The Ultimate Startup Marketing Strategy

Two fundamental truths exist when marketing a startup. One is that a great product alone is not enough to succeed.
The other is that no amount of marketing will make a crap product gain a mass audience.

“Nothing kills a bad company

faster than good marketing”

Successful startup marketing requires that you have both a great product and great marketing. For that
reason, I’ve focused this guide on both customer acquisition and improving your product-market fit.

What’s in this guide?

I’ve split this guide into four parts. Feel free to skip to the section that you’re currently working on. If you have any
specific questions, you can go straight to the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Chapter 1. The Foundations of Startup Marketing

Chapter 2. Paid Media Marketing for Startups
Chapter 3. Earned Media Marketing for Startups
Chapter 4. Owned Media Marketing for Startups
Summary & Comments

Chapter 1: The Foundations of Startup Marketing

For early-stage startups, feedback is more important than customers. The faster you can resolve customer
objections, and improve the product to match market demand, the more likely you are to win over the long run.

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In this chapter we’re going to look at seven essential aspects of laying the foundations for an aggressive marketing
strategy.

Growth hacking – building marketing into your product

Conversion rate optimisation
Using Facebook ads to understand your audience
Customer feedback loops
The diffusion of innovation & targeting early adopters
Fine-tuning your messaging
Differentiation

#1 Viral Marketing & Growth Hacking: Building Marketing Into Your Product

“Marketing is for companies

with sucky products”
F R E D W I L S O N , V C

I disagree with Fred Wilson’s quote, yet I can’t dispute that the most successful startup marketing strategies are
those that embed marketing into their product.

Dropbox, Hotmail, Eventbrite, Mailbox, and Snapchat famously acquired millions of users with almost no money
spent on marketing. Their secret? Building virality into their product.

A startup’s ability to go viral depends on two variables: time, and the ‘viral coefficient’ i.e. the number of new users
each user generates.

Below is a graph to illustrate startup growth at different rates based on varying viral coefficients. Imagine that the Y-
axis represents your number of user signups, and the X-axis represents time.

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If your viral coefficient is 1.0 (each user generates one new user), you will achieve linear growth, assuming you retain
your users. If you have a viral coefficient above 1.1, you will achieve exponential growth as illustrated by all of the
lines above the lower green line.

How do you embed marketing into your product?

Every startup is unique, so I won’t discuss tactical methods in great detail. There are two broad strategies I’d
recommend, though: The first is to build a product worth recommending. If every single user recommends two new
users, you have exponential growth.

The easiest method of measuring a user’s likelihood to recommend your startup is by using the Net Promote Score,
a simple test where you ask users “on a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend?” If
the aggregate score is above 9.0, you will likely achieve exponential growth.

The second strategy is to align your ‘growth hack’ with the channel(s) that your ideal customers use to learn about
your product. Brian Halligan from Hubspot put it best when he said:

“To be successful, you must

match the way you market your
products with the way your
prospects learn about and shop
for your products.” – Brian
Halligan, Hubspot

In the context of growth hacking, it’s no good if your growth hack generates enormous exposure for your brand on
Facebook – when 99% of your best-fit customers coming from reading B2B whitepapers. If that were the case, a
better approach would be to produce user-generated content that could be used to scale producing high-quality
whitepapers.

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It may be less sexy than the growth hacking case studies covered by TechCrunch, but it’ll work.

#2 Conversion Rate Optimisation: Increase your signups with split-test experiments

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the science behind understanding why your visitors are not ‘converting’ into
customers, and then improving your messaging or value proposition to increase this rate of conversions. Contrary
to popular belief, it does not start with running A/B experiments; it starts with understanding your visitors and their
objections.

How to identify customer objections:

The fastest way to understand why potential customers are not converting is to ask them. Below are several tools
and techniques that I’d recommend.

Install Intercom – a great tool that allows you to talk in real time with website visitors.
Ask visitors to fill out a survey using Survey Monkey. Usually, you’ll need to incentivise this with some kind of
giveaway.
Ask for feedback in a forum your customers participate on.
Commission some user tests from UserTesting.com.
Invite someone you know (a customer) to lunch / Skype.

Following this, hopefully you will have a good idea of what is preventing your visitors from converting. Now it’s time
to make changes to your landing page to counter these objections.

The first thing I’d recommend is focusing on the areas with the most leverage. Focus on your headlines, call to
actions, and lead capture forms. Use tools like Leadformly, which will give you a high-converting form without having
to spend months split testing different variations.

