6 Marketing Best Practices Every Startup Business Should Use

Building your own business from the ground up can be a truly thrilling experience. If everything goes just right with your startup plans, it will be something that you created, grew, and found success with. There’s something truly incredible about the entire startup growth process, especially when it does all go right.

To ensure all of your startup puzzle pieces do fall perfectly into place, you’ve got to put the work into making it happen. Of course, nobody expects it to all just miraculously fall into place when launching a new startup. You know it’s a lot of time and hard work, but that’s what you’ve signed up for. Figuring out how to make it all work is exactly what you’re here for.

ENSURING THE BEST FOR YOUR STARTUP BUSINESS

Moving forward with a startup business is never just a walk in the park. Sure, there are plenty of times when running a startup can be lots of fun, but no moments of excitement change the fact that it is hard work. While passion may continue pushing you forward, you are likely also contending with too much stress and a great amount of pressure to succeed.

Success is not guaranteed with a startup. In fact, it is only the rare result that comes with dedication, persistence, and the right smart strategy.

It’s that last crucial element that often trips up a lot of startup founders who, otherwise, have everything that it takes.

It’s tricky, knowing what small elements to put into place in order to get your startup to thrive. There’s a lot of advice out there in the world, but even looking at it all doesn’t instantly enlighten you to a clear path to follow. Still, these six business practices are probably a pretty good place to start.

1. GET EVERYONE ON THE SAME PAGE

When you first start the business, there may not be too many other people going towards the same goal along with you. Even if you have a couple close friends by your side as partners, it is not too hard to keep this small group of people all on the same page. Every step on the way in those early days, you can easily stay a strong team as communication flows freely.

Of course, transparency and agreement may not always come so freely as your startup grows, expands, and encounters new challenges. People may disagree with decisions made or paths taken. Even worse, communication may become so poor that those disagreements aren’t known about or even that those decisions aren’t made known to the whole company.

And when everyone in a startup doesn’t remain on the same page, the whole thing begins to go downhill. It is absolutely possible to keep this communication breakdown from occurring though.

It has to start in the very beginning. Before anything gets forgotten or has even the smallest chance of going wrong, make fully transparent communication a priority in your new company. Build it into the freshly-budding culture that you have all the freedom to create. If you don’t do it now, you give it a chance to never get done at all, leaving your business vulnerable to communication failures.

To prevent communication from ever becoming an issue in your startup, you want to make sure that every single person involved in bringing the startup to success knows that you want their voice to be heard. The big, exciting news as well as the more minor items should be shared so that all can share in the wins and losses as a united team.

Nobody should feel like anything at all should be kept a secret. If every employee is encouraged to share and speak their minds, nobody will feel like they are too unimportant to be listened to. When the lines of communication in a startup stay wide open, the cohesiveness of the startup team can remain, and this is what will take you far.

2. CRAFT YOUR BRAND

With a great idea and a solid team alongside you, it is then time to move your startup into the public eye. You won’t be signing up any clients or making very many sales if you don’t have a good strategy for marketing your business. And, of course, all good marketing starts by having a fully-formed brand.

A brand is the face of a business. It is the all-encompassing whole of what people know your startup as. With a brand, you make yourself identifiable to the public and create the vessel for your marketing to the audience.

A defined brand is definitely something that you need, though crafting it may be more complex than you’d think. It takes a bit more to craft your startup’s brand than just to get a logo and put it everywhere you possibly can.

Yet, you can figure out your startup’s brand and you can use that brand to get your startup where you want it to be. Taking on the branding process is, in fact, exactly what you should do.

Start by determining your target audience and keying in on that one unique and beneficial thing that you have to offer. From here, you can write the brand story that you will present to this audience and also create all the rest of the elements for your branding.

To make sure you never lose your consistency, a set of brand guidelines are necessary.

Within your brand guidelines, you construct your startup’s complete identity. Colors, voice, typography, tone, and, yes, the logo should all be included. With everything that makes up your new brand all put together, you can put that brand out there in the right way for the attention of the right people.

Soon enough, a well thought-out strategy can bring in customers who are excited to see what you can offer next.

3. CREATE EXPERIENCES

One way you can make sure your brand never goes forgotten is by offering something really special: an experience. More and more brands are using experiences to stand out and pull customers in. This experience-based model for gaining attention and earning engagement is a particularly good opportunity for startup businesses looking to make their mark on their industry.

The reason creating experiences is such a good strategy is simple: people don’t actually really care about a product all that much, but an experience sticks with them. It’s memorable, and if you do it right, those powerful memories can hold a connection with your brand for the customer. Make working with your company a positive experience for customers and they will just keep coming back.

