup marketing strategies and the tactics essential for a successful launch.

Before we launch into startup marketing tactics, let’s talk about setting and measuring goals.

SMART Marketing Goals

SMART marketing goals are the actionable objectives that must be accomplished to support the launch of your business. SMART stands for Specific | Measurable | Achievable | Realistic | Timely |. Following the process of crafting business goals based on SMART, supercharges your ability to meet and exceed your goals. Here are two samples to get you started on developing your SMARTs.

  • In 120 days, we will have an email list of 1,400 opted-in potential customers.
    • Specific: We will grow our email subscriber list with 2 lead generators – running ads on Facebook and a robust content strategy that drives organic traffic.
    • Measurable: Starting from 0, we will reach 1,400 subscribers within 120 days from launch.
    • Achievable: Employing lead generation tactics will increase brand awareness, organic traffic, customer engagement, lead generation, and sales.
    • Realistic: This goal is within the window for our industry for a startup.
    • Timely: 1,400 subscribers in 120 days significantly increases our ability to raise awareness and sell our products before the end of the year.
  • In 90 days, we will add 5,000 followers to our TikTok account, 3,500 followers to our Facebook account, and 500 to our LinkedIn account with a robust social media content strategy of 5 posts per week across the platforms.
    • Specific: Each week, we will post two videos/reels, two image teaser posts, and one product-specific educational post – this is one of our primary go-to-market (GTM) strategies.
    • Measurable: Starting from 0, we will add 5,000 TikTok followers, 3,500 Facebook followers, and 500 LinkedIn followers in 90 days.
    • Achievable: Creating a following is a key part of our marketing strategy for launch. Introducing our brand and increasing brand authority will drive leads and sales.
    • Realistic: With strong reels and other content, this goal is achievable and in line with startups in our niche.
    • Timely: In 90 days, we will have followers and measurable results to grow more followers in the following quarters.

This is just a quick primer on SMART marketing goals. Read this article: SMART Marketing Goals: Creating, Measuring, and Revisiting Your Goals for a more in-depth examination.

Strategies Vs. Tactics

Launching a new business successfully requires well-thought-out go-to-market branding and marketing strategy and identifying the tactics required to carry out the strategies. So, what’s the difference between a strategy and a tactic?

  • Strategies are the vision — Tactics are the actions.
  • Strategies are the big picture – Tactics are the detailed actions.
  • Strategies are the long-term vision – Tactics are short-term and may change over time.

Strategies drive the tactics required. Here are a few examples:

  • Strategy: Develop a robust customer loyalty program to increase engagement
  • Tactic: Harvest customer data, track behaviors, reward purchases, and referrals
  • Strategy: Increase customer engagement
  • Tactic: Create exclusive offers to current and past clients, advertising on social media platforms and the website

Successful marketing strategies begin by knowing your customers and meeting their needs and desires with your product or service.

Discovering the Top 9 Marketing Tactics for Startups

Depending on your strategies and goals, the following marketing tactics may or may not fit your needs. Consider these tactics the jumping-off point to designing a customer-centric integrated marketing communication plan.

Build a Strong Brand

For a startup, a strong brand strategy positions your company for success and helps to cultivate brand authority and trust. Your brand showcases your customer-centric mission, drives customer engagement, fosters growth, improves customer retention, and boosts your company above the competition. A brand evokes emotions and is so much more than just a logo and tagline.

To create your brand, brainstorm the following:

  • Product/service
  • Audience
  • Competition
  • Purpose, mission, vision, and promise
  • Brand voice and personality
  • Company name
  • Tagline and slogan
  • Unique value proposition
  • Logo and other visual assets

A consistent and unified brand creates authority, recognition, and trust among customers.

Develop a Customer-Centric Website

Not all websites are created equal, and not all focus on the customer experience. When developing your website, design and engineer with the best UX principles to avoid chasing clients away. A website that is difficult to navigate, unappealing to the eye, with a difficult sales flow, broken links, and other pain points will not generate sales or build brand authority.

Include the following elements at launch to create a successful, lead-generating, customer-centric website include:

  • A streamlined sales flow.
  • A content library that includes articles about your products/services to educate your customers and for link strategy.
  • A press room to house your press releases and press kit as part of your PR strategy.
  • A lead magnet tool to capture visitor information. Effective lead magnets include offering free courses, free trials of digital products, or eBooks.
  • Create keyword strategies for your company and each product.
  • Include web support chat.
  • Information on an affiliate marketing program.
  • Make contacting you EASY.
  • Invest in paid advertising for the launch to drive people to your website.

