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Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials

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Steve Pell
Steve Pell

A pretty comprehensive reading list on marketing, customer acquisition and sales for startups

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STARTUP  READING  LIST  –  JUNE  2012   Marketing,  customer   acquisition  and  sales   Early  stage  marketing,  marketing  strategy,   driving  user  engagement,  consumer  psychology,   viral  growth,  pricing,  sales,  PR,  blogging,  content   marketing,  copywriting,  search  engine   optimisation  and  marketing,  email  marketing,   optimisation  and  landing  pages                
1     Contents   Early  stage  marketing  ............................................................................................................................................  5   Focus  and  market  segmentation  –  David  Skok  ..................................................................................................  5   Understanding  market  –  Chris  Dixon  .................................................................................................................  6   What  customers  to  serve  –  Mark  Suster  ............................................................................................................  6   Getting  started  with  marketing  –  Brant  Cooper  ...............................................................................................  11   Getting  started  with  marketing  –  Dharmesh  Shah  ..........................................................................................  13   Marketing  for  early  stage  tech  startups    –  Mark  Suster  ...................................................................................  16   An  online  marketing  recipe  -­‐  KISSmetrics  .........................................................................................................  20   Naming  your  startup–  Chris  Dixon  ...................................................................................................................  31   Underhyping  your  startup  –  Chris  Dixon  ..........................................................................................................  32   Both  sides  of  the  marketing  equation  –  Chris  Dixon  ........................................................................................  32   Platform  distribution  risks  –  Chris  Dixon  ..........................................................................................................  33   MVP  to  landing  page  –  Ash  Maurya  ................................................................................................................  34   Avoid  the  launch  –  Eric  Ries  ..............................................................................................................................  40   Fred  Wilson  on  marketing  –  Fred  Wilson  .........................................................................................................  43   The  role  of  marketing  –  Rand  Fishkin  ...............................................................................................................  46   The  5  Minute  Guide  To  Cheap  Startup  Advertising  –  Rob  Walling  ...................................................................  51   Marketing  strategy  ..............................................................................................................................................  57   Pick  Your  Early  Beta  Customers  Very  Carefully–  Ben  Yoskovitz  ........................................................................  57   How  to  get  your  first  1,000  users  –  Vinicius  Vacanti  ........................................................................................  58   1000  true  fans  –  Kevin  Kelly  .............................................................................................................................  60   10  obvious  strategies  to  ruthlessly  acquire  users  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ....................................................................  65   10X  Your  Business  –  Elad  Gil  .............................................................................................................................  67   How  to  bring  a  product  to  market  –  Nivi  /  Sean  Ellis  .......................................................................................  69   Marketing  science  Q&A  with  Sean  Ellis  –  Nivi  /  Sean  Ellis  ................................................................................  95   Pace  of  marketing  change  –  Sean  Ellis  .............................................................................................................  97   Startup  marketing  (Sean  Ellis)  –  Nivi  ................................................................................................................  98   The  10x  product  launch  –  Ash  Maurya  ...........................................................................................................  101   Marketing  is  hard  –  Rand  Fishkin  ...................................................................................................................  106   Inbound  marketing  –  David  Skok  ...................................................................................................................  107   Marketing  to  match  the  channel  –  Steve  Blank  .............................................................................................  110   AARRR  by  business  model  –  Brant  Cooper  .....................................................................................................  114   Content  targeting  is  no  match  for  persuasion  architecture  -­‐  Mariel  Bacci  ....................................................  116   Persuasion  architecture  in  action  –  Mariel  Bacci  ...........................................................................................  118  
2     Founders  Make  the  Best  Startup  Marketing  Leaders  –  Sean  Ellis  ..................................................................  120   Growth  hacking  –  Sean  Ellis  ...........................................................................................................................  122   Customer  feedback  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ................................................................................................................  123   Lessons  from  the  casino  industry  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ...........................................................................................  126   Driving  user  engagement  ...................................................................................................................................  128   Product  distribution  (Gaining  user  traction)  –  Peter  Thiel  (Blake  Masters)  ....................................................  137   Getting  traction  –  Gabriel  Weinberg  ..............................................................................................................  184   Optimising  the  conversion  funnel  –  David  Skok  .............................................................................................  154   Big  picture  customer  development  –  Sean  Ellis  ..............................................................................................  120   Engaging  new  users  –  Chris  Dixon  ..................................................................................................................  187   Demand  harvesting  –  Sean  Ellis  .....................................................................................................................  187   How  cost  of  customer  acquisition  kills  startups  –  David  Skok  ........................................................................  137   Value  of  a  user  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  .......................................................................................................................  137   Social  network  marketing  –  Andrew  Chen  .....................................................................................................  132   Facebook  click  to  action  –  Brian  Solis  .............................................................................................................  128   Cost  of  customer  acquisition  –  David  Skok  .....................................................................................................  137   Measuring  user  engagement  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  .................................................................................................  188   Paying  to  acquire  users  –  Sean  Ellis  ................................................................................................................  173   Cost  per  acquisition  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ................................................................................................................  154   Building  networks  –  Chris  Dixon  .....................................................................................................................  188   The  cardinal  sin  of  community  management  –  Eric  Ries  ................................................................................  193   Consumer  psychology  .........................................................................................................................................  197   The  psychology  of  fear  (and  conflict)  –  Peter  Thiel  (Blake  Masters)  ..............................................................  197   People  always  stay  the  same  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  .................................................................................................  211   25  reasons  users  STOP  using  your  product  –  Andrew  Chen  ...........................................................................  216   10  things  about  people  –  Cindy  Alvarez  .........................................................................................................  219   Why  fear  is  a  marketers  best  friend  –  KISSmetrics  .........................................................................................  219   What  jobs  are  users  hiring  your  product  to  perform  –  Chris  Dixon  ................................................................  222   Viral  growth  .......................................................................................................................................................  224   Viral  branding  versus  viral  action  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ..........................................................................................  224   Viral  loops  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ..............................................................................................................................  226   Engagement  loops  –  beyond  viral  –  Eric  Ries  .................................................................................................  229   Viral  marketing  is  not  a  marketing  strategy  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ..........................................................................  233   Ways  to  achieve  viral  growth  –  Vinicius  Vacanti  ............................................................................................  235   Viral  marketing  –  David  Skok  .........................................................................................................................  238  
3     Making  content  go  viral  –  Mark  Suster  ..........................................................................................................  243   Facebook  viral  marketing  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ......................................................................................................  246   Pricing  ................................................................................................................................................................  252   Pricing  for  startups  –  Rob  Fitzpatrick  .............................................................................................................  252   Determining  optimal  price  –  Sean  Ellis  ...........................................................................................................  253   Great  Guidance  on  Pricing  –  Sean  Ellis  ...........................................................................................................  255   Is  Your  Pricing  a  Dot  or  a  Triangle?  –  Cindy  Alvarez  .......................................................................................  256   Should  You  Charge  More  For  Your  Product?  –  Brad  Feld  ...............................................................................  259   It’s  easy  to  underprice  your  product  –  Nivi  .....................................................................................................  260   Price:  Why  Lower  Isn't  Always  Better  –  Fred  Wilson  ......................................................................................  263   PR  .......................................................................................................................................................................  265   Pitching  a  tech  blogger  –  Mark  Hendrickson  ..................................................................................................  290   Building  relations  with  journalists  –  Mark  Suster  ...........................................................................................  292   Noone  cares  about  your  startup  –  Matt  Brezina  ............................................................................................  295   PR  and  crisis  management  –  Mark  Suster  ......................................................................................................  298   Hiring  PR  agencies  –  Brant  Cooper  .................................................................................................................  302   PR  for  startups  -­‐  Erica  Swallow  ......................................................................................................................  305   Spin  and  PR  –  Mark  Suster  .............................................................................................................................  311   How  to  pitch  tech  journalists  –  Ciara  Byrne  ...................................................................................................  313   How  to  pitch  to  the  press  –  Nick  Saint  ............................................................................................................  315   Creating  a  good  blogger  pitch  –  STEPHANIE  SCHWAB  ...................................................................................  317   Blogging  .............................................................................................................................................................  320   Starting  a  blog  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  .......................................................................................................................  320   No  time  to  blog?  –  Charlie  O’Donnell  .............................................................................................................  324   How  to  start  blogging  –  Mark  Suster  .............................................................................................................  325   Becoming  a  better  blogger  –  Neil  Patel  ..........................................................................................................  329   Blogging  for  business  –  Rob  Fitzpatrick  ..........................................................................................................  342   Becoming  a  conversion  machine  –  Glen  Allsopp  ............................................................................................  344   Just  start  blogging  –  Jason  Cohen  ..................................................................................................................  356   The  Ultimate  Guide  to  Guest  Blogging  –  Kristi  Hines  .....................................................................................  360   Content  marketing  .............................................................................................................................................  367   Content  marketing  –  Toby  Murdock  ...............................................................................................................  367   Content  for  both  sides  –  Douglas  Melchior  ....................................................................................................  377   Content  creation  –  John  Pring  ........................................................................................................................  379   Copywriting  ........................................................................................................................................................  394  
4     Long  copy  vs  short  copy  –  Jeff  Sexton  ............................................................................................................  394   For  conversions  or  thought  leadership  –  Steph  Hay  .......................................................................................  396   How  to  be  interesting  –  Jonathan  Morrow  ....................................................................................................  398   Persuasive  writing  techniques  –  Brian  Clark  ..................................................................................................  401   Sales  ...................................................................................................................................................................  265   Sales  and  scope  creep  –  Michael  Woloszynowicz  ...........................................................................................  265   Enterprise  customers  don’t  change  –  Ben  Horowitz  .......................................................................................  267   Scaling  sales  (ABC)  –  Mark  Suster  ..................................................................................................................  270   Scaling  sales  (objection  handling)  –  Mark  Suster  ...........................................................................................  273   Understanding  salespeople  –  Mark  Suster  .....................................................................................................  275   Building  a  sales  team  –  Dharmesh  Shah  ........................................................................................................  278   Hiring  sales  –  Furqan  Nazeeri  .........................................................................................................................  280   Hiring  sales  people  –  Mark  Suster  ..................................................................................................................  281   Selling  to  enterprise  –  Chris  Dixon  ..................................................................................................................  284   Create  a  burning  platform  –  Mark  Suster  ......................................................................................................  285   The  one  day  sales  cycle  –  David  Skok  .............................................................................................................  287   Search  engine  optimisation  and  marketing  .......................................................................................................  404   Adwords  is  not  enough  for  success  on  the  consumer  web  -­‐    Andrew  Chen  ....................................................  404   Some  thoughts  on  SEO  –  Chris  Dixon  .............................................................................................................  406   SEO  is  no  longer  a  viable  marketing  alternative  –  Chris  Dixon  .......................................................................  407   Strategic  SEO  for  Startups  –  Patrick  McKenzie  ...............................................................................................  409   Email  marketing  .................................................................................................................................................  419   It’s  the  CEO’s  job  to  email  the  first  1000  signups  –  Rob  Fitzpatrick  ...............................................................  419   Email  marketing  –  KISSmetrics  .......................................................................................................................  420   Optimisation  and  landing  pages  ........................................................................................................................  428   Why  your  site  will  fail  –  Andrew  Chen  ............................................................................................................  428   AB  test  big  changes  (not  just  small)  –  Josh  Porter  ..........................................................................................  429   AB  vs  qualitative  testing  –  Laura  Klein  ...........................................................................................................  432   Website  optimisation  –  Conversion  Rate  Experts  ...........................................................................................  437   The  Anatomy  of  a  Perfect  Landing  Page  –  FormStack  ...................................................................................  455   Landing  pages  that  convert  –  Chance  Barnett  ...............................................................................................  457        
5     Early  stage  marketing   Early  stage  marketing   Focus  and  market  segmentation  –  David  Skok   http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/sales-­‐marketing-­‐machine/focus-­‐market-­‐segmentation/   Focus  &  Market  Segmentation   Focus: Segment your Market, and pick the Low Hanging Fruit At the start of your marketing process, you will be dealing with the issue of who to target – people that you suspect represent potential buyers. A big mistake that I see with startups is that they don’t take the trouble to segment their target market, and identify the low hanging fruit. Much has been written about the importance of Focus, and I am yet another strong believer in this. Particularly in the early days of a startup, when you have very few resources, and when everything you do has to pay off. If you are not convinced of this, I strongly recommend reading Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore, which remains to this day one of the most important books for startups. Inevitably there will be some sub-segment of your market that is most likely to buy from you. It may be a particular vertical, or it could be picking a particular size of customer, or some other characteristic such as experience with IP networking. Look for buyers that are feeling extreme pain (where their hair is on fire), and who also have money, a sense of urgency, and a good fit with the features of your current version of your product. This will also allow you to develop very specific focused marketing messages that will likely appeal far more strongly than broad general messaging. It will also make it easier to decide what product features to build next, as you will be driven to complete those needed to fully satisfy that one segment. A common mistake is a product that meets 80% of many different segments, because management didn’t have the discipline to focus. 80% is enough to get them interested, but not enough to get them over the bar to purchase. The reason that management teams don’t focus is because focus is hard. Focus means saying no to highly attractive opportunities that may be knocking on your door. As an example, when I first started working with one of my portfolio companies, they had been approached by one of the top global banks that loved their software and wanted to put it into 2,500 branches. The customer was consuming tons of the company resources, with sales and product people flying everywhere. The problem was the bank needed on-site global support, and there was no way that a tiny startup was in a position to provide that. However because the opportunity was so big, no one was willing to say no to it. It took some outside help to make them realize they couldn’t win the deal, and that they were far better off focusing on the SMB market where their products and ability to service them were ideally suited. Don’t fall into that trap: you will win by having a product that is over the bar for one sub-segment, and well targeted focused messaging that resonates clearly with that segment. This market segmentation will drive the first part of your funnel: figuring out who to target.
6       Understanding  your  market  –  Chris  Dixon   http://cdixon.org/2009/10/11/understanding-­‐your-­‐market/   October 11, 2009 Understanding your market Some startups become huge sensations without requiring any active marketing – YouTube, Skype, and Twitter come to mind. However, the vast majority of successful startups gained adoption through marketing: PR, SEO, partnerships, paid marketing, and so on. My strong suggestion would be to hope for the former but plan for the latter. Marketing is a huge topic. Here I just want to make the point that, for starters, you need to figure out two things: 1) how information and influence flows in your market, and 2) when and where people use and/or purchase your product. I’ll use my last startup, SiteAdvisor, as an example. SiteAdvisor (now called McAfee SiteAdvisor) is a consumer security product. Most consumers don’t learn about security products on their own. Instead, they rely on their “family/friend sysadmin” (smartest computer person they know). These family sysadmins read technical websites and magazines. In order to reach this audience, we performed studies on data we had collected, which led to lots of coverage, which raised our profile and bolstered our credibility. Now to when and where people buy security products. Most people only think about security when 1) they buy a new computer, 2) they first get internet access, or 3) they get a virus or other security problem. The last case is actually pretty rare, so most companies focus on 1 and 2. How do you reach people at those moments? Through “channels” – in particular PC makers (“OEMs”) and internet providers (“ISPs”). (For public market people: focusing on these two channels was McAfee’s big insight in the 2000′s and how they made a comeback versus Symantec who dominates retail). Most people don’t talk to their friends about security products so it’s very hard to do mass word-of- mouth marketing. (Exceptions would be the beginning of the spyware epidemic around 2001-2 when AdAware got super popular via word of mouth). So you have to understand and pitch to these channels. These observations are specific to consumer security, but every startup should have a similar theory of how to market their product.   What  customers  to  serve  –  Mark  Suster   http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/09/16/most-­‐startups-­‐should-­‐be-­‐deer-­‐hunters/   Most Startups Should be Deer Hunters by MARK SUSTER on SEPTEMBER 16, 2009 This post is part of my series “Startup Lessons“ Elephants, Deer and Rabbits – Some thoughts on start-up segmentation
7     Nearly all of the mistakes I made at my first company I fixed by the time of my second company. This is the only mistake I repeated twice and it is a mistake that I see many, many companies make. I know that this advice won’t apply to every possible startup – but I think it applies to many. When you start your company the very first question you need to ask yourself is which kind of customers do you want to serve. Many start-ups (and even growth firms) lack this discipline and they therefore serve customers off all sizes. This leads to suboptimal results for all. Make sure you know what the size of customer you want to serve is, what the people in a company of that size do, the problems they have, the features that will resonate and the channels you’ll need to sell into and service that customer. Because it will vary dramatically by different segments I believe you need to pick an animal size and go for it. I’ve stated my animal bias in the title – but each can work for different business types. The segment breakdowns are below: Elephants:
8     It is very tempting for many start-ups to hunt elephants. These are really massive customers. It’s landing AT&T or Microsoft as a customer when you’re a start- up. You’ve got 8 people and are serving a business unit that has 5,000. It’s tempting on many levels to be an elephant hunter. If you manage to kill an elephant they have so much meat they’ll feed you for a long time. But elephants are hard to catch and take whole teams of people to bring down. They take special tools. If you’re not successful you may starve. If you do catch them, it could be even worse. Avoid elephants in your early stages. Learn from my mistakes. Here is the real world story. I worked for Andersen Consulting for more than 8 years. Initially as a systems designer and programmer and post MBA as a strategy consultant. We knew how to land huge corporate customers. We knew how to “call high” into board rooms and get meetings. So when I started my first company I naturally went for elephants. The problem is that they were initially very easy for me to find. I could easily go into the board rooms of major European companies (I was based in London) and land $500k – $1 million contracts so my order book grew rapidly. The problem is that to win each of these deals I had to promise high service levels. We typically committed to building “missing” features and therefore steered off of our MVP (minimum viable product). We had to promise really steep service SLAs and help desk hours. We had to do intense training sessions. And when things didn’t go perfectly these organizations had huge leverage over us. In short, servicing the elephants consumed us. It soaked up all of our development resources and didn’t allow us to focus on what we felt our company strategy was. We started out with such big dreams about changing the world. On some level we felt we did because being a SaaS company in 1999 was trailblazing. But in the end we ended up building esoteric features that we knew our clients would never use because they paid us lots of money. See definition of a whore. And this is not just a problem at start-ups. I remember working for Salesforce.com and we were bagging elephants relative to our size. We were obsessed with landing Merrill Lynch, Dell and Cisco. I watched the first two of these customers consume significant portions of our internal programming resources. I personally felt that we would have been better served putting more resource into building out cloud services, for example, to make Salesforce more scalable in terms of our user base. (note: my internal friends at Salesforce tell me that they’ve really fixed this now and internal dev teams are much more focused on bigger, more strategic development).