The following model by WiderFunnel is also a fantastic starting point for understanding how to improve the
likelihood of a conversion. Whenever I am presented with a CRO project, I like to consider how we could improve
each point. For example, can we reduce the navigation to minimise distractions? Could we increase the urgency by
having a countdown timer or a “Only X left” next to our call-to-actions? In 2012, I managed to quadruple a website’s
conversion rate from 2.5% to 10% using these methods.

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Once you have your mockups designed, I recommend using Visual Website Optimizer to test them against your
existing landing page. VWO has a great user interface, making it very easy to quickly test variations of your website
without needing to make backend coding changes.

Conversion rate optimisation is not something you do once. You should strive to constantly tweak and improve your
landing pages to make incremental improvements.

At the same time, always remember the model below. Incremental tweaks will always hit a limit. There’s often far
more opportunity in being bold and testing something very different.

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#3 Facebook Advertising: Finding your perfect audience using segmentation
Most people think of Facebook Ads as an acquisition channel for driving signups. The truth is that it’s also one of the
best customer research tools we have available to us.

Let me explain. There is no limit to how finely you can segment a Facebook advert. If you wanted, you could run an
identical adverts to 500 different demographic and psychographic audience segments. Using conversion tracking,
you can see which demographics and psychographics then have the highest conversion rate on your service.

Here are a few examples. I work with many music startups, and I’ve found time and time again that guitarists are
typically more likely to sign up to a music service than a drummer or a bassist. For one of our clients, FanDistro, we
found that 23 year old Canadians are approximately 3x more likely to convert than 21 year olds. We know that
musicians in New Zealand are more likely to convert than Australians.

Facebook Ads are, in my opinion, the best way to quickly and affordably verify who your audience are, and what your
cost-per-acquisition is for different demographic groups.

#4 Installing a Customer Feedback Loop

It’s worth reiterating that the most important asset for most startups is to be told what needs improving, and have
an agile system for making those improvements. Anyone who’s read Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup will understand
this as the ‘Iteration Cycle’.

A simple ‘give us feedback’ form is not enough. Most people will not go out of their way to give you feedback. Use
incentives, meet your users, and study user behavior data to understand where people fall off in your funnel, and
more importantly – why?

#5 Diffusion of Innovation: Targeting Early Adopters

Many inexperienced marketers make the mistake of targeting the mass market too soon. The reason this rarely
works is because the majority of people resist change, and are not receptive to products / services that are not
already recommended by early adopters.

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I learned this lesson through A/B testing. Two years ago, while running an experiment to see whether additional
social proof increased signup rates, I found that by simply adding the number of likes and users already signed up
next to the signup button, had a dramatic impact on increasing the website’s signup rate.

If you want to own the majority market share, your initial launch strategy and messaging must appeal to innovators
and early adopters. Once you have a number of case studies, testimonials, and respected innovators singing your
praises, then it’s time to approach the majority. The laggards will follow.

#6 Why, What, How: Fine-Tuning Your Messaging for Conversion

If you haven’t read Simon Sinek’s book ‘Start With Why’, I’d strongly recommend putting it on order.

The gist of the book is that, if you want to inspire someone to take action, you must begin by explaining why you do
what you do. Not what or how.

Apple is a great example of a company that sells “why”. Apple challenges the status quo with everything they do –
MacBooks, iTunes and iPads are just how they do that. Dell don’t have a why – they just sell reasonably good
computers. While Apple talk about pushing humanity forward and challenging the status quo, Dell talk about the size
of their processors and RAM. Is it any wonder why people queue for hours to get the latest product, while Dell
receive nowhere near the level of advocacy, despite their products being very similar.

In the example below, Leadformly’s headline is ‘Capture & convert up to 300% more leads’. This doesn’t tell visitors
anything about what or how the product works, but it gives a compelling ‘why’, followed by a subheading that
explains what the product is and how it works.

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 Does your
messaging
communicate why
your startup exists?
Do you know your
why? If not, this is
an important step
that I would not
advise skipping
over.

#7

Differentiation in your marketing

Various studies predict we see between 1,000 – 5,000 advertisements per day depending on where we live. How do
you compete and stand out with your marketing in such a saturated space?

The answer is by being the shepherd, not a sheep.

Our brain categorises similar pieces of information together, a process known as Gestalt. Because of this, the more
of a similar thing we see, the less impact each additional thing has. When Lady Gaga wore a dress made of meat it
made headlines all over the World. When others copied her quirkiness, hardly anyone talked. This pattern has
repeated itself millions of times over.