There are a couple of ways to accomplish this business practice. Experiences can either be kept fully and completely in the world of marketing or you can actually use experiences as your entire business model. Instead of even bothering to sell products, you can just sell experiences.

However, not every business is meant to be able to sell an experience. Still, every business does actually create experiences for their customers, whether they’re trying to or not.

The customer experience is something every single startup business should work to optimize. After all, customers are what make a startup a success. You want yours to be happy enough to come back, so make sure this is how every customer’s experience with you turns out.

4. GO DIGITAL

Nowadays, much of the customer experience takes place on the internet. Every company must be online and highly digitally-savvy in order to compete. The fact is, going digital is not even just an option for your startup business. It’s a requirement.

Right at the launch of the startup, you should have your website up and ready to go. If you’re a little digitally behind, well, it’s not too late. But remember, the internet and the entire online world moves incredibly fast, so you’re going to have to move fast too if you want to catch up and get all the benefits that digital marketing can provide.

Now, going digital can mean a lot of different things, as it encompasses a whole wide range of different elements. At a minimum for a startup though, we should see a website and social media pages. From there, you can expand, conquer digital marketing, and really make your brand at home on the internet.

Naturally, just having a website up will not do much for your young business. That’s why all that’s at your arsenal with digital marketing is a must to make sure that people can actually find your website. You want social media posts, a digital ad campaign, but most importantly, search engine optimization to get you rising up the rankings.

5. SEO STRATEGY

The search engines are a great way for startup businesses to get found by potential customers. Since everyone is constantly browsing the internet and searching for the answers to their most pressing questions, SEO makes for one of the best marketing methods you can use to get them noticing you.

To get your website to show up on a good spot on the search engine results pages (SERPs), you will need to put in some work, or pay the SEO experts to put the work in for you, to ensure an optimized website. The important thing here is to build your website not just for the potential customers that you hope will arrive there, but also for the search engine algorithms. This is what is known as search engine optimization.

Without it, you won’t have too much luck getting new customers for your startup business. With SEO, you can earn your business the attention it deserves, opening it up to new possibilities, opportunities, and relationships.

6. INVEST IN RELATIONSHIPS

Relationships are a startup business’ most powerful asset. Nothing should come before these on your list of priorities. If you invest in your relationships, that investment will come back to you as a huge boost to your startup.

The relationships that you’ve already built up may be more numerous than you even now realize. There’s your close partnerships, your brand’s relationship with the customer, all the interesting people you meet at events and other networking endeavors, and even more relationship opportunities out there to be found. Every single one of these relationships, as unique as each one is, is important to your startup’s success.

It can be incredible what one connection could do for a starting business if that relationship is nurtured at just the right point in time. To help your chances out, it can be a really smart practice to specifically seek out business partnerships and other relationships that can allow you to reach much further.

One great relationship to look to make when you are working on strengthening your startup business is a partnership with an influencer in your industry. Influencer marketing isn’t just working with Instagrammers or Youtubers and it isn’t limited to certain types of brands in any way. Really, it is an excellent opportunity for any interested startup business.

Team up with an influencer in whichever sphere that you fit in to make an even greater impact on your target audience. The influencer that you work with doesn’t have to be a huge celebrity online with hundreds of thousands of followers. You don’t need a huge league of fans behind your brand ambassador to achieve a clear and well-received message getting out there.

In fact, micro-influencers have proven to be incredibly successful for many startups or even larger businesses that have given influencer marketing a try. While a micro-influencer’s audience may not be as large, they tend to have real connection with those followers that are theirs, and with the quality of their community, your brand can make even more of an impact by working with them.

Whichever influencer you choose to start a relationship with, make sure that the partnership is one of real value. Maybe the best fit for your business would be to collaborate on a blog post or maybe your influencer would work best for you doing video marketing. However you work it out, there should be a good amount of mutual respect going into the collaboration.

All of your startup business relationships should be taken care of as well as possible. It is people that make a startup happen, after all. Don’t neglect to prioritize every single person that helps to make your business a success.

BELIEVE IN YOUR BUSINESS AND PUT IN THE EFFORT IT DESERVES

With these six business practices, you can give your startup its best fighting chance. There’s really no reason not to take advantage of these smart strategies. After all, if you really care about and believe in your startup, you will give it everything that it takes.

Whatever you’ve already put into making this startup a success, you’ve just got to keep pushing it further. With time, as long as you’re putting in all the hard work, you will get there. It just takes the right strategy.

Author Bio: Brittany LeMoine works with Regex SEO to launch brands into success through the various tools provided by digital marketing. With her words, businesses receive the attention they deserve. Through a fully-encompassing SEO strategy as provided by the marketing experts at Regex SEO, companies get customers.