9     Elephant hunting does work for some companies. Some companies / products are designed for large organizations from day 1. But I believe that if you go down this road you will struggle to simultaneously serve the SMB market. The needs are too different as are the sales channels and marketing messages. If you want to hunt elephants optimize your tools for just that. And know that VC will be hard to come by. Rabbits: Equally deceiving are rabbits. There are so many of them – they seem like they’re everywhere. So you chase them. But as you get closer to them you realize that they’re quick little buggers. They scatter and get away. You wonder whether they were really worth the effort after all. Rabbits for me are the equivalent of having a low-end version of your product that you feel you’ll make up for in volume. I see it all the time. Companies post the $5 / month product designed for self-service clients. Or they have products that cost $40 / month but that require a direct sales person to close them. This is especially problematic in the Web 2.0 / Freemium world where too many company build their business models around trying to build massive scale of free customers and then convert a small share to low monthly payments. I guess it has worked for some companies? (Basecamp? Who else?) My second company, Koral, tried to go down the freemium route. We found that at the low end there wasn’t enough revenue to make it worth our while. Then Salesforce.com asked us to implement our solution to all 3,000 employees (before they decided to buy us). So we were trying to optimize for freemium while building in all of the special requests Salesforce asked for in order to win the deal. We went after it because it was worth some serious elephant meat. Sometimes it is acceptable for companies to focus on low-level entry customers – Rabbits. Obviously if you’re going to build a massively scaled business like Twitter, Facebook or Zynga you’re going for huge volumes and the small transaction value model can work. I’m told this model has worked well for Zoho in the small business sector. But unless you’re a very large volume business and focused on transactions rabbits are deceptive. I came across a company today at TechCrunch50 called Outright that is perfectly suited to rabbits. I believe it can actually build a big Rabbit Business and it’s strategy seems perfectly suited to reaching this customer base through partners. But few companies are good at trapping rabbits.
10     Want to be the SharePoint killer? Avoid rabbits. Have a better version of BaseCamp? Ditto. Want to build a product that relies on converting local mom-and-pop businesses into online advertisers – see if a regional approach might work better. Have a product for online backups? Avoid the low end of the market – too elusive and hard to shake enough money out of them. In short, when you hunt rabbits they’re not as easy to catch as you might think. When you catch them they don’t have much meat. So you need a lot of them to feed the village. Deer: The analogy is now obvious. Deer are easy to kill. When you do bag deer they have plenty of meat on them to have made it worth you while. Deer are right-sized for a start-up. Deer are not so big that they can make huge demands on you for your development resources or customer support. They can barely get you to agree to make changes to your standard terms & conditions. If you catch lots of them you’re not beholden to one big one that if they cancel their order you’d be devastated. When you’re a start-up it is far easier to cut your teeth on companies that are easy to serve, not as demanding yet can afford to pay you fair prices for your product. If their demands are too high you can easily move on to the next customer. They allow you to stay focused on your defined company strategy without having to compromise. That’s why I believe most early stage companies should be deer hunters. Final question I’m often asked – how big financially are Elephants, Deer & Rabbits? That’s for you to determine for your own business because it depends on your customer base and the value you’re providing them. Many of my friends who were initially focused on low-entry price point consumers have moved up market to focus on slightly smaller markets with customers willing to pay. For me, classic definition of deer segmentation. Apologies to all vegetarians.    
11     Entrepreneurs:  Know  Thy  Marketing!  –  Brant  Cooper   http://market-­‐by-­‐numbers.com/2009/11/marketing_help/   Entrepreneurs: Know Thy Marketing! By brantcooper, November 18, 2009 7:04 pm I don’t know who is more exasperated, entrepreneurs flummoxed by marketers or me, upset that another entrepreneur has been flummoxed by marketers! People, language is for communication and marketing terms, abused as they are, fall somewhere within the scope of language. To communicate you need to learn the terms. To practice marketing or to hire a marketer you need to grasp some basics. Please. Marketing Help Rule 1. (<> means “not equal to”) Blogging <> PR <> Brand <> SEO <> Logo <> Advertising <> Tagline <> Messaging <> FaceBook <> Positioning <> Twitter <>Lead Gen <> [Enter mktg term here] Marketing Help Rule 2. Trust me, you don’t need all the marketing tactics listed in Rule 1. Marketing Help Rule 3. The right marketing tactics for you, right now depend on WHO your prospective customers are and WHAT stage your company is in. Marketing Help Rule 4. All Marketers have a core competency (or two). Regardless, (almost) all Marketers will sell (almost) all marketing services. Marketing Help Rule 5. You need marketing to grow your business. And more likely than not, you need or will soon need help marketing. Admit it. For a moment, forget everything you know or think you know or have heard about marketing. Start with a clean slate. Now imagine you are a new customer of a particular product or service. You just finished buying. You are a bit giddy: You’re eager to get started. You’re excited at the prospect of reaping serious value. You’re determined to at least get your money’s worth.
12     You have a small fear in the back of your mind that you spent too much or made the wrong choice. You both want to show it off and hide it from view until you’ve proved it’s worth. Now like a bad movie flashback, go back to this morning right before your alarm clock sounded. Better yet, go back to the moment BEFORE you realized you had a NEED that you MIGHT eventually purchase SOMETHING from SOMEONE to RESOLVE the need. Your experience from this moment –pre-realization –to the moment of sale is marketing. Your maybe want to tell me it’s sales. But no, the seller sells. The buyer experiences marketing. Whether you agree or not, analyze all the marketing advice you’ve received in this context. Think about all the people telling you that you must use social media marketing. Think about magazines, news, commercials, blogs. Think about your logo and your clever slogan. Think about “your brand must be consistent!” Think about your color palette. Did any of these things affect your path from pre-realization to purchase (as far as you know)? No, yes, maybe? Ruminate on this concept: Ms. pre-realization will eventually buy from me because: I’m a good person I try hard My technology is the best I don’t oversell I’m ethical General Haig interviewed me on some TV show on a plane somewhere, sometime. I think. I tweet Marketing feels daunting because you are being shown a dozen yellow brick roads that weave off gloriously into the colorful horizon. That and the promise that the chosen path is flowering with ROI poppies. Walk forward in your customer’s shoes from before purchase; from pre-realization. How do you get to you?      
13     Startup  Marketing:  Tactical  Tips  From  The  Trenches  –  Dharmesh  Shah   http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/9008/Startup-­‐Marketing-­‐Tactical-­‐Tips-­‐From-­‐The-­‐Trenches.aspx   Startup Marketing: Tactical Tips From The Trenches I’m speaking at the Inbound Marketing Summit later this month in San Francisco. There are some really great speakers lined up (David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan, Charlene Li, Paul Gillin and others). If you’re looking to learn more about inbound marketing and how to get found in Google, social media and blogs, this should be a great event. If you decide to attend, use the code HUB200 for a special $200 discount. Drop me a note if you’re going to be there, would love to meet-up. My session’s going to be called “Startup Marketing: Tips From The Trenches”. As I get my thoughts together for this, I started making a list of all of the things I’d advise a new startup to do to get things kicked off with a limited budget. As it turns out, there are a lot of tactical steps that individually don’t do much, but in aggregate start laying the foundation for much bigger things. So, I thought I’d share some of these things with you. This list is not intended to be a comprehensive “here are all the things you should do”, but more of a “if I were starting a company today, here’s what I would do in the first 10 days…” It’s written in a short, punchy style. I’ll likely revise it in the future as I add more things, but I wanted to get “Version 1.0” out there for you and see what you think. Tactical Tips for Startup Marketing 1. Pick a name that works. Needs to be simple, memorable and unambiguous. The “.com” domain should be available without playing tricks with the name (like dropping vowels or adding dashes). Also, just because there’s no website on a domain doesn’t mean it’s “available”. Available means something you can register immediately, or that has a price that you’re willing to pay attached to it. Don’t wander down the rabbit hole of finding the perfect name if you have no indication that it’s for sale. This will waste a bunch of your time. 2. Put a simple website up. Doesn’t have to be fancy. The goal is to put enough content on the site to start the Google sandbox clock. Don’t worry about the site not saying much (nobody’s going to be looking at it anyways). Make sure to use a decent content management system (CMS) and not Dreamweaver or (shudder) FrontPage. Just because you can hand-craft HTML doesn’t mean you should for your startup website. The structure and features of a CMS are going to be important someday. Trust me. 3. Get some links into the new startup website. If you have a personal website, link to it from there. If you have friends/associates/family with websites, cash in some favor chips and get them to link to it. The goal is to get the Google crawler to start indexing your site. You only need one decent link to get things going. To check whether your
14     site is being indexed by Google, do a search like site:yoursite.com (not perfect, but good enough). 4. Setup a twitter account. Name of the account should match your company/domain name. Link to your twitter account from your main site and to your main site from your twitter account. (Note: If you have a natural skepticism of the value of twitter, you are welcome to this skepticism. But, go ahead and grab your twitter account anyways. You can resume your skepticism after you do that). 5. Add e-mail subscription. Let people sign-up to get an email when you’re ready to show them the product. A simple email signup form is sufficient. 6. Get a nice logo. Run a quick contest on CrowdSpring or 99Designs and you’ll wind up with something decent enough. Make sure you get the vector file (Illustrator or EPS file) as part of the final deliverable. If you've got design skills yourself, or know somebody really good that can do it, even better. 7. Setup a Facebook business page (known as a “fan” page) for your startup. You’re not going to get many fans in the early days. That’s OK. Just get something out there. Add a simple description of your startup, link back to your main website. The usual stuff. 8. Create a clean Facebook URL. Facebook doesn’t allow simple/vanity URLs (unless you're big and established). So, to make things easier on yourself (and your users), setup a sub-domain and redirect it to your Facebook page. For example, here’s what I did: facebook.hubspot.com (notice that when you visit this link, it takes you automatically to the ugly Facebook URL). Setting up this sub-domain is free and usually pretty easy (it’s done through whoever your registrar is for your domain). 9. Kick off a blog. You can use one of the free hosting tools (like WordPress.com), but don’t use their domain name. Put your blog on blog.yourcompany.com — or if you’re proficient and can install WP locally, make it yourcompany.com/blog. Do NOT make it yourcompany.wordpress.com. The reason is that you want to control all the SEO authority for your blog and channel it towards your main website. And, chances are, WordPress.com doesn’t need your help on the SEO front. 10. Write a blog article that describes how you got to this point. What problem you’re hoping to solve. Why you picked this problem. It should feel a little uncomfortable revealing what you’re revealing. If you have tendencies towards being in “Stealth Mode”, read “Stealth Mode, Schmealth Mode”. With inbound marketing, you’re going to need to get used to revealing things that might be uncomfortable. Get over it. 11. Setup Google Alerts for at least the following: Your company name, link:yourdomain.com and “industry term”. Try to find a good balance for your industry term so you don’t get flooded with alerts that you simply will start ignoring. This may take some iteration and refining. (Oh, and use the “As It Happens” option in Google Alerts so you’re not waiting around for new alerts to show up).
15     12. Find three closest competitors. Pretend like someone is paying you $10,000 for locating each competitor. Really try hard. Barely managed to find three? Take a lot of effort? Great. Now find 3 more. Of these 6, pick the two that you think are the most marketing savvy. They should have aWebsite Grade > 90, a blog with some readers, a website that you can envision people using, a twitter account that they actually post to, etc. These are the competitors that you’re going to start “tracking”. Add their names and websites to your Google Alerts. 13. Update your LinkedIn profile (you do have a LinkedIn profile, right)? Mention your new startup, and add a link to your startup website to one of the three slots for this purpose. Make sure you specify the anchor text. Don’t go with the default of “My Website”. The anchor text should be your startup name and maybe a couple of words of what it does. You can look at my profile to get a sense:http://www.linkedin.com/in/dharmesh (note: I don't accept LinkedIn invites from people I don't know. If you're looking to get to know me, follow me on twitter @dharmesh). 14. Get business cards printed. Don’t go overboard, but don’t use a “free” option (because it’s not really free, it’s just subsidized). I don’t believe much in business cards, but you need them to simply avoid the 30 seconds of discussion as to why you don’t have a card when people ask you for one at conferences and meetings and such. They’re worth the price to avoid that uncomfortableness. 15. Use the Twitter Grader search feature to find high-impact twitter users in your industry. Start following them. You want to start forging relationships. Start building your twitter network. Resist the temptation to mass-follow a bunch of random people or play other games just to get your follower count up. That’s not going to matter. Get some high quality relationships going. If you’re really serious, start using an app like TweetDeck so you can more easily monitor the needed conversations. 16. Create a StumbleUpon account. Specify your areas of interest (part of registration). Spend 10 minutes a day (no more!) stumbling and voting things up/down. Start befriending those that are submitting sites that are relevant and interesting for your startup. Don’t submit your own stuff — just start contributing. 17. Subscribe to the LinkedIn Answers category that best fits your area of interest. Answer one question a day that you feel like you’ve got some expertise in. Don’t self-promote. You’re seeking to build credibility and trust — not sell anything. 18. Find the bloggers that are writing about your topic area. Subscribe to their feed, and read their stuff regularly. Leave valuable comments and participate in the conversation. (Do not spam them or write “fluff” comments. If you don’t have something useful to add to the conversation, don’t comment). 19. Start building some contacts on Facebook. Organize your users into groups (one for your business and another for friends/family). This will come in handy later. Don’t spam people and ask them to visit your website. At this point, your website is still probably not worth visiting.
16     20. Grade your website on Website Grader. Fix the basic things. You should be able to get a 50+ just by doing the simple things it suggests. [Disclaimer: I wrote Website Grader]. 21. Get Some Analytics: Install some web analytics software and start watching your traffic. Where is it coming from? How is it growing? What keywords are people using to find you? What content are they looking at? It's ok to get a bit maniacal and obssessed about it at first. Many of us do that (and some of us never get over it). If you liked this article, you'll probably love the Inbound Marketing book that I co- authored. It includes similar practical advice for getting found in Google, social media and blogs. If you’re interested in startups, you can follow me on twitter @dharmesh. What have I missed? What ideas do you have on tactical things for startup marketing? What do youdo? Update: Oh, and by the way, if you liked this article, you will love my recently released book,Inbound Marketing: Getting Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs. The book is a practical guide to marketing on the web and has been an Amazon Top 100 book since the day of it's release. Love startups? Join the OnStartups community on Facebook.   Marketing  for  early  stage  tech  startups    –  Mark  Suster   http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/06/27/10-­‐lessons-­‐for-­‐managing-­‐marketing-­‐at-­‐an-­‐early-­‐stage-­‐ startup/   10 Marketing Lessons for Early-Stage Tech Startups by MARK SUSTER on JUNE 27, 2011 I made every textbook mistake at my first startup, which is why I believe I was much more effective at my second one. I have adopted the motto “good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment.“ We need to learn from doing, by trial-and-error.