This is not about first-mover advantage; this is about observing what everyone else is, and being the opposite. Apply
this from the most macro aspect of your strategy down to the micro, and you’ll be amazed at how significant this is.

Now that we’ve covered off the foundations of messaging and preparing your product for a successful marketing
strategy, let’s move on to customer acquisition. I’ve split the section on customer acquisition into three chapters,
paid media, earned media, and owned media.

Chapter 2: Paid Media Marketing for Startups

There’s a school of thought that says startups should spend as little as possible on marketing. I disagree. I believe
that marketing should focus on positive ROI (return on investment). If a paid media channel can profitably drive
qualified users for your startup, it’d be foolish to refuse it on the basis that it’s paid for. Another reason for using
paid media is to establish a cost-per-acquisition, as this will act as a benchmark to compare all other marketing
activity.

Paid media channels fall into three broad categories: display, search, and affiliate marketing. Below are some of the
main online channels I’d recommend looking into, along with some tips on each.

#8 Facebook Advertising
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We’ve already discussed Facebook Ads from a research perspective, but let’s consider it now as a channel for
acquiring users.

While it’s possible to write a guide of this length on Facebook Ads alone, I’ll quickly summarise some of my
recommendations based on a considerable amount of Facebook Ad campaigns that I’ve worked on.

Use page promoted posts targeting people in the news feed. These ads have the highest click-through and
engagement rates.
Test as many advert variations as possible. The weirder, brighter, and more unique your ad is, the better. When
everyone else zigs, zag.
Don’t create ads using the Facebook Ad Manager (it’s awful). Either use the power editor, or a dedicated tool like
Qwaya. This will make segmentation much easier.
Use conversion tracking – by installing the conversion pixel you enable oCPM for conversion bidding. This
basically means that Facebook will algorithmically optimise your budget for more conversions.
Use fine segmentation – If you use Qwaya, you can split your ad campaign into tens or hundreds of individual
ads each targeting a specific segment of your audience. This enables you to quickly see which ad segments
perform well and which don’t, so you can move your budget to the segments that are most profitable.

I’ve written about Facebook Ads in more depth here.

#9 Google Adwords (Search)

If your product solves an issue that people search for, there’s a high likelihood that Google AdWords will be a great
acquisition channel for you. For example, if your startup helps people find the cheapest gig tickets, you may want to
bid on terms like ‘cheap gig ticket’, ‘London gig tickets’, and ‘Gaslight Anthem London Roundhouse tickets’.

#10 Google Adwords (Display)

Similarly to above, Google enable you to purchase banner adverts through their display network. You can specify
which websites your banner ad appears on, or bid to appear on websites related to certain keywords.

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An example of Nikon using Google Display Network to run adverts on Billboard.com.

#11 Reddit Advertising

Reddit is often overlooked as a paid marketing channel. I have to admit, the results I’ve had in the past are extremely
varied, but it’s very cheap and always worth testing.

Reddit advertising works by running ads at the top of any subreddit of your choice. For example, for a music client,
we may advertise in the subreddits ‘WeAretheMusicMakers’, ‘Music’, and ‘Guitar’. Each subreddit has a very distinct
community, so it pays to get involved in each one for a bit of time first before running ads.

One specific reason why I’m a fan of Reddit Advertising is because Reddit seems to attract the early adopter types. It’s
a great place for getting honest feedback and targeting people who are likely to be receptive regardless of what stage
your product’s at.

#12 Google Remarketing

Google Remarketing goes one step beyond the standard display advertising mentioned above. Essentially, when
someone visits your website a cookie is dropped on their computer. When they visit other websites, an ad will
appear encouraging them to come back to your website.

You can get very smart with this by running different remarketing ads for different stages of your signup funnel. For
example, if they visited the signup page but didn’t complete the form, you could run an ad with an incentive to finish
signing up.

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Google Remarketing is generally very effective as the people you’re advertising to are qualified and already aware of
your product. The trick is to get the frequency right and not be overly annoying!

#13 Facebook Exchange

Facebook Exchange works in a very similar to Google Remarketing, but using Facebook Ads instead. In other words,
someone visits your website and bounces. When they go to Facebook they’ll find your ads encouraging them to
come back.

To use Facebook Exchange you’ll need to use one of their partners. I’ve tested a handful of them and recommend
AdRoll.

#14 StumbleUpon Advertising

While the quality of visitors from StumbleUpon is generally quite low, the cost per click is exceptionally low also,
enabling you to buy a large amount of traffic for a low cost.

