First Steps for Marketing Your Web Startup

Most of the startups that we work with start with developing a minimum viable product either to take it to the first group of beta users which can be a small group of selected users from the target users, public or potential investors. This time can be used efficiently to start preparing your marketing plan and start executing it to create some buzz which will help you drive a good number of early adopters at the time of launch.

A good launch will help you get some feedback to test your ideas i.e. if the customer's expectations match the way that you developed the features or if they are also excited about your product like you are. or do they care enough to also start sharing about your product?

I will list down some steps which should be part of the marketing plan of your tech startup:

Creating a website would be the first tip anyone would give you for your startup or you probably are sure yourself as well that you need it as well. However, here are a few things that I believe should be part of your startup marketing site.

– Signup for News: A signup for the news section is the most important section I believe. All other things on the website which I will detail below should help you increase the signups so that you can get your first list of users who are excited or interested in your product. You can do this simply by connecting it to Mailchimp or other similar sites which will easily help you set this up with minimum effort.

– Make it Responsive: Responsive design (7 Key benefits of responsive design) is becoming increasingly important as people are using different types of devices to browse the internet. A responsive design will give a good impression to your website.

We understand that a startup's seed money is very important and videos and responsive designs are expensive things. You can try and save some money by buying a nice responsive design theme from websites like ThemeForest which we also frequently use to set up websites.

A short and simple video that can explain the idea of your product will help you a great deal if it's on the homepage of your website. Videos are the most effective marketing tool if done properly.

Social media is one of the most important tools to connect with your target users. Your target users will likely, be using some form of social media. Even if they are not using it much, I believe it is still important as most investors do use it and it will give them a good impression of your startup. Set up your social media profiles on popular social media websites like Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn,n and Facebook. Reserving names on most social media websites might be a good idea but my recommendation would be to only take up the profiles you can actively manage later on.

The best thing about Twitter is that you can search your targeted users or tweet with hashtags in areas of your interest. Your startup's account can be used to share news or information about your products as well as things related that might be of interest to your targeted user. It's also an effective strategy to set up other accounts or develop another side brand. The purpose of this site brand could only be to share anything which could be of interest to your target user. This site brand can help you generate a loyal set of users to which you can market your product occasionally.

This is something that I have found to have worked with many web-based startups. i.e. carefully choose a catchy line for the problem you are trying to solve and run an AdSense campaign for a limited budget and see how many conversions you get. The timing of this can be right after you launch your MVP or while it's being developed. This would give you a good set of first beta users and may also help you test your idea. If your startup will be subscription-based you can also determine an ROI based on the number of conversions that you get.

Visual data like images are processed faster by the brain which is the reason why infographics have become a popular tool. Use images wherever you can to explain your ideas. It will be a good idea to keep all these images on your Pinterest account which help you drive more potential target users.