17     If I can help you avoid some of my first-time mistakes it would be a victory. The following are some lessons I learned about early-stage startup marketing. Because market is such a broad topic, I’m restricting these lessons to PR marketing (as opposed SEO, SEM, product marketing, etc.). 1. Where Stealth is Good – There’s a lot of discussions on the web about whether startups should be stealthy before they launch or not. The truth is – there isn’t a “right” answer so for your company. You need some guidelines to make decisions. My general rule is that it’s good to be stealth in the early days while you’re building your product and testing your market. Stealth does not mean constipated, paranoid and totally untrusting of others. It does mean not telling more people your future plans than is necessary. It means avoiding drinking too much at cocktail parties with other tech people and bragging about your plans. It means not over-sharing your deal with VCs or other investors. The truth is that we work in a very small, tight-knit industry and news & plans spread fast. In the early days you don’t really want 3 extra teams hearing your ideas and gearing up to compete before you feel you’ve got a solid head start. Most people totally advise against stealth. They think that only by being open and testing your ideas in an open marketplace can you be successful. Be careful about this advice. Also be careful about VCs. Most ones that I know have very high ethical standards so I’m not concerned about that. But once a VC has heard your idea he can’t “un-think” it. And these ideas have ways of seeping into board discussions with portfolio companies as in, “have you ever thought about trying A, B or C?” It’s mostly unintentional but tacit knowledge about ideas spreads quickly amongst the chattering elite. I actually like finding entrepreneurs who are more circumspect, less braggadocios and generally more planned about their actions. 2. Where Stealth is Bad – I do meet entrepreneurs who clearly fall on the other side of spectrum and are totally closed. I worked with an entrepreneur who was to appear at a startup networking event where he was to talk about his company’s plans. He considered pulling out of the event
18     because he wanted to stay in “stealth mode” and felt an event like this compromised him. I counseled him to do the event (it was high profile) and talk in broad themes about the areas in which his business would compete. There are very few truly novel ideas so talking in broad themes certainly wouldn’t give away any grand strategy. In stead he went to the event and told everybody “we’re in stealth mode and can’t yet reveal what we do.” It went down like a lead balloon. I think he really learned from this experience: Experience comes from bad judgment. Nobody likes to hear you say, “we can’t tell you anything we’re in stealth mode” so develop some generic talking points that don’t give anything away when you’re asked what you do. The biggest problem with over-stealthing yourself is that you cut off some of your most valuable resources in terms of testing your ideas, getting feedback from smart entrepreneurs & investors and helping you figure out the potential flaws in your approach. In my experience, entrepreneurs who are overly paranoid or are information hoarders rarely do well. They certainly struggle to find mentors as there is nothing more frustrating than trying to help a company who is afraid to tell you anything. 3. Market Today’s Puck, Not Where It’s Going – I often tell startups to “skate where the puck is going” as a metaphor for not just copying what every other company is doing today but to think about where the future lies and planning for that now. But it is a big mistake to tell too many people where you’re heading. I call this “marketing futures.” Marketing futures can be really good for enterprise software companies where the information is passed between sales rep and potential customer in terms of near-term roadmap. The buying cycles are often 3-6 months so you want to put your best future foot forward. But don’t let this information get out into the general press and don’t market more than a few months out. For early-stage consumer companies I would be careful not to market futures at all. We all know that much of early-stage technology startup success comes from execution and often what you’re working on today will be rolled out more seriously over the next several months. So I recommend that companies talk in detail about the puck at their feet but avoid talking about where the puck is going. While all your competitors are trying to copy your model, you’re already on to the next thing on your engineering team. Nobody seems more disciplined at this tight-lipped future marketing than Apple and you can see how it has served them. 4. Don’t Market a Bad Product – Perhaps the most important lesson for first-time entrepreneurs is that you can’t have great marketing for a bad product. The corollary is that it is very hard to recover from a crappy marketing campaign that over-hyped. I think I first heard this from Guy Kawasaki but it’s kind of obvious. In a world in which you’re encouraged to launch early and get feedback from customers you can often confuse “product launch” with “marketing.” I think a great example right now is turntable.fm. It’s a buggy product but pretty damn cool. I haven’t heard them pounding their chest and running big marketing campaigns. And the product itself is invite-only so they can control volume and everybody has expectations managed. By the time they go GA (generally available product) I’ll be the kinks are all worked out. And the anticipation of wanting to see the product will build. The strategy they’re employing is called “velvet rope” as in what nightclubs do to build scarcity and interest in getting on the inside. It also helps to keep down issues with crowds getting too big, too early.
19     5. Don’t Blow Your Wad Early – There is a temptation of startups to announce that they’re “first” at something so they rush to market with announcements. I know because I did this in early 2000. We rushed to market to be first and got great coverage in the Financial Times (we were in London). But our product wasn’t ready for prime time and we struggled to live up to the hype we had created. As you can imagine that once you’re compared to Ishtar (the movie) you’ve got a higher bar of success to get people interested the second time. Not everyone has a spare 40 mill for a re-do. 6. Market to Your Target Audience – I’ve seen a lot of startups who like to write blog posts on life as an entrepreneur. That’s fine if entrepreneurs are your target market. But be clear on whom your target market is and what the messages you want to communicate to them are. I talked about that in detail on this post about how to blog as a startup. But whom you’re marketing to is not always an easy topic. At one company I work with it’s clear that our target user today is youth-oriented and middle America as opposed to 20-something and Silicon Valley or New York. We’ve been very successful at the former. But we also need to be mindful that often the influencers are on the coasts (LA/NY/SF) and that we can’t ignore them. So we’ve launched some campaigns to be sure we’re picking up these crowds with different messages. 7. Don’t Believe the Hype – Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes in marketing is to get caught up in your competitors marketing noise. When you’re inside the bubble and paying attention to every announcement of your nearest 3-4 competitors it’s easy to get despondent when they get their killer press articles or announce new features. Those of us that have been around the block tend to not get too worked up on any big competitor announcements. They come and go. They’re mostly fleeting. Life goes on. iMessage is announced. The NY Times puts Group Messaging companies on their list of companies crushed by Apple’s WWDC. But life doesn’t end. It’s a narrow product. Most app-to-app products are inter-operable, Apple isn’t. You have tons of differentiation. Life goes on. 8. Your Competitors Look the Same as You When They’re Naked in the Mirror – One thing that startup CEOs often overlook is the impact of marketing on team morale. Every day your team members are reading about all of the great things happening at your competitors company. You’re reading their press releases or blog posts. Insider your company everything feels like it’s going to hell in a hand basket. That’s because that’s how it ALWAYS feels at a startup. You always have too much technical debt, too many problems, staff members quitting, not enough capital, customer complaints, etc. That is EXACTLY how your competitors feel, too. And they’re reading your press articles and thinking, “shit, they have everything figured out.” You don’t. Make sure your team knows this and stays confident. Iwrote about it in detail in this article. 9. Build Relationships – Many startups make the mistake of thinking that they simply approach a journalist any time they have a story and get coverage. IIt doesn’t work that way. Journalist are constantly harangued by over-eager entrepreneurs. Go slowly. Get to know journalists when you don’t need stories. If you care about this topic a more detailed article is here. Follow them on Twitter. Respect their profession. Read their articles. Comment. Ask if you can help be a source for other stories. Say hello to them at conferences. Understand how their job works. Understand that for every article they write they need “an angle” and if you can’t help shape that you’re not likely to get inches. The more helpful you are over time the more likely you are to get inches when you need them.
20     10. It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint – Some startup teams I speak with try to lump a bunch of announcements all into one release to try and have more effect. And example is lumping your VC funding announcement into a story about major customers wins, product features or key milestones. Don’t do this. A funding announcement is a stand-alone event. It’s an angle. There are journals who dedicate a lot of time & energy into covering funding. Focus solely on that event. When it’s time later to talk about some major customer wins or big biz dev partnerships you’ll do so. If you announce killer product features worthy of coverage then talk about that. One strategy I encourage is to break up mini-releases into exclusives that you give to different journalists to spread the love around and give everybody something unique to write about. Nobody likes writing re-hashed stories. The  Ultimate  Online  Marketing  Recipe  -­‐  KISSmetrics   http://blog.kissmetrics.com/ultimate-­‐online-­‐marketing-­‐recipe/   The  Ultimate  Online  Marketing  Recipe   The basis for any good online marketing plan is an awesome landing page. But regardless of how incredible your landing page is, you still need to get people there. That’s often the part that breaks down when a company actually starts marketing a new product or service online. They’ve got the landing page that’s been expertly designed and follows all the best practices, but they’re not getting conversions because they’re not getting traffic. There’s tons of information out there for crafting an online marketing program that won’t cost you much more than time. One little problem: there’s so much information available that it’s often overwhelming. Even things like infographics that try to break it down can be too much. So we’ve crafted the ultimate online marketing recipe. One that’s easy to follow and breaks everything down into steps. We’ve linked more information about most steps throughout the article so you can easily access more in-depth information if you need it. Stage One: Gather Your Ingredients
21     Image by Like_the_Grand_Canyon The first stage of your marketing recipe consists of gathering up your ingredients. You’re laying the groundwork here for the rest of your marketing efforts, so make sure you don’t skip anything. Think about what happens when you leave out an ingredient in a recipe for a cake. Leave out the flour, and you get a soupy mess. Leave out the sugar and the taste is horrible. Leave out your eggs and the whole thing crumbles. The same thing happens if you leave out a key ingredient of your online marketing plan. So let’s start by claiming your brand on the major social networks: Google+ (as soon as brand pages are available), Facebook, and Twitter. Depending on your industry, there might be niche social networks where you also want accounts (for example, an author might want to set up an account on Goodreads and LibraryThing as well). Make sure you customize your Twitter background. This can serve as your social landing page until your website and other landing pages are ready. At this point you also want to set up your corporate blog and start posting right away. Make sure you submit your content to social sharing services (like StumbleUpon) and bookmark it on sites like Delicious. Research popular keywords related to your content and make sure you tag your posts with those words, and include them naturally within the content itself. On the technical end of things, you’ll want to set up a Google Analytics account, a Google Webmaster Tools account, and a Feedburner account for managing and monitoring your RSS feeds. Analytics will help you monitor exactly what’s happening on your website, where your traffic is coming from, etc. Make sure you set up some goals and conversion funnels there, and annotate any important events (like a mention on a big blog) so you can remember six months from now why you saw a spike or a dip in traffic at a particular time.
22     At the same time, you should be gathering up leads for your product or service launch. Make sure you use a hosted email provider like Gmail, not a program like Outlook. Create your email template at this time, too. Step-by-Step Breakdown Set Up Your Website Correctly. Build a website. Chances are your company already has one. But if they don’t you can’t go any farther. Your website is the central hub of your entire online marketing strategy. Install Google Analytics. Make sure the analytics code is on every page of your website. Set up a Google Webmaster Tools account. Create a sitemap XML file and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. Be sure to have your web designers or developers fix any errors that Google Webmaster Tools may alert you to. We have a pretty comprehensive guide to Google Webmaster Tools here. Claim Your Social Networking Profiles. Sign up for a Twitter account. Think about your Twitter name because people will naturally “mention you” on Twitter by typing @yourcompanyname. Therefore you’ll most likely pick a Twitter name and URL like: http://twitter.com/yourcompanyname. Be sure to link back to your website in your profile. Have a professional designer create your Twitter background. Your Twitter background should be consistent with your website branding and offer some basic contact information. Consider communicating your value proposition on the background or in your profile description. Create a Facebook page (not a profile). Like Twitter, create a Facebook page and claim your Facebook URL to be something like: http://facebook.com/yourcompanyname. Set up Your Company Blog. Keep your blog on your company domain name. The whole point of blogging is to attract relevant traffic back to your website. Blogging on another domain other than your company domain, defeats this purpose. This is the fundamental reason why blogging is good for SEO. For example, your blog should be located somewhere like: http://www.yourcompanyname.com/blog or http://blog.yourcompanyname.com. Keep your blog design consistent with your website design. They don’t have to look identical, but for the same reason you keep your Twitter profile in alignment with your company branding and design style, you should do the same for your company blog. Get your Email Marketing Ready. Choose an email distribution service. Sending mass emails from your personal computer email client or web based email account is a sure fire way to shoot your email marketing campaign in the foot. Choose an email distribution service like Mailchimp, Constant Contact or Aweber to send out your company newsletter. Each of these services are great for making sure your emails get through to your email base while minimizing the dreaded spam folder. On top of that, they make adding new emails to your marketing list a snap.
23     Create an Email Template. Again keep your email template consistent with your website branding and design style. Stage Two: Initial Prep Work Image by Wapster By this point you’ve got all the basics gathered. You’ve got your social media accounts, you’ve set up your blog, and you’re tracking your efforts. Now it’s time to start building up more content and reinforcing your first efforts. You should be working to build a Twitter following on a daily basis. There are a number of ways to do this, including following other users who might be interested in what you’re offering, and posting useful tweets. You should also be starting your drip marketing campaign with the leads you’ve gathered, to build up awareness and educate your potential customers. Continue to refine your SEO based on the keyword research you’ve done. The goal is to maximize your placement for both primary keywords and longtail search results (which is where you’ll probably gain the most traction initially). Make sure you’ve set up custom reports in Analytics for both search optimization and other important metrics. Finally, it’s a good idea to set up an editorial calendar for your blog and stick to it. If you know what you’re going to post ahead of time, it helps ensure that you’re updating regularly. Forming the habit of regular blog posts can be a difficult thing to do for new bloggers, but is essential if you want to be successful. And while we’re on the topic of blogs, make sure you’ve set up social sharing buttons on your blog posts to make it easy for others to share your content. Step-by-Step Breakdown Build a Twitter Following
24     Start tweeting gently. Get your feet wet and get comfortable with the “Twittersphere”. Tweet a few times a day at first, retweet other people’s posts you find valuable. Follow people you know really well to start instant and meaningful Twitter relationships. Follow people who might be interested in what you offer. You can search twitter to find people who are talking about what you have to offer. See what kind of interactions you get from this. However, sometimes it’s best just to follow people related to your industry (like experts and gurus) than to bother potential customers. Figure out what’s right for you. Be personable. Don’t just spam your twitter account with your own blog content. Interact with your followers and share other people’s content when it makes sense. Download our Twitter Marketing Guide. Read this guide a little bit every day and you’ll be a Twitter expert in no time. SEO Conduct keyword research. Use keyword research tools to figure out what key phrases attract the most relevant traffic to your website. It’s very important at this step to determine what languageattracts the right kind of customers to your website. Don’t just aim for the keywords with the highest search volume. Create keyword rich title tags and H1 headings. The most basic and powerful SEO you can do is simply place the top key phrases you have selected from your keyword analysis and place them in the title tags and H1 heading tags of your webpages. DO NOT REPEAT KEYWORDS ON MULTIPLE WEBPAGES. This will cause keyword cannibalization and ruin your SEO efforts. Also, be sure you have only one H1 heading per webpage which can be easily detected by viewing the webpage source code and searching for “h1″. Don’t forget about videos and image content. Images are really important for SEO. Be sure every webpage has a couple unique images with the appropriate alt tag information filled out (alt tags contain keywords related to the image). If you have videos, be sure to upload them to a branded Youtube channel and think about the title of your videos. They are important keywords for search as well. Create an Editorial Calendar Prepare a list of topics you want to publish. This is an excellent process to make sure you have enough content to publish for months to come. It’s also a great time to think about what content will attract the audience you’re are trying to market to. Spend a lot of time on this part! Schedule your posts. After you have determined what content you want to create, it’s important you have a plan to ensure you can execute the content delivery. Determine who will write what content, what the due date is for each post, and allow time for content review. Stage Three: Mix Your Ingredients
25     Image by Jamie It’s time to really start pushing your online marketing campaign. You’ve got all the basics down, you’ve settled into a bit of a routine in terms of blog updates and other efforts, and now you want results. All too often, people falter at this stage, thinking they’re not going to see results, when in fact this is just the point where they should really be stepping up their efforts. Up to this point, you’ve probably just been tweeting whenever it was convenient. That’s great, except that there are optimal times for sending out tweets, depending on what you want your followers to do. Rather than sending out tweets randomly, use an app that lets you schedule your tweets (like HootSuite or Seesmic). Up until now, you haven’t done too much with your social media accounts other than Twitter. It’s time toset up a Facebook page. You want to create a page that focuses on gaining more “likes” (followers), so that your updates are being broadcast to those interested in what you’re offering. Make sure yourFacebook page is connected to your blog so that news items are posted whenever you publish a new post. You should also, at this point, consider segmenting your email lists so you can better target your email newsletter. If your mailing list isn’t growing as fast as you’d like, there are a couple of ways you can add new leads. The first is to answer questions on sites like LinkedIn or Quora (make sure your profile is filled out completely on both sites) to establish yourself as an expert. The other way is to offer some kind of giveaway in exchange for signing up for your mailing list. Make sure it’s something of value, so that your visitors will be happy to turn over their email address or other information in exchange. Directly tied into the second part of that is creating an ebook or whitepaper that solves a need your prospective customers will likely have. Giving that away only to newsletter or feed subscribers is a great way to get more people to sign up.