I’ve yet to see astounding results from StumbleUpon ads, except for travel related content. StumbleUpon is very
visual social network where inspirational and stimulating content seems to spread virally. If you’re a luxury travel
operator, this is a gold mine. If you a SAAS company promoting an app, it may be a little bit trickier.

#15 Twitter Advertising

Twitter Ads can be very effective, but the reason I haven’t recommended them sooner is due to the budget
limitations. Currently, the minimum budget for a Twitter Ad campaign is £5,000/month, which is outside of most
startup’s budget. If you do have this sort of budget to invest, then Twitter Ads do tend to be pretty effective when
done right.

My advice would be to promote an amazing piece of content rather than directly promoting your services. View
Twitter as a 1:many platform where, if you run your ads correctly, you can launch your content to a large audience
who will introduce your content to an even larger audience.

If your campaign dies after being promoted to the initial audience, start again.

#16 Content Discovery Platforms

There are a number of content discovery platforms that promote your content alongside articles on major news
sites such as the New York Times and The Guardian.

I’ve tested a handful of these, including Outbrain, Zemanta, nRelate and Taboola. For driving backlinks and launching
content they’re a powerful tool, although they can get quite expensive depending on the quality of your content.

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#17 LinkedIn Advertising
While my personal experiences with LinkedIn advertising has not been particularly positive, I know of a few startups
(particularly in the financial services industry) that have achieved great results by running targeted ads to people by
their job title and sector.

In my opinion, the problem with LinkedIn Ads is banner blindness. The adverts don’t stand out, and appear in the
same spot on every page, causing users to become ‘blind’ to them.

#18 Video Pre-Roll Advertising

If your startup has produced a compelling promo video, pre-roll advertising could be a powerful paid marketing
channel for you. Using TubeMogul, you can pay for your video to appear as an advert before video content on major
video networks, such as 4od, and YouTube.

One interesting ‘trick’ with pre-roll advertising is that you do not pay if your ad is skipped within the first five seconds
(which most people do skip). The trick, then, is to go down one of two routes. The first route is to get the message
out about your service within the first five seconds of the video hoping that people skip so that you can expose your
message to a huge number of people without paying too much.

The second option is to make the first five seconds ambiguous and weird enough to intrigue people to watch the rest
of the video. Here’s the best example I’ve seen of this tactic being put into practice.

#19 Affiliate marketing

If your startup benefits from offering a high margin product and has a good conversion rate, then you may benefit
from offering an affiliate programme through a network such as Affiliate Window or ClickBank.

I wouldn’t advise diving into affiliate marketing until you’ve already established your brand and found other
marketing channels. Consider it more of an accelerant rather than a base fuel for your online marketing strategy.

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Chapter 3:Earned Media Marketing for Startups
Earned media can be thought of as any form of publicity generated by your advocates (customers, fans, partners). In
my opinion, earned media is the most valuable, cost-effective, credible, and sustainable form of online marketing. It’s
also the hardest to create and measure.

The reason earned media is so effective is because people trust their friend’s recommendations. Conversely, our
trust in virtually all other forms of paid & owned media advertising is declining.

So how can you leverage this shift in trust to drive more sales / signups?

#20 Do Something Remarkable

The secret sauce of the PR industry is that remarkable things get remarked upon. If you want to earn word of mouth
and have the press, your customers, and whoever else talking about your startup, you must give them something
remarkable.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to build a full-scale dragon skeleton on a beach in Dorset, or fly jetpacks
around New York City, but if you want to cause a ripple, you’ll need to do something beyond the norm. Perhaps your
startup is remarkable in itself?

As much as I’d love to say “do X”, there is no simple answer here, because quite often it’s the things that haven’t been
done before that are work the best. My best advice is to read Edward De Bono’s book on Lateral Thinking (he
pioneered the word ‘lateral thinking’), get some post-it notes and blast out as many ideas as you can conjure up.
Then go for the idea that’s most promising.

#21 Build Exceptional Resources

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I struggle to go a week without mentioning Moz.com’s weather report tool. It’s an incredibly useful resource for the
SEO industry and generates enormous amounts of publicity for Moz.

Sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel – you just need to ask yourself “what would our customers find
useful?” and build something exceptional.

#22 Meet Your Influencers

How valuable would it be to your startup if you met Robert Scoble, Jack Dorsey, or some TechCrunch journalist? A
large aspect of your success in PR and marketing does revolve around who you know, so it’s important to learn what
affects the size and quality of your personal network.

