How to Market Your Startup Online (Like a Pro)

The general scopes out an attack plan.
The soldier attacks.

Your attack plan is the strategy.
The attack itself is the tactic.

Your strategy is to use advantages to capture market share from a competitor.

We covered that here: How to develop a marketing strategy for a startup.

Today, you’ll learn about the techniques and weaponry used to attack competitors.

In marketing, they are your distribution channels. Each with its own benefit and cost. You have to decide which channel best fits your strategy.

Send your Zerglings against a group of Marines in StarCraft, and it’s game over. So choose wisely to avoid wasting resources.

Marketing Channels

 

There are three foundational channels of distribution.

Each channel has its own mediums.

Some mediums are cross-channel.

But, each channel will serve itself, and all channels will benefit each other.

The three channels are:

Paid – paying to extend reach to increase awareness, engagement, and sales. It works fast, is easy to scale, and measure, and is controllable. But, it’s costly and does not establish equity like earned and owned channels.

Examples: Display ads, Paid Social, Sponsored Posts

Owned – you own this platform and control what’s on it. It builds long-term rapport with prospects and customers. You have complete control, and it’s affordable. But it takes time to build. That’s a heavy investment. It isn’t easy to scale because people will have to like your brand. There’s no guarantee you’ll build this channel. Most of all, it could be challenging to measure.

Examples: Email lists, social media profiles, websites subscribers

Earned – this is the equity you’ve built from community engagement. It comes with trust and reach. It’s long-lasting, generally free, and gives you solid credibility. But you expose yourself to criticism here. You can’t control the negative commentary on your brand. And it takes a lot of work to measure.

Examples: WOM, organic shares, brand associations

There is another channel that generally combines elements of the three and comes with combinations of pros/cons of the three.

Converged – Equity and reach that combines two or more of the other three types of media. You can leverage different strengths of channels. But the impact is generally complex and is difficult to track.

Examples: SEO, Brand ambassadors

How to Market Your Startup Online

With a marketing strategy, determine which channels are best for you: paid, owned, earned, or converged.

From there, look at the different mediums in each channel and test them. Stick with the most efficient one.

You don’t want to blow your entire budget on paid ads if you only have a few dollars to spare. Conversely, you don’t want to go all-in on building an email list if your goal is to grow quickly.

I know we’re talking high-level here.

We’ll eventually get to the “how to create a facebook ads campaign” posts in the future. But you need the fundamentals.

The actual mediums and ways to execute change all the time.

Facebook exists today, but it will be the Metaverse in the future.

The fundamentals remain constant.

You can apply strategy and tactics across any medium if you learn the fundamentals. The fundamentals apply to the Metaverse as much as they apply to Facebook.

So keep the fundamentals sharp, and it’ll serve you forever.

Funded startups generally aim for rapid growth.

They have the budget to go hard on paid ads.

They’ll bid on competitors, bid on their own brand, and spare no expense in the name of growth. This is viable until you run out of money.

That’s why you should always allocate some focus to owned and earned media.

Together, they create beautiful symphonies like SEO. If an influencer loves and promotes your product without asking, you now have a brand ambassador.

Paid-Ads Will Bleed Your Budget Dry

Investors will pressure you for hyper-growth.

They will give you a budget to do so.

But when that money runs out, your startup dies.

How many startups do you know run through rounds of funding only to end up dead?

Most of them.

They die because of ad-spend (I know, it’s more complicated than that).

The money runs out. The leads stop coming. The cash flow stops. The workers leave. Then the startup folds.

Paid ads are zerglings in StarCraft.

Great for rushing in during the early stages, but less effective as the battle matures.

You’ll face ad-cost traps as you and your competition bid mercilessly to gain market share. It’s wild out there.

So, pay attention to sustainability.

If you want sustainable growth even when the budget runs out, you must focus on earned and owned channels.

When your market matures, you must focus on earned and owned media.

In reality, you need to focus on these channels BEFORE all of that.

If you begin with those channels in mind, you will crush competitors through relevance alone. These will become your low-cost distribution channels (sometimes free) where you can reliably gain customers.

There are TWO mediums you REALLY need from those channels: Email and SEO.

These two channels feed each other an endless loop of benefits and customers.

SEO will attract visitors to your site so they can sign up for your email list. Then your email newsletter will warm them up for a sales call. Just keep doing this for growth.

Challenge Yourself to Grow Sustainably

If you want to grow and keep growing, paid ads will do it.

The catch is that you’ll need infinite money. So think about it.

• What mediums will reduce my overall CAC?
• How much does it cost to invest in those mediums?
• Do the long-term returns of that investment make sense?
• What if I run out of money?
• What if ads keep costing more?

The channels and mediums you choose will stem from your strategy.

A winning combination of those requires time and testing. But it’s worth it.

How do you market your startup online? Well, you stick to the fundamentals: create a strategy, determine the channels, pick a medium, then execute for long-term success.

 

I have a decade of experience generating millions of clicks and hundreds of thousands of leads for F100s and startups. Throughout that time, I’ve systemized the growth tactics and frameworks I used to streamline startup marketing success. If you’d like tactics and systems for success, please subscribe to my newsletter!

 

-Mitch