26     This is also a good time to start advertising with Google AdWords. There are plenty of coupons out there that give you a credit (sometimes upwards of $100) to try AdWords. Find these and use one to set up a test campaign using landing pages. Figure out which ad and landing page combinations work best (using your Quality Score), and then start spending your own money on further AdWords advertising. Make sure that the landing pages you use are designed with a single purpose in mind and with a single call to action on each page. Cluttering up your pages with too many options or too much information only serves to lower your conversion rates. To make sure your landing pages are the best they can be, make sure you use the Unbounce.com scorecard. Generate a to-do list for improvements from your score there. Use your Analytics reports to look for areas on your website that are underperforming and find ways to fix them. This step becomes even more important if the underperforming pages are vital parts of your conversion funnel. Another great way to drive more traffic to your site is to write guest posts for other blogs with similar visitor demographics. Look for sites in related niches and get in touch with the blog owners about guest posting. For example, if you’re selling a financial product to small business owners, look for blogs that address marketing for small business, or something similar. Same demographic, but not a direct competitor. Step-by-Step Breakdown Schedule Your Tweets. Pick a Tweet scheduling tool. Use a service like Bufferapp to schedule your tweets throughout the day. Write compelling tweets that should entice click throughs and seed some of your previously written blog content for future delivery. Don’t leave your Twitter account on auto-pilot. Remember to interact and be personable throughout the day. If your company Twitter account is only spitting out content from the company blog and there isn’t any real human interaction visible on the profile, the more “spammy” your company profile will look. Set up Your Facebook Page. Fill out your information. Include your company contact information, year founded, links to your website and blog. Upload images. Upload images such as advertisements, pictures of your team and company events. Show the world that your company is a living, breathing, and exciting entity. Connect your blog to your company Facebook page. Use a tool like Hootsuite to use your blog RSS feed as a way to update your Facebook page automatically. Download our Facebook Marketing Guide. This comprehensive guide will help you get the most out of your Facebook marketing efforts. Segment Your Email List
27     Design your email segments. Since every person on your email list isn’t meant to receive every email you’re going to send out, design the appropriate segments (i.e. product updates, press releases, gender, region etc.). Let your customers choose which emails they would like to receive. Wherever you have an email sign up form, be sure to ask your subscribers what kind of emails they want to receive. This will put your subscribers in the appropriate buckets and should improve your email marketing metrics. Start Advertising Online Google Adwords. If you want instant website traffic and new business, Google Adwords is the place to be. But watch out, it can be very expensive and highly competitive. Yahoo / Bing. Google might be the largest pay-per-click advertising network, but Yahoo and Bing tend to have a better return on investment. Facebook. Facebook Advertising allows you to target potential customers by interest, age and gender demographics which gives it a completely unique advantage over Google and Yahoo/Bing. Consider hiring a professional. Online advertising is an extremely competitive, expensive and time consuming task. Unless you have someone in-house that can be dedicated to this activity full time, it’s wise to hire a reputable firm or PPC marketer to manage your internet advertising campaigns. Done right, this can be one of the most lucrative ways to generate new business. Doing it yourself. If your don’t have the budget to hire a professional and insist on doing internet advertising in-house or yourself, be sure to read this guide. Stage Four: Bake Image by Kevin Spencer
28     We’re getting to the stage where everything is about refining and reinforcing what you’re already doing. There aren’t a lot of new steps at this point, but if you really want to get the most out of your efforts, you need to continuously refine and test what you’re doing. On that note, try some A/B testing with your landing page ideas to see whether there are better ways to do what you’ve been doing. You might even try some “live” tests with real visitors to see what they’re drawn to on your pages, and if they respond to your call to action. You should also be A/B testing your emails to make sure that you’re getting the best response possible. Don’t just monitor open rates, though, make sure you’re measuring overall conversions. Who cares if people open your email if it ends up in their trash two seconds later? What you want are emails that are converting in high numbers, regardless of their open rates. Of course, the ultimate goal is to find an email with a high open rate and a high conversion rate. Link building at this point becomes much more organic. You’re getting some traffic at this point, and the best way to capitalize on that is to create great content that people want to link to. Monitor these incoming links to see where your traffic is coming from, and to see if your content is reaching the right demographics. One great way to get more incoming links is to write about influential people your visitors would be interested in reading about. In the best case scenario, this can get you attention from the actual influencer. You should be using LinkedIn more at this point to extend your reach. This is particularly important for anyone selling a B2B service or product, but even B2C companies can benefit from using LinkedIn. Just look for people or groups who are likely interested in what you’re selling. Don’t overlook the power of recommendations, either. Make sure you’re not neglecting any one social media platform; balance your time so you can manage them all. Step-by-Step Breakdown A/B Test A/B test Pay-Per-Click landing pages. You’re most likely going to be sending traffic from your Pay- Per-Click marketing, social media marketing and sometimes even email marketing to special landing pages (instead of your website home page). Therefore you should A/B test these landing pages to see which variations perform better. This is the surest way to see instant marketing improvements. A/B test your website webpages. A lot of people forget that their website pages are landing pages. These should also be A/B tested (whether it for lead generation, sign ups or sales). A/B test your email campaigns. Finally, you can A/B test your email campaigns to see which headlines, layouts, and copy performs best. Engage in Link Building Write great blog content. The key to ranking well on the search engines is to provide your customers and audience with great content. Think of creative articles you can publish on your blog that will attract other bloggers and industry people to link to your posts. Ask for links. Sometimes it’s as simple as asking the right people to link to you. Perhaps someone has written a blog post about your site and forgot to link to you. In other cases you can ask vendors to and business partners to link to your website. Be sure to have them include the key phrases you picked during your keyword analysis in the link text that points back to your website.
29     Create infographics. Infographics are a great way to communicate ideas in a very creative way. They generally get linked to a lot. However this activity should most likely be outsourced to a professional design firm. Here are some examples of infographics created for KISSmetrics. Use Linked-In Connect with people or groups who are likely interested in what you’re selling. Similar to Twitter, nurturing these relationships correctly will help spread the good word of your brand. Give recommendations. This is somewhat like social networking karma. Recommend people who have helped your business or company and see what happens in return! Stage Five: Serve and Enjoy Image by Kimberly Vardeman At this point, it’s all about maintenance. You need to make sure you don’t lose any of the ground you’ve gained, while continuing to build your platform and reputation. Try being more interactive on social media. Leaving Twitter open throughout the day so that you can interact “live” with your followers or those talking about your brand is a great way to improve your reputation. Make sure that Twitter is being monitored throughout the day and interact whenever possible. You might make a schedule so that different employees can manage Twitter at different times throughout the day, so that a single person doesn’t get overwhelmed. You should try creating a viral landing page for a contest to get more attention. Make sharing the page (either by liking or sharing it on Facebook, or retweeting on Twitter) a requirement for contest entry for the best results.
30     Start using surveys and feedback widgets to get real-time data from those visitors coming to your website to make sure you’re not losing any leads due to technical or usability problems. This is vital at this stage if you want to continue growing. You should also make sure that your incoming marketing traffic is being segmented so that you can better monitor the effects of your efforts (Analytics has great tools for this). You’ve already done a whitepaper or ebook to get more visitors, so now why not try an infographic related to your industry? Infographics are a great way to share data. Make sure your logo and website address are highly visible on the graphic for the best results. And finally at this stage, you may want to consider using expert services (like KISSmetrics) to get even more out of your efforts. Step-by-Step Breakdown Monitor Your Social Network. Assign or hire someone to actively monitor. Great opportunities can be gained by actively monitoring your social networks. However this task can be 100% time consuming, so it wise to hire a support person to perform this task or assign “on guard times” for certain employees. If cost is an issue when it comes to hiring someone for this task, consider using Odesk.com Determine how to handle complaints and reputation issues. Having a game plan on how to handle people complaining about your brand can be very crucial to your online success. Devise a process and protocol to handle complaints and cries for help. Surveys, Tracking and Feedback Sign up for website monitoring. You should sign up for a website monitoring service that will alert you if your website goes down for any reason. Sign up for KISSinsights. One of the bests way to provide content, products or services that your customers want is to ask them by using a survey tool like KISSinsights. Track everything with UTM tracking. Get in the habit of tracking all your online marketing activities by using UTM tracking on all links. This is the reason why internet marketing is so awesome, nearly everything is trackable and measurable! Using analytics like Google Analytics or KISSmetrics, you can see the effects of all your internet marketing activities. Use KISSmetrics! Sign up for a KISSmetrics account. If you really want to take your internet marketing to the next level, KISSmetrics allows you to A/B test every marketing activity, calculate ROI of each online marketing activity, provides segmentation analytics, event tracking and more. Talk to us anytime and ask us for help.. Trying to do every possible online marketing activity is really hard to accomplish. This is why KISSmetrics is such a useful tool. With KISSmetrics you can determine which online marketing activities are helping you achieve your goals, therefore allowing you to focus on the marketing tasks that are actually making a difference to your bottom line. Click here to try KISSmetrics and you’ll be surprised at how much more you can get out of your online marketing efforts with our tool. We’re more than happy to discuss the ways in which we can improve your business. Feel free to talk to us!
31     About the Authors: Cameron Chapman is a freelance designer, blogger, and the author of Internet Famous: A Practical Guide to Becoming an Online Celebrity. Sean Work is the Marketing Director at KISSmetrics. You can follow him on Twitter right here :)     Naming  your  startup–  Chris  Dixon   http://cdixon.org/2009/04/18/naming-­‐your-­‐startup/   Naming your startup The Name Inspector has a good post today regarding 6 naming myths to ignore. I think it’s generally right on. Naming is so important and so incredibly hard, especially for consumer internet companies that not only have to find a good name but also get the URL. I am convinced that a big part of Twitter’s success, for example, is it has such a great name. Simple word, easy to spell, great imagery, and also evocative of what the product does without being overly literal. I have been involved in naming a number of startups, including my two most recent companies: Hunch and SiteAdvisor. Each time it was a long and painful process. Here are some things I’ve learned along the way. 1) Probably the most important thing is that the name be easy to spell after someone hears it pronounced. I was involved in one startup before where every time you said the name the person says “what?” and then you have to spell it. Trust me, it becomes really tedious and also adds friction to word-of-mouth buzz. 2) You should have different naming goals for different products. For example, SiteAdvisor was a security product. You really can’t make security “cool” so we didn’t even try to bother to do that with the name. Instead we went for a name that helped explain in a very literal way what the product did. Before we came up with the name SiteAdvisor, I probably had 100 meetings where people said “I don’t understand what you are building – is it an anti-phishing toolbar, a spyware blocker or what?”. This included meetings with VC’s who focus on security and other experts. I knew the name SiteAdvisor was a winner when my father in law wrote the name on a high school blackboard and asked the kids what they thought the company did and one kid said “They advise you about websites” (and then he said ” … or construction sites” ). Also we liked the name because we imagined in the future doing more than just security – for example warning about adult content. (Alas, we never got that far). 3) I tend to disagree with The Name Inspector about name length. Shorter is definitely better. In particular the number of syllables is important. SiteAdvisor, while good at describing the product, is really clunky to pronounce. I also tend to really dislike Latin-y portmanteau names like “Integra” “Omnitrust” etc. Sounds like a pharmaceutical product. 4) A few things I’ve learned about methodology. I think it’s very rare to have an epiphany where you come up with a great name. First of all, even if you do, the domain is probably taken and too expensive. For systematically brainstorming, I really like the Related Words function on RhymeZone. I try to make lists of words that are sort of related to the product and then look at all the related words, look at all those words’ related words, etc, making lists of words and word fragments
32     that sounds good. Then I have a systematic process for checking domains to see if they are buyable. If you are super lucky (and picked a multiword domain name) you might get it retail, but at this point almost all .com names (yes, I think you still need to own the .com) are owned by someone and the question becomes whether they will sell it at a reasonable price. The best case is usually that it’s owned by a professional domainer and it’s not very monetizable via Adsense (domainers make a lot of money from Adsense on sites like candy.com so you’d need to offer them a tons of money to sell it). Naming is tough!   Underhyping  your  startup  –  Chris  Dixon   http://cdixon.org/2010/04/06/underhyping-­‐your-­‐startup/   April 6, 2010 Underhyping your startup I recently tweeted: New early-stage start up trend: get big quietly, so you don’t tip off potential competitors. Chris Sacca agreed: @cdixon Agreed. As of this morning, I have four companies who don’t want investors mentioning that they’ve been funded. Business Insider took these tweets to mean “Stealth mode is back.” But that’s actually not what I meant. The companies I’m referring to (and I think Chris is referring to) are publicly launched, acquiring users and generating revenue. They are modeling themselves after Groupon, where the first time the VC community / tech press gets excited about them, they are already so successful that it’s hard for competitors to jump in. This trend strikes me as a response to the fact that 1) raising money from certain investors can be such a strong signal that it triggers massive investor/tech press excitement, 2) things are “frothy” now – meaning lots of smart people are starting companies and easily raising lots of money, 3) word seems to travel faster than ever about interesting startups, and 4) there are big companies like Facebook and Google who are good at fast following. I don’t know what to call this but it’s not stealth mode. Maybe “underhype” mode?     Both  sides  of  the  marketing  equation  –  Chris  Dixon   http://cdixon.org/2010/10/16/the-­‐ladies-­‐night-­‐strategy/   October 16, 2010 The “ladies’ night” strategy
33     Many singles bars have “ladies’ night” where women are offered price discounts. Singles bars do this for women but not for men because (heterosexually-focused) bars are what economists call two- sided markets – platforms that have two distinct user groups and that get more valuable to each group the more the other group joins the platform - and women are apparently harder to attract to singles bars than men. Businesses that target two-sided markets are extremely hard to build but also extremely hard to compete against once they reach scale. Tech businesses that have created successful two-sided markets include Ebay (sellers and buyers), Google (advertisers and publishers), Paypal (buyers and merchants), and Microsoft (Windows users and developers). In some cases individuals/institutions are consistently on one side (buyers and merchants) while in other cases they fluctuate between sides (Ebay sellers are also often buyers). In almost every two-sided market, one side is harder to acquire than the other. The most common way to attract the hard side is the ladies’ night strategy: reduce prices for the hard side, even to zero (e.g. Adobe Flash & PDF for end-users), or below zero (e.g. party promotors paying celebrities to attend). Rarer ways to attract the hard side is 1) getting them to invest the platform itself (e.g. Visa & Mastercard), and 2) interoperating with existing hard sides (e.g. Playstation 3 running Playstation 2 games). If you are starting a company that targets a two-sided market you need to figure out which side is the hard side and then focus your efforts on marketing to that side. Generally, the more asymmetric your market the better, as it allows you to market to each side more in serial than in parallel.     Platform  distribution  risks  –  Chris  Dixon   http://cdixon.org/2012/02/14/platform-­‐distribution-­‐risks/   Platform distribution risks When your product extends a platform’s functionality, one of the main risks you face is that the platform could embed your product’s key features within the platform – what is sometimes called subsumption risk. This happened to a lot of startups in the 90s that built products for the Windows platform. When you depend on a platform for distribution (acquiring and retaining users), you take on different risks. Specifically: 1) Oversaturation . The risk that supply of products on the platform significantly outpaces demand. This seems to have happened recently to the iOS App Store: there are over 500,000 apps and counting, and popularity tends to be highly concentrated, making it very difficult for new apps to get noticed. Oversaturation also happened to Google (organic) results in most query categories in the last 2000′s. 2) Barriers to discovery . The risk that the discovery methods on the platform aren’t meritocratic. iOS apps depend upon appearing in iTunes’ Top 25 lists, leading to a “rich get richer” bias, along with aggressive attempts to game the system. Apple has other app discovery mechanisms like its Featured Apps and Genius features, but those seem to drive far fewer downloads than the top lists. Google search has increasingly been favoring Google’s own products and also seems to heavily favor
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials
Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials

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Startup Reading List - Marketing and Customer Acquisition Essentials

  • 1. STARTUP  READING  LIST  –  JUNE  2012   Marketing,  customer   acquisition  and  sales   Early  stage  marketing,  marketing  strategy,   driving  user  engagement,  consumer  psychology,   viral  growth,  pricing,  sales,  PR,  blogging,  content   marketing,  copywriting,  search  engine   optimisation  and  marketing,  email  marketing,   optimisation  and  landing  pages                
  • 2. 1     Contents   Early  stage  marketing  ............................................................................................................................................  5   Focus  and  market  segmentation  –  David  Skok  ..................................................................................................  5   Understanding  market  –  Chris  Dixon  .................................................................................................................  6   What  customers  to  serve  –  Mark  Suster  ............................................................................................................  6   Getting  started  with  marketing  –  Brant  Cooper  ...............................................................................................  11   Getting  started  with  marketing  –  Dharmesh  Shah  ..........................................................................................  13   Marketing  for  early  stage  tech  startups    –  Mark  Suster  ...................................................................................  16   An  online  marketing  recipe  -­‐  KISSmetrics  .........................................................................................................  20   Naming  your  startup–  Chris  Dixon  ...................................................................................................................  31   Underhyping  your  startup  –  Chris  Dixon  ..........................................................................................................  32   Both  sides  of  the  marketing  equation  –  Chris  Dixon  ........................................................................................  32   Platform  distribution  risks  –  Chris  Dixon  ..........................................................................................................  33   MVP  to  landing  page  –  Ash  Maurya  ................................................................................................................  34   Avoid  the  launch  –  Eric  Ries  ..............................................................................................................................  40   Fred  Wilson  on  marketing  –  Fred  Wilson  .........................................................................................................  43   The  role  of  marketing  –  Rand  Fishkin  ...............................................................................................................  46   The  5  Minute  Guide  To  Cheap  Startup  Advertising  –  Rob  Walling  ...................................................................  51   Marketing  strategy  ..............................................................................................................................................  57   Pick  Your  Early  Beta  Customers  Very  Carefully–  Ben  Yoskovitz  ........................................................................  57   How  to  get  your  first  1,000  users  –  Vinicius  Vacanti  ........................................................................................  58   1000  true  fans  –  Kevin  Kelly  .............................................................................................................................  60   10  obvious  strategies  to  ruthlessly  acquire  users  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ....................................................................  65   10X  Your  Business  –  Elad  Gil  .............................................................................................................................  67   How  to  bring  a  product  to  market  –  Nivi  /  Sean  Ellis  .......................................................................................  69   Marketing  science  Q&A  with  Sean  Ellis  –  Nivi  /  Sean  Ellis  ................................................................................  95   Pace  of  marketing  change  –  Sean  Ellis  .............................................................................................................  97   Startup  marketing  (Sean  Ellis)  –  Nivi  ................................................................................................................  98   The  10x  product  launch  –  Ash  Maurya  ...........................................................................................................  101   Marketing  is  hard  –  Rand  Fishkin  ...................................................................................................................  106   Inbound  marketing  –  David  Skok  ...................................................................................................................  107   Marketing  to  match  the  channel  –  Steve  Blank  .............................................................................................  110   AARRR  by  business  model  –  Brant  Cooper  .....................................................................................................  114   Content  targeting  is  no  match  for  persuasion  architecture  -­‐  Mariel  Bacci  ....................................................  116   Persuasion  architecture  in  action  –  Mariel  Bacci  ...........................................................................................  118  