Meeting anyone starts with being in the same space as them, either geographically or virtually. Last January I was
speaking at Midem, a music conference in the South of France. While over there I met Robert Scoble, Mark Hoppus
from Blink 182, and a number of interesting people who’ve become invaluable contacts. I don’t say this to boast, but
to make the point that it was incredibly predictable and well publicised that these people would be at Midem on the
specified dates – all I had to do was show up. The hardest part in meeting the people you need to meet is booking the
ticket and showing up.

“80% of success is showing up” – Woody Allen

#23 Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Over 500 million people search in Google every day. Regardless of what some startup celebrities may proclaim, SEO
is not something you should ignore.

The strength of search marketing is that, if you have a product that people are looking for, your site can appear at
the perfect moment – when they’re searching for it.

This differs to Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube advertising, where you’re relying on distraction to pull people away
from what they were doing to visit your website. With Google, you’re helping them find what they were looking for in
the first place.
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Organic search marketing is a broad field in itself, so I won’t go into much depth at all here. However, I will impart a
few pieces of advice from my experience working at an SEO agency for several years, and overseeing hundreds of
campaigns.

Don’t think you’re saving money by hiring a cheap SEO. Rankings go both ways, and if you get someone crap,
they’ll cost you a lot more than you think. Be prepared to pay a decent price for good SEO services.
Focus on what’s best for the users – when in doubt, ask yourself “is this best for our users?” – if the answer is
yes, there’s a very good chance that it’s also best for search engines.
Nothing is guaranteed. Anyone who guarantees results is most likely selling snake oil.
It takes time. I advise most of our clients not to expect any increase in SEO traffic for at least 3 months. Of
course, sometimes we see increases in as little as a week, but SEO typically takes a long time to grow.

Chapter 4: Owned Media Marketing for Startups

Owned media relates to any marketing channel owned by your startup. In the online world, this refers to any
websites and social media profiles that you operate.

There’s a great deal of crossover between owned and earned media, and I like to think of owned media being the
‘platform’ for increasing the success of your earned campaigns.

Imagine you created a great story on how your startup just broke a World Record. Without a platform to publish the
story on, you’re best hope is to send out a press release and cross your fingers that at least one journalist will
publish the story.

If you have a blog with a steady audience of 5,000 visitors per day, you can post your story to that audience, and rest
assured that at the very least, 35,000 people will have been exposed to the story by next week. Hopefully, that initial
audience will have ‘launched’ your story creating organic growth.

#24 Building a Blog That Converts

Building a blog that converts is hard. Most companies fail because they blog about what they want their customers
to read, rather than writing about what their customers want to read.

There are a small number of companies who understand this. Buffer, for example, are a company that offer social
media automation software. Instead of going on about their services, their blog contains insights on everything from
happiness to writing tips. They write what their customers want to read.

My advice when building a blog is this: if you want to create a truly successful blog, you must be willing to commit at
least 100 great articles. After you’ve written 100 articles you’ll not only have a good understanding of what works, but
each article will be driving a little bit of traffic, a few links, and a few signups each day. From there, the results will
compound.

If you’re not willing to invest a lot of time in building a blog, I wouldn’t advise starting. It’s hard work, but the results

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will pay-off if you stick with it.

#25 Email Marketing

Five years ago, email marketing was about building your mailing list and sending newsletters or autoresponder
campaigns out.

Those days are long gone. Traditional email marketing is rapidly being replaced by marketing automation, which is
software that gives you the ability to trigger personalised messages based on different rules. For example, if
someone signs up for a free trial but doesn’t actually use a certain feature within a certain amount of time, you can
trigger an automated email inviting them to check it out.

Marketing is ultimately a pursuit to send the right message to the right people at the right time. Marketing
automation is about as close as we can get to scaling this.

There are lots of great email marketing tools that now offer marketing automation. I personally love ActiveCampaign,
which has one of the best interfaces for building marketing automation campaigns that I’ve seen.

The next step is to know what makes a good email. This isn’t just about writing clickable subject lines and crafting
beautiful HTML templates, it’s about understanding what your audience wants to receive in their inbox. I can’t tell you
the answer here, but I urge that you consider “would I want to receive this email?”

Be sure to experiment with different frequencies of emailing, days of the week, and types. Comparing the open and
click through rates over time is the only sure way to know what works and what doesn’t.

#26 Video: Leveraging the second largest search engine in the World

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We rarely think of YouTube as a search engine, but with over 50,000,000 searches made on YouTube every day, that’s
effectively what it is. Using YouTube Traffic Estimator, we can see exactly how many searches are made for different
queries every month.