Don’t worry if you’ve already created your website but didn’t consider UX best practices; a 9 Ways a UX Audit can Help you Thrive will find pain points and brand inconsistencies and provide a roadmap for revamping your website before launch.

Create a Robust Content Marketing Plan

While many people believe that the purpose of content is solely for SEO purposes, this isn’t true. Content, whether videos, articles, white papers, infographics, courses, case studies, or podcasts, builds brand authority, creates engagement, educates customers, and drives organic traffic.

As part of your content marketing plan, develop an editorial calendar as part of your content management system. Editorial calendars are strategic and incorporate seasonal activities and content-focused events. But arguably, the biggest benefits of an editorial calendar are streamlined scheduling, consistency, and fresh content, and it keeps your team organized.

Email Marketing

Email marketing campaigns generate website traffic, drive sales, increase brand awareness, engage customers, and give insight into your customers. Email marketing is effective – when done correctly – but we all have an inbox full of campaigns that fail to hit the mark. Here are X ways to create effective email marketing campaigns:

  • Provide value – make recipients want to open your email.
  • Identify a special offer.
  • Craft a CTA.
  • Create a landing page.
  • Write short, benefit-focused subject lines.
  • Write compelling body content (if you don’t have a skilled copywriter on staff, outsource!)
  • Ask for referrals.
  • Stay out of spam by avoiding spam-friendly language.
  • Add abandoned cart emails to the email marketing strategy.

Social Media Marketing

Generating leads is often the top challenge for a new company. Social media marketing is essential in today’s digitally focused world, even for B2B companies. With your brand guidelines in hand, create social media profiles on platforms where your customers are engaging. Set a follower volume and activity goal and analyze your social media statistics monthly.

Leverage social media platforms to create buzz for your launch – use paid advertising, influencer partnerships, and engaging content to reach your ideal customer base. It is vital to have a team member engage with customers who comment on your posts or send private messages. But be sure to give your social media team your brand guidelines and the acceptable voice and tone to use in public.

Public Relations

PR is an essential part of an Integrated Marketing Communication Plan. Before launch, develop a press kit to send to local, industry-specific, and national media outlets. A PR strategy capitalizes on many of the abovementioned tactics, including knowing your audience and competition, creating a website, and having content that engages and educates. Start with these action items for a successful PR campaign:

  • Follow the 3 P’s of PR – Product | Purpose | Passion
  • Put on your press hat. Find the news “hook” in your story and remember that news is timely, relevant, and often novel (what’s the angle?)
  • Write the launch press release.
  • Write the story to send with your press release to target media outlets. Note: tailoring each introductory story to specific publications or journalists is a must.
  • Gain insight into what your target publications and journalists cover by following them on social media.
  • Leverage your social media – release press releases on social media.
  • Evaluate your PR Metrics to understand ROI and measure the effectiveness of individual platforms, brand positioning, web traffic, engagement, impressions, earned backlinks, and impressions.

Event Marketing

Face-to-face is a great way to gain attention and traction for a start-up, and event marketing is definitely a tactic to incorporate. While in-person events are ideal for a business launch, large-scale in-person events are resource hogs. Online or hybrid events are effective, especially for digital products.

Why should you launch your business with an event? Events build anticipation, promote a rush of sales, create brand awareness, generate momentum, and give journalists insight into your business. Be prepared to show your products in action and introduce your team. For a hybrid or virtual event, SpotMe is a top event platform that allows customized branded events.

Customer Relationship Management

Managing customer relationships is a common challenge yet one of the best strategies to grow your business. Fortunately, there are robust CRM tools to take the pressure off your team. As a startup, spend time evaluating the data you want from your customers, in addition to name, contact information, and purchasing habits, and then determine how you will harvest the data. Have your CRM tool set up with the categories you need before launch.

While putting off a CRM until you have customers may be tempting, capturing and keeping contacts organized and ready without one is very difficult. Ongoing, the CRM will be the lifeblood for both sales and marketing. The benefits of a customer relationship management plan include:

  • Improve customer relationships.
  • Better tracking of customer and prospect data.
  • Easy to add new leads.
  • Find new customers fast.
  • Access to detailed analytics.
  • Ability to sort, prioritize, and analyze sales leads.
  • Increased sales.
  • Automated sales reports.
  • Customer buying patterns.
  • Streamlined avenue for email marketing.

There’s no universal perfect marketing mix to launch a business. Create your perfect mix, balancing your goals, strategies, tactics, and budget.

At The KMM Group, we recognize that launching a new business is overwhelming. We would be thrilled to assist you with creating and implementing an integrated marketing communication plan for your launch and beyond. Schedule a free 30-minute intro call today.