  • 3. 2     Founders  Make  the  Best  Startup  Marketing  Leaders  –  Sean  Ellis  ..................................................................  120   Growth  hacking  –  Sean  Ellis  ...........................................................................................................................  122   Customer  feedback  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ................................................................................................................  123   Lessons  from  the  casino  industry  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ...........................................................................................  126   Driving  user  engagement  ...................................................................................................................................  128   Product  distribution  (Gaining  user  traction)  –  Peter  Thiel  (Blake  Masters)  ....................................................  137   Getting  traction  –  Gabriel  Weinberg  ..............................................................................................................  184   Optimising  the  conversion  funnel  –  David  Skok  .............................................................................................  154   Big  picture  customer  development  –  Sean  Ellis  ..............................................................................................  120   Engaging  new  users  –  Chris  Dixon  ..................................................................................................................  187   Demand  harvesting  –  Sean  Ellis  .....................................................................................................................  187   How  cost  of  customer  acquisition  kills  startups  –  David  Skok  ........................................................................  137   Value  of  a  user  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  .......................................................................................................................  137   Social  network  marketing  –  Andrew  Chen  .....................................................................................................  132   Facebook  click  to  action  –  Brian  Solis  .............................................................................................................  128   Cost  of  customer  acquisition  –  David  Skok  .....................................................................................................  137   Measuring  user  engagement  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  .................................................................................................  188   Paying  to  acquire  users  –  Sean  Ellis  ................................................................................................................  173   Cost  per  acquisition  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ................................................................................................................  154   Building  networks  –  Chris  Dixon  .....................................................................................................................  188   The  cardinal  sin  of  community  management  –  Eric  Ries  ................................................................................  193   Consumer  psychology  .........................................................................................................................................  197   The  psychology  of  fear  (and  conflict)  –  Peter  Thiel  (Blake  Masters)  ..............................................................  197   People  always  stay  the  same  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  .................................................................................................  211   25  reasons  users  STOP  using  your  product  –  Andrew  Chen  ...........................................................................  216   10  things  about  people  –  Cindy  Alvarez  .........................................................................................................  219   Why  fear  is  a  marketers  best  friend  –  KISSmetrics  .........................................................................................  219   What  jobs  are  users  hiring  your  product  to  perform  –  Chris  Dixon  ................................................................  222   Viral  growth  .......................................................................................................................................................  224   Viral  branding  versus  viral  action  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ..........................................................................................  224   Viral  loops  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ..............................................................................................................................  226   Engagement  loops  –  beyond  viral  –  Eric  Ries  .................................................................................................  229   Viral  marketing  is  not  a  marketing  strategy  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ..........................................................................  233   Ways  to  achieve  viral  growth  –  Vinicius  Vacanti  ............................................................................................  235   Viral  marketing  –  David  Skok  .........................................................................................................................  238  
  • 4. 3     Making  content  go  viral  –  Mark  Suster  ..........................................................................................................  243   Facebook  viral  marketing  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  ......................................................................................................  246   Pricing  ................................................................................................................................................................  252   Pricing  for  startups  –  Rob  Fitzpatrick  .............................................................................................................  252   Determining  optimal  price  –  Sean  Ellis  ...........................................................................................................  253   Great  Guidance  on  Pricing  –  Sean  Ellis  ...........................................................................................................  255   Is  Your  Pricing  a  Dot  or  a  Triangle?  –  Cindy  Alvarez  .......................................................................................  256   Should  You  Charge  More  For  Your  Product?  –  Brad  Feld  ...............................................................................  259   It’s  easy  to  underprice  your  product  –  Nivi  .....................................................................................................  260   Price:  Why  Lower  Isn't  Always  Better  –  Fred  Wilson  ......................................................................................  263   PR  .......................................................................................................................................................................  265   Pitching  a  tech  blogger  –  Mark  Hendrickson  ..................................................................................................  290   Building  relations  with  journalists  –  Mark  Suster  ...........................................................................................  292   Noone  cares  about  your  startup  –  Matt  Brezina  ............................................................................................  295   PR  and  crisis  management  –  Mark  Suster  ......................................................................................................  298   Hiring  PR  agencies  –  Brant  Cooper  .................................................................................................................  302   PR  for  startups  -­‐  Erica  Swallow  ......................................................................................................................  305   Spin  and  PR  –  Mark  Suster  .............................................................................................................................  311   How  to  pitch  tech  journalists  –  Ciara  Byrne  ...................................................................................................  313   How  to  pitch  to  the  press  –  Nick  Saint  ............................................................................................................  315   Creating  a  good  blogger  pitch  –  STEPHANIE  SCHWAB  ...................................................................................  317   Blogging  .............................................................................................................................................................  320   Starting  a  blog  -­‐  Andrew  Chen  .......................................................................................................................  320   No  time  to  blog?  –  Charlie  O’Donnell  .............................................................................................................  324   How  to  start  blogging  –  Mark  Suster  .............................................................................................................  325   Becoming  a  better  blogger  –  Neil  Patel  ..........................................................................................................  329   Blogging  for  business  –  Rob  Fitzpatrick  ..........................................................................................................  342   Becoming  a  conversion  machine  –  Glen  Allsopp  ............................................................................................  344   Just  start  blogging  –  Jason  Cohen  ..................................................................................................................  356   The  Ultimate  Guide  to  Guest  Blogging  –  Kristi  Hines  .....................................................................................  360   Content  marketing  .............................................................................................................................................  367   Content  marketing  –  Toby  Murdock  ...............................................................................................................  367   Content  for  both  sides  –  Douglas  Melchior  ....................................................................................................  377   Content  creation  –  John  Pring  ........................................................................................................................  379   Copywriting  ........................................................................................................................................................  394  
  • 5. 4     Long  copy  vs  short  copy  –  Jeff  Sexton  ............................................................................................................  394   For  conversions  or  thought  leadership  –  Steph  Hay  .......................................................................................  396   How  to  be  interesting  –  Jonathan  Morrow  ....................................................................................................  398   Persuasive  writing  techniques  –  Brian  Clark  ..................................................................................................  401   Sales  ...................................................................................................................................................................  265   Sales  and  scope  creep  –  Michael  Woloszynowicz  ...........................................................................................  265   Enterprise  customers  don’t  change  –  Ben  Horowitz  .......................................................................................  267   Scaling  sales  (ABC)  –  Mark  Suster  ..................................................................................................................  270   Scaling  sales  (objection  handling)  –  Mark  Suster  ...........................................................................................  273   Understanding  salespeople  –  Mark  Suster  .....................................................................................................  275   Building  a  sales  team  –  Dharmesh  Shah  ........................................................................................................  278   Hiring  sales  –  Furqan  Nazeeri  .........................................................................................................................  280   Hiring  sales  people  –  Mark  Suster  ..................................................................................................................  281   Selling  to  enterprise  –  Chris  Dixon  ..................................................................................................................  284   Create  a  burning  platform  –  Mark  Suster  ......................................................................................................  285   The  one  day  sales  cycle  –  David  Skok  .............................................................................................................  287   Search  engine  optimisation  and  marketing  .......................................................................................................  404   Adwords  is  not  enough  for  success  on  the  consumer  web  -­‐    Andrew  Chen  ....................................................  404   Some  thoughts  on  SEO  –  Chris  Dixon  .............................................................................................................  406   SEO  is  no  longer  a  viable  marketing  alternative  –  Chris  Dixon  .......................................................................  407   Strategic  SEO  for  Startups  –  Patrick  McKenzie  ...............................................................................................  409   Email  marketing  .................................................................................................................................................  419   It’s  the  CEO’s  job  to  email  the  first  1000  signups  –  Rob  Fitzpatrick  ...............................................................  419   Email  marketing  –  KISSmetrics  .......................................................................................................................  420   Optimisation  and  landing  pages  ........................................................................................................................  428   Why  your  site  will  fail  –  Andrew  Chen  ............................................................................................................  428   AB  test  big  changes  (not  just  small)  –  Josh  Porter  ..........................................................................................  429   AB  vs  qualitative  testing  –  Laura  Klein  ...........................................................................................................  432   Website  optimisation  –  Conversion  Rate  Experts  ...........................................................................................  437   The  Anatomy  of  a  Perfect  Landing  Page  –  FormStack  ...................................................................................  455   Landing  pages  that  convert  –  Chance  Barnett  ...............................................................................................  457        
  • 6. 5     Early  stage  marketing   Early  stage  marketing   Focus  and  market  segmentation  –  David  Skok   http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/sales-­‐marketing-­‐machine/focus-­‐market-­‐segmentation/   Focus  &  Market  Segmentation   Focus: Segment your Market, and pick the Low Hanging Fruit At the start of your marketing process, you will be dealing with the issue of who to target – people that you suspect represent potential buyers. A big mistake that I see with startups is that they don’t take the trouble to segment their target market, and identify the low hanging fruit. Much has been written about the importance of Focus, and I am yet another strong believer in this. Particularly in the early days of a startup, when you have very few resources, and when everything you do has to pay off. If you are not convinced of this, I strongly recommend reading Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore, which remains to this day one of the most important books for startups. Inevitably there will be some sub-segment of your market that is most likely to buy from you. It may be a particular vertical, or it could be picking a particular size of customer, or some other characteristic such as experience with IP networking. Look for buyers that are feeling extreme pain (where their hair is on fire), and who also have money, a sense of urgency, and a good fit with the features of your current version of your product. This will also allow you to develop very specific focused marketing messages that will likely appeal far more strongly than broad general messaging. It will also make it easier to decide what product features to build next, as you will be driven to complete those needed to fully satisfy that one segment. A common mistake is a product that meets 80% of many different segments, because management didn’t have the discipline to focus. 80% is enough to get them interested, but not enough to get them over the bar to purchase. The reason that management teams don’t focus is because focus is hard. Focus means saying no to highly attractive opportunities that may be knocking on your door. As an example, when I first started working with one of my portfolio companies, they had been approached by one of the top global banks that loved their software and wanted to put it into 2,500 branches. The customer was consuming tons of the company resources, with sales and product people flying everywhere. The problem was the bank needed on-site global support, and there was no way that a tiny startup was in a position to provide that. However because the opportunity was so big, no one was willing to say no to it. It took some outside help to make them realize they couldn’t win the deal, and that they were far better off focusing on the SMB market where their products and ability to service them were ideally suited. Don’t fall into that trap: you will win by having a product that is over the bar for one sub-segment, and well targeted focused messaging that resonates clearly with that segment. This market segmentation will drive the first part of your funnel: figuring out who to target.
  • 7. 6       Understanding  your  market  –  Chris  Dixon   http://cdixon.org/2009/10/11/understanding-­‐your-­‐market/   October 11, 2009 Understanding your market Some startups become huge sensations without requiring any active marketing – YouTube, Skype, and Twitter come to mind. However, the vast majority of successful startups gained adoption through marketing: PR, SEO, partnerships, paid marketing, and so on. My strong suggestion would be to hope for the former but plan for the latter. Marketing is a huge topic. Here I just want to make the point that, for starters, you need to figure out two things: 1) how information and influence flows in your market, and 2) when and where people use and/or purchase your product. I’ll use my last startup, SiteAdvisor, as an example. SiteAdvisor (now called McAfee SiteAdvisor) is a consumer security product. Most consumers don’t learn about security products on their own. Instead, they rely on their “family/friend sysadmin” (smartest computer person they know). These family sysadmins read technical websites and magazines. In order to reach this audience, we performed studies on data we had collected, which led to lots of coverage, which raised our profile and bolstered our credibility. Now to when and where people buy security products. Most people only think about security when 1) they buy a new computer, 2) they first get internet access, or 3) they get a virus or other security problem. The last case is actually pretty rare, so most companies focus on 1 and 2. How do you reach people at those moments? Through “channels” – in particular PC makers (“OEMs”) and internet providers (“ISPs”). (For public market people: focusing on these two channels was McAfee’s big insight in the 2000′s and how they made a comeback versus Symantec who dominates retail). Most people don’t talk to their friends about security products so it’s very hard to do mass word-of- mouth marketing. (Exceptions would be the beginning of the spyware epidemic around 2001-2 when AdAware got super popular via word of mouth). So you have to understand and pitch to these channels. These observations are specific to consumer security, but every startup should have a similar theory of how to market their product.   What  customers  to  serve  –  Mark  Suster   http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/09/16/most-­‐startups-­‐should-­‐be-­‐deer-­‐hunters/   Most Startups Should be Deer Hunters by MARK SUSTER on SEPTEMBER 16, 2009 This post is part of my series “Startup Lessons“ Elephants, Deer and Rabbits – Some thoughts on start-up segmentation
  • 8. 7     Nearly all of the mistakes I made at my first company I fixed by the time of my second company. This is the only mistake I repeated twice and it is a mistake that I see many, many companies make. I know that this advice won’t apply to every possible startup – but I think it applies to many. When you start your company the very first question you need to ask yourself is which kind of customers do you want to serve. Many start-ups (and even growth firms) lack this discipline and they therefore serve customers off all sizes. This leads to suboptimal results for all. Make sure you know what the size of customer you want to serve is, what the people in a company of that size do, the problems they have, the features that will resonate and the channels you’ll need to sell into and service that customer. Because it will vary dramatically by different segments I believe you need to pick an animal size and go for it. I’ve stated my animal bias in the title – but each can work for different business types. The segment breakdowns are below: Elephants:
  • 9. 8     It is very tempting for many start-ups to hunt elephants. These are really massive customers. It’s landing AT&T or Microsoft as a customer when you’re a start- up. You’ve got 8 people and are serving a business unit that has 5,000. It’s tempting on many levels to be an elephant hunter. If you manage to kill an elephant they have so much meat they’ll feed you for a long time. But elephants are hard to catch and take whole teams of people to bring down. They take special tools. If you’re not successful you may starve. If you do catch them, it could be even worse. Avoid elephants in your early stages. Learn from my mistakes. Here is the real world story. I worked for Andersen Consulting for more than 8 years. Initially as a systems designer and programmer and post MBA as a strategy consultant. We knew how to land huge corporate customers. We knew how to “call high” into board rooms and get meetings. So when I started my first company I naturally went for elephants. The problem is that they were initially very easy for me to find. I could easily go into the board rooms of major European companies (I was based in London) and land $500k – $1 million contracts so my order book grew rapidly. The problem is that to win each of these deals I had to promise high service levels. We typically committed to building “missing” features and therefore steered off of our MVP (minimum viable product). We had to promise really steep service SLAs and help desk hours. We had to do intense training sessions. And when things didn’t go perfectly these organizations had huge leverage over us. In short, servicing the elephants consumed us. It soaked up all of our development resources and didn’t allow us to focus on what we felt our company strategy was. We started out with such big dreams about changing the world. On some level we felt we did because being a SaaS company in 1999 was trailblazing. But in the end we ended up building esoteric features that we knew our clients would never use because they paid us lots of money. See definition of a whore. And this is not just a problem at start-ups. I remember working for Salesforce.com and we were bagging elephants relative to our size. We were obsessed with landing Merrill Lynch, Dell and Cisco. I watched the first two of these customers consume significant portions of our internal programming resources. I personally felt that we would have been better served putting more resource into building out cloud services, for example, to make Salesforce more scalable in terms of our user base. (note: my internal friends at Salesforce tell me that they’ve really fixed this now and internal dev teams are much more focused on bigger, more strategic development).