Let’s say your startup offers time management solutions. A quick search on YouTube for videos on productivity
reveals that many 3-minute videos have over 50,000 views – some have over 1,000,000.

The benefit of incorporating video into your search strategy is that YouTube, and other video hosting sites, are
considerably less competitive than Google. Interestingly, Google are also featuring more and more videos in their
universal search results, making it a powerful method of ranking in Google in itself.

#27 Content Marketing: Infographics, Videos, Case Studies, White Papers, and more
When it comes to digital marketing, I like to think about what will work in two years time. I don’t believe content
marketing will be the future, but I do think that content-based online PR will be.

I think the overlap between creating exceptional content and relationship-based PR will be what the best digital
marketers will focus on a few years from now.

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I won’t focus on the relationship-based part here, as I’ve already covered that in some depth in the section on
meeting influencers. Let’s instead focus on what makes content exceptional.

The first step in producing exceptional content is to define exceptional. For example, in the music industry I know
that infographics, on average, out-perform every other format of content by roughly 198% (number of backlinks &
social shares). I know that content relating to piracy, royalties, and music industry challenges is more likely to be
shared than content relating to artist news or the live industry. I know this because I measure what works
extensively.

You too should know, with confidence, what works in your niche.

On producing content of exceptional quality, my rule of thumb is to spend more than 40 hours producing it.
Anything that takes less time is easily probably easy to replicate. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create it, it just
means it probably won’t generate amazing results.

Don’t start your content strategy with what can we create? Start with what would be amazing? You’ll find a way to
create it.

For specific tips on content marketing, I wrote a post for Moz offering 97 tips on content marketing. Andrew Gale has
also written a great overview of startup marketing strategies here.

#28 Building a Presence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other social networks
Like email marketing, social networks provide a great opportunity to launch content and drive potential customers
to your service, but there’s far more to it than broadcasting your agenda. Social networks provide a great
opportunity to gather feedback, build relationships, and add credibility to your service.

While a guide on social media is far beyond the scope of this guide, here are a few important points to consider in
your social strategy.

Know why you’re using it

Because of the ever increasing number of social networks, and the endless possibilities of what you can do within

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social media, it’s important to know why you’re using social media from the outset.

You can have multiple reasons. Quantity is not the issue, clarity is.

Ultimately, retweets, likes, +1s and shares are meaningless. Your core business goals are what matter: user signups,
retention, revenue, customer lifetime value, user satisfaction etc. Social media becomes valuable when you connect
the two together. When you use Twitter to leverage PR opportunities, Facebook to increase the quantity of
monetisable eyeballs, or Google+ to increase search rankings, that’s when social media has a tangible value.

Know what works

I spend a lot of time in the entertainment industry understanding what content is the most shareable. While it’s good
to confirm these things with data, often it just takes a few hours of research to understand what people talk about in
your niche. So many companies publish crap that no one in their right mind would have a conversation about – don’t
fall into that trap. Start by knowing what sparks conversations in your niche.

Lead with content

We manage a decent number of social media strategies at Venture Harbour, and if I can sum up what differentiates
the clients who are successful using social media from those who are less so, it’s having a content-centric strategy.

What I mean by this is that by having a regular stream of interesting content being created and shared within your
social networks, the amount and depth of engagement seems to naturally grow and compound. It stops you from
using social media for the sake of using social media, and instead focus on using it as a means to a more valuable
end.

Conclusion
I’d like to wrap this guide up by making the paradoxical point that nothing in this guide is exclusively correct. It’s just
one perspective. In many cases, the opposite of what I’ve said is equally correct and I advise experimenting to reach
your own conclusions on what works.

The reason I’ve been able to reach many of these conclusions is through eight years of testing assumptions day in
and day out. But this is a fast-moving industry where nothing remains static, so we must challenge what we’re told
and work out for ourselves how to effectively market our companies.

Finally, if you have any experiences or points you’d like to add, please use the comments below, which I’ll keep an eye
on. If you have any questions I’d be happy to answer them there. If you’d like to keep things private, or are interested
in working with us, feel free to get in touch.

Comments

J U S T I N M C G I L L @
W O R K A D O January 19, 2014

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Great ideas and insights into the various paid media channels. Would love to see additional links to really dive
into each of the steps mentioned above, but love this as a high level overview. Thanks for compiling!