  • 10. 9     Elephant hunting does work for some companies. Some companies / products are designed for large organizations from day 1. But I believe that if you go down this road you will struggle to simultaneously serve the SMB market. The needs are too different as are the sales channels and marketing messages. If you want to hunt elephants optimize your tools for just that. And know that VC will be hard to come by. Rabbits: Equally deceiving are rabbits. There are so many of them – they seem like they’re everywhere. So you chase them. But as you get closer to them you realize that they’re quick little buggers. They scatter and get away. You wonder whether they were really worth the effort after all. Rabbits for me are the equivalent of having a low-end version of your product that you feel you’ll make up for in volume. I see it all the time. Companies post the $5 / month product designed for self-service clients. Or they have products that cost $40 / month but that require a direct sales person to close them. This is especially problematic in the Web 2.0 / Freemium world where too many company build their business models around trying to build massive scale of free customers and then convert a small share to low monthly payments. I guess it has worked for some companies? (Basecamp? Who else?) My second company, Koral, tried to go down the freemium route. We found that at the low end there wasn’t enough revenue to make it worth our while. Then Salesforce.com asked us to implement our solution to all 3,000 employees (before they decided to buy us). So we were trying to optimize for freemium while building in all of the special requests Salesforce asked for in order to win the deal. We went after it because it was worth some serious elephant meat. Sometimes it is acceptable for companies to focus on low-level entry customers – Rabbits. Obviously if you’re going to build a massively scaled business like Twitter, Facebook or Zynga you’re going for huge volumes and the small transaction value model can work. I’m told this model has worked well for Zoho in the small business sector. But unless you’re a very large volume business and focused on transactions rabbits are deceptive. I came across a company today at TechCrunch50 called Outright that is perfectly suited to rabbits. I believe it can actually build a big Rabbit Business and it’s strategy seems perfectly suited to reaching this customer base through partners. But few companies are good at trapping rabbits.
  • 11. 10     Want to be the SharePoint killer? Avoid rabbits. Have a better version of BaseCamp? Ditto. Want to build a product that relies on converting local mom-and-pop businesses into online advertisers – see if a regional approach might work better. Have a product for online backups? Avoid the low end of the market – too elusive and hard to shake enough money out of them. In short, when you hunt rabbits they’re not as easy to catch as you might think. When you catch them they don’t have much meat. So you need a lot of them to feed the village. Deer: The analogy is now obvious. Deer are easy to kill. When you do bag deer they have plenty of meat on them to have made it worth you while. Deer are right-sized for a start-up. Deer are not so big that they can make huge demands on you for your development resources or customer support. They can barely get you to agree to make changes to your standard terms & conditions. If you catch lots of them you’re not beholden to one big one that if they cancel their order you’d be devastated. When you’re a start-up it is far easier to cut your teeth on companies that are easy to serve, not as demanding yet can afford to pay you fair prices for your product. If their demands are too high you can easily move on to the next customer. They allow you to stay focused on your defined company strategy without having to compromise. That’s why I believe most early stage companies should be deer hunters. Final question I’m often asked – how big financially are Elephants, Deer & Rabbits? That’s for you to determine for your own business because it depends on your customer base and the value you’re providing them. Many of my friends who were initially focused on low-entry price point consumers have moved up market to focus on slightly smaller markets with customers willing to pay. For me, classic definition of deer segmentation. Apologies to all vegetarians.    
  • 12. 11     Entrepreneurs:  Know  Thy  Marketing!  –  Brant  Cooper   http://market-­‐by-­‐numbers.com/2009/11/marketing_help/   Entrepreneurs: Know Thy Marketing! By brantcooper, November 18, 2009 7:04 pm I don’t know who is more exasperated, entrepreneurs flummoxed by marketers or me, upset that another entrepreneur has been flummoxed by marketers! People, language is for communication and marketing terms, abused as they are, fall somewhere within the scope of language. To communicate you need to learn the terms. To practice marketing or to hire a marketer you need to grasp some basics. Please. Marketing Help Rule 1. (<> means “not equal to”) Blogging <> PR <> Brand <> SEO <> Logo <> Advertising <> Tagline <> Messaging <> FaceBook <> Positioning <> Twitter <>Lead Gen <> [Enter mktg term here] Marketing Help Rule 2. Trust me, you don’t need all the marketing tactics listed in Rule 1. Marketing Help Rule 3. The right marketing tactics for you, right now depend on WHO your prospective customers are and WHAT stage your company is in. Marketing Help Rule 4. All Marketers have a core competency (or two). Regardless, (almost) all Marketers will sell (almost) all marketing services. Marketing Help Rule 5. You need marketing to grow your business. And more likely than not, you need or will soon need help marketing. Admit it. For a moment, forget everything you know or think you know or have heard about marketing. Start with a clean slate. Now imagine you are a new customer of a particular product or service. You just finished buying. You are a bit giddy: You’re eager to get started. You’re excited at the prospect of reaping serious value. You’re determined to at least get your money’s worth.
  • 13. 12     You have a small fear in the back of your mind that you spent too much or made the wrong choice. You both want to show it off and hide it from view until you’ve proved it’s worth. Now like a bad movie flashback, go back to this morning right before your alarm clock sounded. Better yet, go back to the moment BEFORE you realized you had a NEED that you MIGHT eventually purchase SOMETHING from SOMEONE to RESOLVE the need. Your experience from this moment –pre-realization –to the moment of sale is marketing. Your maybe want to tell me it’s sales. But no, the seller sells. The buyer experiences marketing. Whether you agree or not, analyze all the marketing advice you’ve received in this context. Think about all the people telling you that you must use social media marketing. Think about magazines, news, commercials, blogs. Think about your logo and your clever slogan. Think about “your brand must be consistent!” Think about your color palette. Did any of these things affect your path from pre-realization to purchase (as far as you know)? No, yes, maybe? Ruminate on this concept: Ms. pre-realization will eventually buy from me because: I’m a good person I try hard My technology is the best I don’t oversell I’m ethical General Haig interviewed me on some TV show on a plane somewhere, sometime. I think. I tweet Marketing feels daunting because you are being shown a dozen yellow brick roads that weave off gloriously into the colorful horizon. That and the promise that the chosen path is flowering with ROI poppies. Walk forward in your customer’s shoes from before purchase; from pre-realization. How do you get to you?      
  • 14. 13     Startup  Marketing:  Tactical  Tips  From  The  Trenches  –  Dharmesh  Shah   http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/9008/Startup-­‐Marketing-­‐Tactical-­‐Tips-­‐From-­‐The-­‐Trenches.aspx   Startup Marketing: Tactical Tips From The Trenches I’m speaking at the Inbound Marketing Summit later this month in San Francisco. There are some really great speakers lined up (David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan, Charlene Li, Paul Gillin and others). If you’re looking to learn more about inbound marketing and how to get found in Google, social media and blogs, this should be a great event. If you decide to attend, use the code HUB200 for a special $200 discount. Drop me a note if you’re going to be there, would love to meet-up. My session’s going to be called “Startup Marketing: Tips From The Trenches”. As I get my thoughts together for this, I started making a list of all of the things I’d advise a new startup to do to get things kicked off with a limited budget. As it turns out, there are a lot of tactical steps that individually don’t do much, but in aggregate start laying the foundation for much bigger things. So, I thought I’d share some of these things with you. This list is not intended to be a comprehensive “here are all the things you should do”, but more of a “if I were starting a company today, here’s what I would do in the first 10 days…” It’s written in a short, punchy style. I’ll likely revise it in the future as I add more things, but I wanted to get “Version 1.0” out there for you and see what you think. Tactical Tips for Startup Marketing 1. Pick a name that works. Needs to be simple, memorable and unambiguous. The “.com” domain should be available without playing tricks with the name (like dropping vowels or adding dashes). Also, just because there’s no website on a domain doesn’t mean it’s “available”. Available means something you can register immediately, or that has a price that you’re willing to pay attached to it. Don’t wander down the rabbit hole of finding the perfect name if you have no indication that it’s for sale. This will waste a bunch of your time. 2. Put a simple website up. Doesn’t have to be fancy. The goal is to put enough content on the site to start the Google sandbox clock. Don’t worry about the site not saying much (nobody’s going to be looking at it anyways). Make sure to use a decent content management system (CMS) and not Dreamweaver or (shudder) FrontPage. Just because you can hand-craft HTML doesn’t mean you should for your startup website. The structure and features of a CMS are going to be important someday. Trust me. 3. Get some links into the new startup website. If you have a personal website, link to it from there. If you have friends/associates/family with websites, cash in some favor chips and get them to link to it. The goal is to get the Google crawler to start indexing your site. You only need one decent link to get things going. To check whether your
  • 15. 14     site is being indexed by Google, do a search like site:yoursite.com (not perfect, but good enough). 4. Setup a twitter account. Name of the account should match your company/domain name. Link to your twitter account from your main site and to your main site from your twitter account. (Note: If you have a natural skepticism of the value of twitter, you are welcome to this skepticism. But, go ahead and grab your twitter account anyways. You can resume your skepticism after you do that). 5. Add e-mail subscription. Let people sign-up to get an email when you’re ready to show them the product. A simple email signup form is sufficient. 6. Get a nice logo. Run a quick contest on CrowdSpring or 99Designs and you’ll wind up with something decent enough. Make sure you get the vector file (Illustrator or EPS file) as part of the final deliverable. If you've got design skills yourself, or know somebody really good that can do it, even better. 7. Setup a Facebook business page (known as a “fan” page) for your startup. You’re not going to get many fans in the early days. That’s OK. Just get something out there. Add a simple description of your startup, link back to your main website. The usual stuff. 8. Create a clean Facebook URL. Facebook doesn’t allow simple/vanity URLs (unless you're big and established). So, to make things easier on yourself (and your users), setup a sub-domain and redirect it to your Facebook page. For example, here’s what I did: facebook.hubspot.com (notice that when you visit this link, it takes you automatically to the ugly Facebook URL). Setting up this sub-domain is free and usually pretty easy (it’s done through whoever your registrar is for your domain). 9. Kick off a blog. You can use one of the free hosting tools (like WordPress.com), but don’t use their domain name. Put your blog on blog.yourcompany.com — or if you’re proficient and can install WP locally, make it yourcompany.com/blog. Do NOT make it yourcompany.wordpress.com. The reason is that you want to control all the SEO authority for your blog and channel it towards your main website. And, chances are, WordPress.com doesn’t need your help on the SEO front. 10. Write a blog article that describes how you got to this point. What problem you’re hoping to solve. Why you picked this problem. It should feel a little uncomfortable revealing what you’re revealing. If you have tendencies towards being in “Stealth Mode”, read “Stealth Mode, Schmealth Mode”. With inbound marketing, you’re going to need to get used to revealing things that might be uncomfortable. Get over it. 11. Setup Google Alerts for at least the following: Your company name, link:yourdomain.com and “industry term”. Try to find a good balance for your industry term so you don’t get flooded with alerts that you simply will start ignoring. This may take some iteration and refining. (Oh, and use the “As It Happens” option in Google Alerts so you’re not waiting around for new alerts to show up).
  • 16. 15     12. Find three closest competitors. Pretend like someone is paying you $10,000 for locating each competitor. Really try hard. Barely managed to find three? Take a lot of effort? Great. Now find 3 more. Of these 6, pick the two that you think are the most marketing savvy. They should have aWebsite Grade > 90, a blog with some readers, a website that you can envision people using, a twitter account that they actually post to, etc. These are the competitors that you’re going to start “tracking”. Add their names and websites to your Google Alerts. 13. Update your LinkedIn profile (you do have a LinkedIn profile, right)? Mention your new startup, and add a link to your startup website to one of the three slots for this purpose. Make sure you specify the anchor text. Don’t go with the default of “My Website”. The anchor text should be your startup name and maybe a couple of words of what it does. You can look at my profile to get a sense:http://www.linkedin.com/in/dharmesh (note: I don't accept LinkedIn invites from people I don't know. If you're looking to get to know me, follow me on twitter @dharmesh). 14. Get business cards printed. Don’t go overboard, but don’t use a “free” option (because it’s not really free, it’s just subsidized). I don’t believe much in business cards, but you need them to simply avoid the 30 seconds of discussion as to why you don’t have a card when people ask you for one at conferences and meetings and such. They’re worth the price to avoid that uncomfortableness. 15. Use the Twitter Grader search feature to find high-impact twitter users in your industry. Start following them. You want to start forging relationships. Start building your twitter network. Resist the temptation to mass-follow a bunch of random people or play other games just to get your follower count up. That’s not going to matter. Get some high quality relationships going. If you’re really serious, start using an app like TweetDeck so you can more easily monitor the needed conversations. 16. Create a StumbleUpon account. Specify your areas of interest (part of registration). Spend 10 minutes a day (no more!) stumbling and voting things up/down. Start befriending those that are submitting sites that are relevant and interesting for your startup. Don’t submit your own stuff — just start contributing. 17. Subscribe to the LinkedIn Answers category that best fits your area of interest. Answer one question a day that you feel like you’ve got some expertise in. Don’t self-promote. You’re seeking to build credibility and trust — not sell anything. 18. Find the bloggers that are writing about your topic area. Subscribe to their feed, and read their stuff regularly. Leave valuable comments and participate in the conversation. (Do not spam them or write “fluff” comments. If you don’t have something useful to add to the conversation, don’t comment). 19. Start building some contacts on Facebook. Organize your users into groups (one for your business and another for friends/family). This will come in handy later. Don’t spam people and ask them to visit your website. At this point, your website is still probably not worth visiting.
  • 17. 16     20. Grade your website on Website Grader. Fix the basic things. You should be able to get a 50+ just by doing the simple things it suggests. [Disclaimer: I wrote Website Grader]. 21. Get Some Analytics: Install some web analytics software and start watching your traffic. Where is it coming from? How is it growing? What keywords are people using to find you? What content are they looking at? It's ok to get a bit maniacal and obssessed about it at first. Many of us do that (and some of us never get over it). If you liked this article, you'll probably love the Inbound Marketing book that I co- authored. It includes similar practical advice for getting found in Google, social media and blogs. If you’re interested in startups, you can follow me on twitter @dharmesh. What have I missed? What ideas do you have on tactical things for startup marketing? What do youdo? Update: Oh, and by the way, if you liked this article, you will love my recently released book,Inbound Marketing: Getting Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs. The book is a practical guide to marketing on the web and has been an Amazon Top 100 book since the day of it's release. Love startups? Join the OnStartups community on Facebook.   Marketing  for  early  stage  tech  startups    –  Mark  Suster   http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/06/27/10-­‐lessons-­‐for-­‐managing-­‐marketing-­‐at-­‐an-­‐early-­‐stage-­‐ startup/   10 Marketing Lessons for Early-Stage Tech Startups by MARK SUSTER on JUNE 27, 2011 I made every textbook mistake at my first startup, which is why I believe I was much more effective at my second one. I have adopted the motto “good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment.“ We need to learn from doing, by trial-and-error.
  • 18. 17     If I can help you avoid some of my first-time mistakes it would be a victory. The following are some lessons I learned about early-stage startup marketing. Because market is such a broad topic, I’m restricting these lessons to PR marketing (as opposed SEO, SEM, product marketing, etc.). 1. Where Stealth is Good – There’s a lot of discussions on the web about whether startups should be stealthy before they launch or not. The truth is – there isn’t a “right” answer so for your company. You need some guidelines to make decisions. My general rule is that it’s good to be stealth in the early days while you’re building your product and testing your market. Stealth does not mean constipated, paranoid and totally untrusting of others. It does mean not telling more people your future plans than is necessary. It means avoiding drinking too much at cocktail parties with other tech people and bragging about your plans. It means not over-sharing your deal with VCs or other investors. The truth is that we work in a very small, tight-knit industry and news & plans spread fast. In the early days you don’t really want 3 extra teams hearing your ideas and gearing up to compete before you feel you’ve got a solid head start. Most people totally advise against stealth. They think that only by being open and testing your ideas in an open marketplace can you be successful. Be careful about this advice. Also be careful about VCs. Most ones that I know have very high ethical standards so I’m not concerned about that. But once a VC has heard your idea he can’t “un-think” it. And these ideas have ways of seeping into board discussions with portfolio companies as in, “have you ever thought about trying A, B or C?” It’s mostly unintentional but tacit knowledge about ideas spreads quickly amongst the chattering elite. I actually like finding entrepreneurs who are more circumspect, less braggadocios and generally more planned about their actions. 2. Where Stealth is Bad – I do meet entrepreneurs who clearly fall on the other side of spectrum and are totally closed. I worked with an entrepreneur who was to appear at a startup networking event where he was to talk about his company’s plans. He considered pulling out of the event
  • 19. 18     because he wanted to stay in “stealth mode” and felt an event like this compromised him. I counseled him to do the event (it was high profile) and talk in broad themes about the areas in which his business would compete. There are very few truly novel ideas so talking in broad themes certainly wouldn’t give away any grand strategy. In stead he went to the event and told everybody “we’re in stealth mode and can’t yet reveal what we do.” It went down like a lead balloon. I think he really learned from this experience: Experience comes from bad judgment. Nobody likes to hear you say, “we can’t tell you anything we’re in stealth mode” so develop some generic talking points that don’t give anything away when you’re asked what you do. The biggest problem with over-stealthing yourself is that you cut off some of your most valuable resources in terms of testing your ideas, getting feedback from smart entrepreneurs & investors and helping you figure out the potential flaws in your approach. In my experience, entrepreneurs who are overly paranoid or are information hoarders rarely do well. They certainly struggle to find mentors as there is nothing more frustrating than trying to help a company who is afraid to tell you anything. 3. Market Today’s Puck, Not Where It’s Going – I often tell startups to “skate where the puck is going” as a metaphor for not just copying what every other company is doing today but to think about where the future lies and planning for that now. But it is a big mistake to tell too many people where you’re heading. I call this “marketing futures.” Marketing futures can be really good for enterprise software companies where the information is passed between sales rep and potential customer in terms of near-term roadmap. The buying cycles are often 3-6 months so you want to put your best future foot forward. But don’t let this information get out into the general press and don’t market more than a few months out. For early-stage consumer companies I would be careful not to market futures at all. We all know that much of early-stage technology startup success comes from execution and often what you’re working on today will be rolled out more seriously over the next several months. So I recommend that companies talk in detail about the puck at their feet but avoid talking about where the puck is going. While all your competitors are trying to copy your model, you’re already on to the next thing on your engineering team. Nobody seems more disciplined at this tight-lipped future marketing than Apple and you can see how it has served them. 4. Don’t Market a Bad Product – Perhaps the most important lesson for first-time entrepreneurs is that you can’t have great marketing for a bad product. The corollary is that it is very hard to recover from a crappy marketing campaign that over-hyped. I think I first heard this from Guy Kawasaki but it’s kind of obvious. In a world in which you’re encouraged to launch early and get feedback from customers you can often confuse “product launch” with “marketing.” I think a great example right now is turntable.fm. It’s a buggy product but pretty damn cool. I haven’t heard them pounding their chest and running big marketing campaigns. And the product itself is invite-only so they can control volume and everybody has expectations managed. By the time they go GA (generally available product) I’ll be the kinks are all worked out. And the anticipation of wanting to see the product will build. The strategy they’re employing is called “velvet rope” as in what nightclubs do to build scarcity and interest in getting on the inside. It also helps to keep down issues with crowds getting too big, too early.
  • 20. 19     5. Don’t Blow Your Wad Early – There is a temptation of startups to announce that they’re “first” at something so they rush to market with announcements. I know because I did this in early 2000. We rushed to market to be first and got great coverage in the Financial Times (we were in London). But our product wasn’t ready for prime time and we struggled to live up to the hype we had created. As you can imagine that once you’re compared to Ishtar (the movie) you’ve got a higher bar of success to get people interested the second time. Not everyone has a spare 40 mill for a re-do. 6. Market to Your Target Audience – I’ve seen a lot of startups who like to write blog posts on life as an entrepreneur. That’s fine if entrepreneurs are your target market. But be clear on whom your target market is and what the messages you want to communicate to them are. I talked about that in detail on this post about how to blog as a startup. But whom you’re marketing to is not always an easy topic. At one company I work with it’s clear that our target user today is youth-oriented and middle America as opposed to 20-something and Silicon Valley or New York. We’ve been very successful at the former. But we also need to be mindful that often the influencers are on the coasts (LA/NY/SF) and that we can’t ignore them. So we’ve launched some campaigns to be sure we’re picking up these crowds with different messages. 7. Don’t Believe the Hype – Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes in marketing is to get caught up in your competitors marketing noise. When you’re inside the bubble and paying attention to every announcement of your nearest 3-4 competitors it’s easy to get despondent when they get their killer press articles or announce new features. Those of us that have been around the block tend to not get too worked up on any big competitor announcements. They come and go. They’re mostly fleeting. Life goes on. iMessage is announced. The NY Times puts Group Messaging companies on their list of companies crushed by Apple’s WWDC. But life doesn’t end. It’s a narrow product. Most app-to-app products are inter-operable, Apple isn’t. You have tons of differentiation. Life goes on. 8. Your Competitors Look the Same as You When They’re Naked in the Mirror – One thing that startup CEOs often overlook is the impact of marketing on team morale. Every day your team members are reading about all of the great things happening at your competitors company. You’re reading their press releases or blog posts. Insider your company everything feels like it’s going to hell in a hand basket. That’s because that’s how it ALWAYS feels at a startup. You always have too much technical debt, too many problems, staff members quitting, not enough capital, customer complaints, etc. That is EXACTLY how your competitors feel, too. And they’re reading your press articles and thinking, “shit, they have everything figured out.” You don’t. Make sure your team knows this and stays confident. Iwrote about it in detail in this article. 9. Build Relationships – Many startups make the mistake of thinking that they simply approach a journalist any time they have a story and get coverage. IIt doesn’t work that way. Journalist are constantly harangued by over-eager entrepreneurs. Go slowly. Get to know journalists when you don’t need stories. If you care about this topic a more detailed article is here. Follow them on Twitter. Respect their profession. Read their articles. Comment. Ask if you can help be a source for other stories. Say hello to them at conferences. Understand how their job works. Understand that for every article they write they need “an angle” and if you can’t help shape that you’re not likely to get inches. The more helpful you are over time the more likely you are to get inches when you need them.
  • 21. 20     10. It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint – Some startup teams I speak with try to lump a bunch of announcements all into one release to try and have more effect. And example is lumping your VC funding announcement into a story about major customers wins, product features or key milestones. Don’t do this. A funding announcement is a stand-alone event. It’s an angle. There are journals who dedicate a lot of time & energy into covering funding. Focus solely on that event. When it’s time later to talk about some major customer wins or big biz dev partnerships you’ll do so. If you announce killer product features worthy of coverage then talk about that. One strategy I encourage is to break up mini-releases into exclusives that you give to different journalists to spread the love around and give everybody something unique to write about. Nobody likes writing re-hashed stories. The  Ultimate  Online  Marketing  Recipe  -­‐  KISSmetrics   http://blog.kissmetrics.com/ultimate-­‐online-­‐marketing-­‐recipe/   The  Ultimate  Online  Marketing  Recipe   The basis for any good online marketing plan is an awesome landing page. But regardless of how incredible your landing page is, you still need to get people there. That’s often the part that breaks down when a company actually starts marketing a new product or service online. They’ve got the landing page that’s been expertly designed and follows all the best practices, but they’re not getting conversions because they’re not getting traffic. There’s tons of information out there for crafting an online marketing program that won’t cost you much more than time. One little problem: there’s so much information available that it’s often overwhelming. Even things like infographics that try to break it down can be too much. So we’ve crafted the ultimate online marketing recipe. One that’s easy to follow and breaks everything down into steps. We’ve linked more information about most steps throughout the article so you can easily access more in-depth information if you need it. Stage One: Gather Your Ingredients
  • 22. 21     Image by Like_the_Grand_Canyon The first stage of your marketing recipe consists of gathering up your ingredients. You’re laying the groundwork here for the rest of your marketing efforts, so make sure you don’t skip anything. Think about what happens when you leave out an ingredient in a recipe for a cake. Leave out the flour, and you get a soupy mess. Leave out the sugar and the taste is horrible. Leave out your eggs and the whole thing crumbles. The same thing happens if you leave out a key ingredient of your online marketing plan. So let’s start by claiming your brand on the major social networks: Google+ (as soon as brand pages are available), Facebook, and Twitter. Depending on your industry, there might be niche social networks where you also want accounts (for example, an author might want to set up an account on Goodreads and LibraryThing as well). Make sure you customize your Twitter background. This can serve as your social landing page until your website and other landing pages are ready. At this point you also want to set up your corporate blog and start posting right away. Make sure you submit your content to social sharing services (like StumbleUpon) and bookmark it on sites like Delicious. Research popular keywords related to your content and make sure you tag your posts with those words, and include them naturally within the content itself. On the technical end of things, you’ll want to set up a Google Analytics account, a Google Webmaster Tools account, and a Feedburner account for managing and monitoring your RSS feeds. Analytics will help you monitor exactly what’s happening on your website, where your traffic is coming from, etc. Make sure you set up some goals and conversion funnels there, and annotate any important events (like a mention on a big blog) so you can remember six months from now why you saw a spike or a dip in traffic at a particular time.
  • 23. 22     At the same time, you should be gathering up leads for your product or service launch. Make sure you use a hosted email provider like Gmail, not a program like Outlook. Create your email template at this time, too. Step-by-Step Breakdown Set Up Your Website Correctly. Build a website. Chances are your company already has one. But if they don’t you can’t go any farther. Your website is the central hub of your entire online marketing strategy. Install Google Analytics. Make sure the analytics code is on every page of your website. Set up a Google Webmaster Tools account. Create a sitemap XML file and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. Be sure to have your web designers or developers fix any errors that Google Webmaster Tools may alert you to. We have a pretty comprehensive guide to Google Webmaster Tools here. Claim Your Social Networking Profiles. Sign up for a Twitter account. Think about your Twitter name because people will naturally “mention you” on Twitter by typing @yourcompanyname. Therefore you’ll most likely pick a Twitter name and URL like: http://twitter.com/yourcompanyname. Be sure to link back to your website in your profile. Have a professional designer create your Twitter background. Your Twitter background should be consistent with your website branding and offer some basic contact information. Consider communicating your value proposition on the background or in your profile description. Create a Facebook page (not a profile). Like Twitter, create a Facebook page and claim your Facebook URL to be something like: http://facebook.com/yourcompanyname. Set up Your Company Blog. Keep your blog on your company domain name. The whole point of blogging is to attract relevant traffic back to your website. Blogging on another domain other than your company domain, defeats this purpose. This is the fundamental reason why blogging is good for SEO. For example, your blog should be located somewhere like: http://www.yourcompanyname.com/blog or http://blog.yourcompanyname.com. Keep your blog design consistent with your website design. They don’t have to look identical, but for the same reason you keep your Twitter profile in alignment with your company branding and design style, you should do the same for your company blog. Get your Email Marketing Ready. Choose an email distribution service. Sending mass emails from your personal computer email client or web based email account is a sure fire way to shoot your email marketing campaign in the foot. Choose an email distribution service like Mailchimp, Constant Contact or Aweber to send out your company newsletter. Each of these services are great for making sure your emails get through to your email base while minimizing the dreaded spam folder. On top of that, they make adding new emails to your marketing list a snap.
  • 24. 23     Create an Email Template. Again keep your email template consistent with your website branding and design style. Stage Two: Initial Prep Work Image by Wapster By this point you’ve got all the basics gathered. You’ve got your social media accounts, you’ve set up your blog, and you’re tracking your efforts. Now it’s time to start building up more content and reinforcing your first efforts. You should be working to build a Twitter following on a daily basis. There are a number of ways to do this, including following other users who might be interested in what you’re offering, and posting useful tweets. You should also be starting your drip marketing campaign with the leads you’ve gathered, to build up awareness and educate your potential customers. Continue to refine your SEO based on the keyword research you’ve done. The goal is to maximize your placement for both primary keywords and longtail search results (which is where you’ll probably gain the most traction initially). Make sure you’ve set up custom reports in Analytics for both search optimization and other important metrics. Finally, it’s a good idea to set up an editorial calendar for your blog and stick to it. If you know what you’re going to post ahead of time, it helps ensure that you’re updating regularly. Forming the habit of regular blog posts can be a difficult thing to do for new bloggers, but is essential if you want to be successful. And while we’re on the topic of blogs, make sure you’ve set up social sharing buttons on your blog posts to make it easy for others to share your content. Step-by-Step Breakdown Build a Twitter Following
  • 25. 24     Start tweeting gently. Get your feet wet and get comfortable with the “Twittersphere”. Tweet a few times a day at first, retweet other people’s posts you find valuable. Follow people you know really well to start instant and meaningful Twitter relationships. Follow people who might be interested in what you offer. You can search twitter to find people who are talking about what you have to offer. See what kind of interactions you get from this. However, sometimes it’s best just to follow people related to your industry (like experts and gurus) than to bother potential customers. Figure out what’s right for you. Be personable. Don’t just spam your twitter account with your own blog content. Interact with your followers and share other people’s content when it makes sense. Download our Twitter Marketing Guide. Read this guide a little bit every day and you’ll be a Twitter expert in no time. SEO Conduct keyword research. Use keyword research tools to figure out what key phrases attract the most relevant traffic to your website. It’s very important at this step to determine what languageattracts the right kind of customers to your website. Don’t just aim for the keywords with the highest search volume. Create keyword rich title tags and H1 headings. The most basic and powerful SEO you can do is simply place the top key phrases you have selected from your keyword analysis and place them in the title tags and H1 heading tags of your webpages. DO NOT REPEAT KEYWORDS ON MULTIPLE WEBPAGES. This will cause keyword cannibalization and ruin your SEO efforts. Also, be sure you have only one H1 heading per webpage which can be easily detected by viewing the webpage source code and searching for “h1″. Don’t forget about videos and image content. Images are really important for SEO. Be sure every webpage has a couple unique images with the appropriate alt tag information filled out (alt tags contain keywords related to the image). If you have videos, be sure to upload them to a branded Youtube channel and think about the title of your videos. They are important keywords for search as well. Create an Editorial Calendar Prepare a list of topics you want to publish. This is an excellent process to make sure you have enough content to publish for months to come. It’s also a great time to think about what content will attract the audience you’re are trying to market to. Spend a lot of time on this part! Schedule your posts. After you have determined what content you want to create, it’s important you have a plan to ensure you can execute the content delivery. Determine who will write what content, what the due date is for each post, and allow time for content review. Stage Three: Mix Your Ingredients
  • 26. 25     Image by Jamie It’s time to really start pushing your online marketing campaign. You’ve got all the basics down, you’ve settled into a bit of a routine in terms of blog updates and other efforts, and now you want results. All too often, people falter at this stage, thinking they’re not going to see results, when in fact this is just the point where they should really be stepping up their efforts. Up to this point, you’ve probably just been tweeting whenever it was convenient. That’s great, except that there are optimal times for sending out tweets, depending on what you want your followers to do. Rather than sending out tweets randomly, use an app that lets you schedule your tweets (like HootSuite or Seesmic). Up until now, you haven’t done too much with your social media accounts other than Twitter. It’s time toset up a Facebook page. You want to create a page that focuses on gaining more “likes” (followers), so that your updates are being broadcast to those interested in what you’re offering. Make sure yourFacebook page is connected to your blog so that news items are posted whenever you publish a new post. You should also, at this point, consider segmenting your email lists so you can better target your email newsletter. If your mailing list isn’t growing as fast as you’d like, there are a couple of ways you can add new leads. The first is to answer questions on sites like LinkedIn or Quora (make sure your profile is filled out completely on both sites) to establish yourself as an expert. The other way is to offer some kind of giveaway in exchange for signing up for your mailing list. Make sure it’s something of value, so that your visitors will be happy to turn over their email address or other information in exchange. Directly tied into the second part of that is creating an ebook or whitepaper that solves a need your prospective customers will likely have. Giving that away only to newsletter or feed subscribers is a great way to get more people to sign up.