 R E P L Y

M A R C U S T A January
Y L 19,O2014R 1 2 3

Thanks Justin! I'm going to hopefully build on this guide as I test out various methods in more depth. Glad
you enjoyed it as it is though! Marcus

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M I C H A E L
G O O D April 17, 2016

I would like to thank the author for this AMAZING post. There are too many internet marketers out there
struggling to get traffic. How many people out there with mind-blowing websites that the world NEEDS that
will never get enough traffic to get their ideas out to the public? How many people stuck at 9 to 5’s
struggling to make money online only because they just CAN’T GET TRAFFIC? This is an extremely thoughtful
post. The world needs more people who would create an article like this that could help the struggling
moms out there trying to make money online. This article has helped me A LOT. You see, I’m starting a new
venture. This is the first venture of mine where I will be really trying to drive good free traffic. I never really
tried before. This new venture (site) is ‘the one’. It literally HAS to work if I can get enough quality, targeted
traffic to it, and this site could make BILLIONS. So what I am looking for is high quality, PERMANENT (no work
needed to maintain – long term – hands-free), targeted, free traffic, and this article has laid out some of
these types of traffic sources. High quality, permanent, targeted free traffic is the best type of traffic you
could get. It’s hands free and pure ROI. So I highly recommend that anyone reading who needs traffic look
into it. Some good high quality, permanent, targeted, free traffic sources you could use are number one,
BaLooZo ( http://baloozo.com/get-instant-autopilot-targeted-website-traffic.html ), an ad site where you
could post a permanent ad and push it to the top of the search results for your keywords and your
category’s page 10 times a day, and there are advanced ad statistics. There are also feature PPC ads that go
on top of the free ads that you could bid on for the first position, with a $0.001 load minimum and a $0.001
click minimum, in case you want to eventually pay for traffic, as well. You just sign up, post a permanent free
ad and you’re getting permanent, free traffic forever. Number two is http://flickr.com, a photo sharing site.
To get traffic with this site you have to create interesting, niche targeted images or take interesting niche
targeted photos or screenshots, sign up, upload the photos using proper tags (keywords) to make the
traffic targeted, and say in the description of the photo: “Feel free to use this image, but give credits to
http://www.yourwebsite.com.”, and then you’re getting permanent, targeted, free traffic forever from
people sharing your photos and crediting your link. Thanks a lot. You really don’t know what this means for
me and how much you’ve just helped me. Does anyone know any other ways I could get permanent,
targeted, free traffic? I would be ever-thankful if you could share one with me.

 R E P L Y

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S T U A R T @
G L E A M . I O January 20, 2014

Awesome post, maybe I'm biased but would be great to see a section around contests/incentivization etc :)

 R E P L Y

J O N A T H A N
M C L E L L A N May 26, 2014

Very impressive, thanks so much for sharing - now time to put all off this into action...

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S H E H A N
W I J E T I L L A KMayE28, 2014

Great Read! By a long stretch one of the better articles i have come across! I guess ultimately at the end of the
day you have to ask the question "What would my customer want to read, see or hear"..

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F R E S H July
M 13,A2014I L

Great article! It helps me to write down my own startup's strategy :)

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D I N A M
M A N S O U R September 10, 2014

This is probably the GREATEST article on marketing for startups that I have ever searched for, found and read!
Keep up the good work!

 R E P L Y

E L L May
I E19, 2015

I completely agree. This article is so helpful and you've given away so much valuable information to help
startups launch off the ground. Thank you

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E M I October
L 2, 2014

Thank you for this great article. I am working for a startup company now and I was put in charge of
intergrating social media strategies into our marketing strategies and I feel like this article has helped me a lot.
Are you available for a little Q/A through e-mail in the near future?

 R E P L Y

F A B I O V I R G I @
P A D D L E . C O M October 9, 2014

Thanks for the great read Marcus! I'm trying to grow our startup, Paddle.com, but because we're focuseed on
a very niche audience I've found the marketing process to be tricky so far. This guide has been really helpful.

 R E P L Y

F A B I November
A N 13, 2014

Wow. Thanks for this really insightful article. I will definitely integrate some strategies for our own startup.

 R E P L Y

K U R November
T 17, 2014

Wow, this guide is awesome. Do you guys give away some in-depth free marketing guides for startups (like us)
who cannot afford big services like VH? Thanks!

 R E P L Y

J O S November
H 21, 2014

What an amazing guide. I feel like I should have paid for the amount of depth and detail you went into with that
guide. Thanks Marcus!