  • 27. 26     This is also a good time to start advertising with Google AdWords. There are plenty of coupons out there that give you a credit (sometimes upwards of $100) to try AdWords. Find these and use one to set up a test campaign using landing pages. Figure out which ad and landing page combinations work best (using your Quality Score), and then start spending your own money on further AdWords advertising. Make sure that the landing pages you use are designed with a single purpose in mind and with a single call to action on each page. Cluttering up your pages with too many options or too much information only serves to lower your conversion rates. To make sure your landing pages are the best they can be, make sure you use the Unbounce.com scorecard. Generate a to-do list for improvements from your score there. Use your Analytics reports to look for areas on your website that are underperforming and find ways to fix them. This step becomes even more important if the underperforming pages are vital parts of your conversion funnel. Another great way to drive more traffic to your site is to write guest posts for other blogs with similar visitor demographics. Look for sites in related niches and get in touch with the blog owners about guest posting. For example, if you’re selling a financial product to small business owners, look for blogs that address marketing for small business, or something similar. Same demographic, but not a direct competitor. Step-by-Step Breakdown Schedule Your Tweets. Pick a Tweet scheduling tool. Use a service like Bufferapp to schedule your tweets throughout the day. Write compelling tweets that should entice click throughs and seed some of your previously written blog content for future delivery. Don’t leave your Twitter account on auto-pilot. Remember to interact and be personable throughout the day. If your company Twitter account is only spitting out content from the company blog and there isn’t any real human interaction visible on the profile, the more “spammy” your company profile will look. Set up Your Facebook Page. Fill out your information. Include your company contact information, year founded, links to your website and blog. Upload images. Upload images such as advertisements, pictures of your team and company events. Show the world that your company is a living, breathing, and exciting entity. Connect your blog to your company Facebook page. Use a tool like Hootsuite to use your blog RSS feed as a way to update your Facebook page automatically. Download our Facebook Marketing Guide. This comprehensive guide will help you get the most out of your Facebook marketing efforts. Segment Your Email List
  • 28. 27     Design your email segments. Since every person on your email list isn’t meant to receive every email you’re going to send out, design the appropriate segments (i.e. product updates, press releases, gender, region etc.). Let your customers choose which emails they would like to receive. Wherever you have an email sign up form, be sure to ask your subscribers what kind of emails they want to receive. This will put your subscribers in the appropriate buckets and should improve your email marketing metrics. Start Advertising Online Google Adwords. If you want instant website traffic and new business, Google Adwords is the place to be. But watch out, it can be very expensive and highly competitive. Yahoo / Bing. Google might be the largest pay-per-click advertising network, but Yahoo and Bing tend to have a better return on investment. Facebook. Facebook Advertising allows you to target potential customers by interest, age and gender demographics which gives it a completely unique advantage over Google and Yahoo/Bing. Consider hiring a professional. Online advertising is an extremely competitive, expensive and time consuming task. Unless you have someone in-house that can be dedicated to this activity full time, it’s wise to hire a reputable firm or PPC marketer to manage your internet advertising campaigns. Done right, this can be one of the most lucrative ways to generate new business. Doing it yourself. If your don’t have the budget to hire a professional and insist on doing internet advertising in-house or yourself, be sure to read this guide. Stage Four: Bake Image by Kevin Spencer
  • 29. 28     We’re getting to the stage where everything is about refining and reinforcing what you’re already doing. There aren’t a lot of new steps at this point, but if you really want to get the most out of your efforts, you need to continuously refine and test what you’re doing. On that note, try some A/B testing with your landing page ideas to see whether there are better ways to do what you’ve been doing. You might even try some “live” tests with real visitors to see what they’re drawn to on your pages, and if they respond to your call to action. You should also be A/B testing your emails to make sure that you’re getting the best response possible. Don’t just monitor open rates, though, make sure you’re measuring overall conversions. Who cares if people open your email if it ends up in their trash two seconds later? What you want are emails that are converting in high numbers, regardless of their open rates. Of course, the ultimate goal is to find an email with a high open rate and a high conversion rate. Link building at this point becomes much more organic. You’re getting some traffic at this point, and the best way to capitalize on that is to create great content that people want to link to. Monitor these incoming links to see where your traffic is coming from, and to see if your content is reaching the right demographics. One great way to get more incoming links is to write about influential people your visitors would be interested in reading about. In the best case scenario, this can get you attention from the actual influencer. You should be using LinkedIn more at this point to extend your reach. This is particularly important for anyone selling a B2B service or product, but even B2C companies can benefit from using LinkedIn. Just look for people or groups who are likely interested in what you’re selling. Don’t overlook the power of recommendations, either. Make sure you’re not neglecting any one social media platform; balance your time so you can manage them all. Step-by-Step Breakdown A/B Test A/B test Pay-Per-Click landing pages. You’re most likely going to be sending traffic from your Pay- Per-Click marketing, social media marketing and sometimes even email marketing to special landing pages (instead of your website home page). Therefore you should A/B test these landing pages to see which variations perform better. This is the surest way to see instant marketing improvements. A/B test your website webpages. A lot of people forget that their website pages are landing pages. These should also be A/B tested (whether it for lead generation, sign ups or sales). A/B test your email campaigns. Finally, you can A/B test your email campaigns to see which headlines, layouts, and copy performs best. Engage in Link Building Write great blog content. The key to ranking well on the search engines is to provide your customers and audience with great content. Think of creative articles you can publish on your blog that will attract other bloggers and industry people to link to your posts. Ask for links. Sometimes it’s as simple as asking the right people to link to you. Perhaps someone has written a blog post about your site and forgot to link to you. In other cases you can ask vendors to and business partners to link to your website. Be sure to have them include the key phrases you picked during your keyword analysis in the link text that points back to your website.
  • 30. 29     Create infographics. Infographics are a great way to communicate ideas in a very creative way. They generally get linked to a lot. However this activity should most likely be outsourced to a professional design firm. Here are some examples of infographics created for KISSmetrics. Use Linked-In Connect with people or groups who are likely interested in what you’re selling. Similar to Twitter, nurturing these relationships correctly will help spread the good word of your brand. Give recommendations. This is somewhat like social networking karma. Recommend people who have helped your business or company and see what happens in return! Stage Five: Serve and Enjoy Image by Kimberly Vardeman At this point, it’s all about maintenance. You need to make sure you don’t lose any of the ground you’ve gained, while continuing to build your platform and reputation. Try being more interactive on social media. Leaving Twitter open throughout the day so that you can interact “live” with your followers or those talking about your brand is a great way to improve your reputation. Make sure that Twitter is being monitored throughout the day and interact whenever possible. You might make a schedule so that different employees can manage Twitter at different times throughout the day, so that a single person doesn’t get overwhelmed. You should try creating a viral landing page for a contest to get more attention. Make sharing the page (either by liking or sharing it on Facebook, or retweeting on Twitter) a requirement for contest entry for the best results.
  • 31. 30     Start using surveys and feedback widgets to get real-time data from those visitors coming to your website to make sure you’re not losing any leads due to technical or usability problems. This is vital at this stage if you want to continue growing. You should also make sure that your incoming marketing traffic is being segmented so that you can better monitor the effects of your efforts (Analytics has great tools for this). You’ve already done a whitepaper or ebook to get more visitors, so now why not try an infographic related to your industry? Infographics are a great way to share data. Make sure your logo and website address are highly visible on the graphic for the best results. And finally at this stage, you may want to consider using expert services (like KISSmetrics) to get even more out of your efforts. Step-by-Step Breakdown Monitor Your Social Network. Assign or hire someone to actively monitor. Great opportunities can be gained by actively monitoring your social networks. However this task can be 100% time consuming, so it wise to hire a support person to perform this task or assign “on guard times” for certain employees. If cost is an issue when it comes to hiring someone for this task, consider using Odesk.com Determine how to handle complaints and reputation issues. Having a game plan on how to handle people complaining about your brand can be very crucial to your online success. Devise a process and protocol to handle complaints and cries for help. Surveys, Tracking and Feedback Sign up for website monitoring. You should sign up for a website monitoring service that will alert you if your website goes down for any reason. Sign up for KISSinsights. One of the bests way to provide content, products or services that your customers want is to ask them by using a survey tool like KISSinsights. Track everything with UTM tracking. Get in the habit of tracking all your online marketing activities by using UTM tracking on all links. This is the reason why internet marketing is so awesome, nearly everything is trackable and measurable! Using analytics like Google Analytics or KISSmetrics, you can see the effects of all your internet marketing activities. Use KISSmetrics! Sign up for a KISSmetrics account. If you really want to take your internet marketing to the next level, KISSmetrics allows you to A/B test every marketing activity, calculate ROI of each online marketing activity, provides segmentation analytics, event tracking and more. Talk to us anytime and ask us for help.. Trying to do every possible online marketing activity is really hard to accomplish. This is why KISSmetrics is such a useful tool. With KISSmetrics you can determine which online marketing activities are helping you achieve your goals, therefore allowing you to focus on the marketing tasks that are actually making a difference to your bottom line. Click here to try KISSmetrics and you’ll be surprised at how much more you can get out of your online marketing efforts with our tool. We’re more than happy to discuss the ways in which we can improve your business. Feel free to talk to us!
  • 32. 31     About the Authors: Cameron Chapman is a freelance designer, blogger, and the author of Internet Famous: A Practical Guide to Becoming an Online Celebrity. Sean Work is the Marketing Director at KISSmetrics. You can follow him on Twitter right here :)     Naming  your  startup–  Chris  Dixon   http://cdixon.org/2009/04/18/naming-­‐your-­‐startup/   Naming your startup The Name Inspector has a good post today regarding 6 naming myths to ignore. I think it’s generally right on. Naming is so important and so incredibly hard, especially for consumer internet companies that not only have to find a good name but also get the URL. I am convinced that a big part of Twitter’s success, for example, is it has such a great name. Simple word, easy to spell, great imagery, and also evocative of what the product does without being overly literal. I have been involved in naming a number of startups, including my two most recent companies: Hunch and SiteAdvisor. Each time it was a long and painful process. Here are some things I’ve learned along the way. 1) Probably the most important thing is that the name be easy to spell after someone hears it pronounced. I was involved in one startup before where every time you said the name the person says “what?” and then you have to spell it. Trust me, it becomes really tedious and also adds friction to word-of-mouth buzz. 2) You should have different naming goals for different products. For example, SiteAdvisor was a security product. You really can’t make security “cool” so we didn’t even try to bother to do that with the name. Instead we went for a name that helped explain in a very literal way what the product did. Before we came up with the name SiteAdvisor, I probably had 100 meetings where people said “I don’t understand what you are building – is it an anti-phishing toolbar, a spyware blocker or what?”. This included meetings with VC’s who focus on security and other experts. I knew the name SiteAdvisor was a winner when my father in law wrote the name on a high school blackboard and asked the kids what they thought the company did and one kid said “They advise you about websites” (and then he said ” … or construction sites” ). Also we liked the name because we imagined in the future doing more than just security – for example warning about adult content. (Alas, we never got that far). 3) I tend to disagree with The Name Inspector about name length. Shorter is definitely better. In particular the number of syllables is important. SiteAdvisor, while good at describing the product, is really clunky to pronounce. I also tend to really dislike Latin-y portmanteau names like “Integra” “Omnitrust” etc. Sounds like a pharmaceutical product. 4) A few things I’ve learned about methodology. I think it’s very rare to have an epiphany where you come up with a great name. First of all, even if you do, the domain is probably taken and too expensive. For systematically brainstorming, I really like the Related Words function on RhymeZone. I try to make lists of words that are sort of related to the product and then look at all the related words, look at all those words’ related words, etc, making lists of words and word fragments
  • 33. 32     that sounds good. Then I have a systematic process for checking domains to see if they are buyable. If you are super lucky (and picked a multiword domain name) you might get it retail, but at this point almost all .com names (yes, I think you still need to own the .com) are owned by someone and the question becomes whether they will sell it at a reasonable price. The best case is usually that it’s owned by a professional domainer and it’s not very monetizable via Adsense (domainers make a lot of money from Adsense on sites like candy.com so you’d need to offer them a tons of money to sell it). Naming is tough!   Underhyping  your  startup  –  Chris  Dixon   http://cdixon.org/2010/04/06/underhyping-­‐your-­‐startup/   April 6, 2010 Underhyping your startup I recently tweeted: New early-stage start up trend: get big quietly, so you don’t tip off potential competitors. Chris Sacca agreed: @cdixon Agreed. As of this morning, I have four companies who don’t want investors mentioning that they’ve been funded. Business Insider took these tweets to mean “Stealth mode is back.” But that’s actually not what I meant. The companies I’m referring to (and I think Chris is referring to) are publicly launched, acquiring users and generating revenue. They are modeling themselves after Groupon, where the first time the VC community / tech press gets excited about them, they are already so successful that it’s hard for competitors to jump in. This trend strikes me as a response to the fact that 1) raising money from certain investors can be such a strong signal that it triggers massive investor/tech press excitement, 2) things are “frothy” now – meaning lots of smart people are starting companies and easily raising lots of money, 3) word seems to travel faster than ever about interesting startups, and 4) there are big companies like Facebook and Google who are good at fast following. I don’t know what to call this but it’s not stealth mode. Maybe “underhype” mode?     Both  sides  of  the  marketing  equation  –  Chris  Dixon   http://cdixon.org/2010/10/16/the-­‐ladies-­‐night-­‐strategy/   October 16, 2010 The “ladies’ night” strategy
  • 34. 33     Many singles bars have “ladies’ night” where women are offered price discounts. Singles bars do this for women but not for men because (heterosexually-focused) bars are what economists call two- sided markets – platforms that have two distinct user groups and that get more valuable to each group the more the other group joins the platform - and women are apparently harder to attract to singles bars than men. Businesses that target two-sided markets are extremely hard to build but also extremely hard to compete against once they reach scale. Tech businesses that have created successful two-sided markets include Ebay (sellers and buyers), Google (advertisers and publishers), Paypal (buyers and merchants), and Microsoft (Windows users and developers). In some cases individuals/institutions are consistently on one side (buyers and merchants) while in other cases they fluctuate between sides (Ebay sellers are also often buyers). In almost every two-sided market, one side is harder to acquire than the other. The most common way to attract the hard side is the ladies’ night strategy: reduce prices for the hard side, even to zero (e.g. Adobe Flash & PDF for end-users), or below zero (e.g. party promotors paying celebrities to attend). Rarer ways to attract the hard side is 1) getting them to invest the platform itself (e.g. Visa & Mastercard), and 2) interoperating with existing hard sides (e.g. Playstation 3 running Playstation 2 games). If you are starting a company that targets a two-sided market you need to figure out which side is the hard side and then focus your efforts on marketing to that side. Generally, the more asymmetric your market the better, as it allows you to market to each side more in serial than in parallel.     Platform  distribution  risks  –  Chris  Dixon   http://cdixon.org/2012/02/14/platform-­‐distribution-­‐risks/   Platform distribution risks When your product extends a platform’s functionality, one of the main risks you face is that the platform could embed your product’s key features within the platform – what is sometimes called subsumption risk. This happened to a lot of startups in the 90s that built products for the Windows platform. When you depend on a platform for distribution (acquiring and retaining users), you take on different risks. Specifically: 1) Oversaturation . The risk that supply of products on the platform significantly outpaces demand. This seems to have happened recently to the iOS App Store: there are over 500,000 apps and counting, and popularity tends to be highly concentrated, making it very difficult for new apps to get noticed. Oversaturation also happened to Google (organic) results in most query categories in the last 2000′s. 2) Barriers to discovery . The risk that the discovery methods on the platform aren’t meritocratic. iOS apps depend upon appearing in iTunes’ Top 25 lists, leading to a “rich get richer” bias, along with aggressive attempts to game the system. Apple has other app discovery mechanisms like its Featured Apps and Genius features, but those seem to drive far fewer downloads than the top lists. Google search has increasingly been favoring Google’s own products and also seems to heavily favor