 R E P L Y

D I V Y A PNovember
R I 26,Y 2014
A

Great post. Interesting article for sure.

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 R E P L Y

C H R I S December
T I N15, E2014

Hey Marcus, Just wanted to comment on how helpful this article was for helping me come up with a more
concrete marketing plan and ideas for my start up. Looking forward to reading more tips and advice from you!

 R E P L Y

R O H A N
P R A K A S H December 25, 2014

I knew nothing about marketing strategies and how to bring them into action. Great read and i certainly now
have an idea of my short term plans. Thanks a ton. Would be great if you email me some more content on
Lateral Thinking as per your experience.

 R E P L Y

S H U B H A M
S H A R M A January 2, 2015

I really loved the ideas that you have shared with us Marcus. They are extremely helpful for the budding
entrepreneurs who don't know jack about how the things go, like me. I just have one question and it would
really help me if you can find some time out to answer me. With so many options available to us to market our
startup, how does one choose? I have a food delivery startup in the development phase, we are going to roll
out our first prototype in a week and are planning to launch our upgraded version in a month, how should we
go about marketing our startup? We are launching it initially for a small part of the city, then iterate and scale
from there. Hope to hear from you!

 R E P L Y

S T E V E
M A S O N January 7, 2015

Marcus, Really refreshing post, perfectly pitched with enough insight into each topic to allow the ready to
understand the subject and make a decision if they want to research further and use that strategy in their
own marketing program.

 R E P L Y

S E A M U S O
S U L L I V A N February 5, 2015

For a novice your in depth analysis of the online marketing space is extremely helpful. I am currently building a
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marketing strategy for my startup www.sullycard.com and have found your commentary and listing the pros
and cons of each branch to be particularly useful. Thank you and keep up the good work.

 R E P L Y

N E L April
L Y29, 2015

I've read many blog post about Marketing and Media for Entrepreneurs, and most of them say a lot but
nothing at the same time (if you know what I mean). I really enjoyed reading your post and found it vey
insightful. Thank you!

 R E P L Y

M E E R May
R 21,A2015

Great article! Very helpful. Clearly you've put in more than 40 hours for this article :) Thanks for sharing :)

 R E P L Y

A R A SJulyH27, 2015

Thank you for very compelling and helpful roadmap!

 R E P L Y

H O L October
L Y 11, 2015

Awesome article, such a comprehensive guide!

 R E P L Y

R A B October
I N 28, 2015

Hi Marcus, Very useful and interesting article. As all the other comments above show, ppl have found it very
useful. We are in the process of launching our own startup HotTicket.in, and I am sure we would be using
many of the tips provided by you above.

 R E P L Y

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R O H A N
P A R S E W A RNovember 5, 2015

This is one of the best articles I have read ever related to online marketing. useful inputs and tools which I will
definitely use to market my start up effectively. Thanks a lot for such a great article.

 R E P L Y

J U L November
I A 26, 2015

Thank you for your post! This is the best article I have read start-up marketing so far!

 R E P L Y

S A U L O
A V E L A R November 27, 2015

Hi Marcus, First of all, I'd like to reinforce what everybody wrote about your article. It's an incredible tool for
those who are trying to find a guide on the implementation for marketing activities on startups. I'd like to
double check with you if you would include traditional methods as well, such as events, referrals and direct
marketing on the pool of strategies for implementation. Regards, Saul

 R E P L Y

N A T E
V I C K E R YDecember 10, 2015

Great article Marcus. You have covered most of the relevant marketing tools and strategies in this post. I
personally would include mobile app marketing as more and more emerging mktg tool. I'll be sure to follow up
on your guide. Best, Nate

 R E P L Y

J A Y S O N
L E E December 10, 2015

As being a first-year start-up leader, this article gives me a great insight and a wake-up call to start according
actions. This recalled some of practices I felt I should've begun, but I couldn't do so due to lack of knowledge in
detph. This was it. Thank you.

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 J O S December
E 15, 2015

Thanks Marcus for sharing! One of the most clear and simple posts on this matter. I particularly enjoyed the
separation between foundations and other means. Really useful for an early stage Startup. Looking forward to
read more from you.

 R E P L Y

R A G H A V
B A N S A L December 18, 2015

It is one of the best articles i have ever read on marketing. Learnt alot. Thanks Marcus Would love to reach out
to you for some suggestions on my start-up.

 R E P L Y

H A R S H
S H U K L A May 24, 2016

Nice detailed article.

 R E P L Y

M I G U MayE25,L2016

Nice !

 R E P L Y

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