When it launched the second-generation GMC Acadia crossover, GMC overhauled its Acadia marketing strategy.

Top Marketing Tips For Your Startup

Because the Acadia was moved one class down from a full-size to a mid-size SUV, they couldn’t continue marketing it according to old Acadia values. The new car was smaller in terms of length, width, and height and reclassified as a mid-size SUV with less cargo space and a lower MSRP, though still with a third-row back seat and seven seats. The Yukon and Yukon XL became the new full-size models and a fresh marketing campaign had to be designed from scratch for the repositioned Acadia.

Every single product or service appeals to a specific target audience, whether it’s a GMC Acadia, an HP printer, a payroll solution, a funeral service, or a tech startup. This means that every single one of these products or services requires a marketing campaign tailored to a specific target audience in order to achieve success. The job is doubly difficult in the case of a startup business because most startups fail. How can you boost your startup’s marketing performance to give your startup the best chance of success?

Startups – The Stats

Talking about statistics on startups, they don’t make for easy reading:

• Only around 10 percent of startups succeed
• Only around 25 percent of venture-backed startups succeed
• Less than half of businesses survive for five years
• About a third of startups make it to their 10th year
• About a quarter of startups make it to their 15th year
• Around 60 percent of startups don’t turn a profit
• The highest incidence of startup failure is in the information industry – 63 percent

Marketing Tips And Tricks For Startups

Businesses that remain in the top ten percent of startups that actually make it have certain strategies in common in comparison to the majority of startups that fail:

• Focus on your business-critical goals. Your business needs a sense of clarity and direction, imparted by clear goals. Remember that these should be attainable and specific goals – and you should be able to measure them. Goals are very important for startups, especially because staff members may initially fulfill several roles until there is enough money and resources to appoint more personnel. Don’t split your attention between too many disparate initiatives and refocus frequently on what’s important.
• Define a target audience. Marketing comes to naught if it’s to the wrong audience. A full-size SUV is not marketed to college students. Understand and define your audience and document their characteristics and buyer profile to understand how your service or product helps them and makes their lives better. Additionally, it is vital to place importance on your local marketing strategy and invest in the development of effective local marketing campaigns, which are geared towards your local audience. More often than not, your local audience is your primary audience.
• Your content marketing should be generating new business. In order to bring prospective consumers to your site, you have to create high-quality content that entices them, answers any questions they might have, and leads them to a point where they can be naturally converted to a customer. SEO-optimized blogs can work very well and should not just be jargon but demonstrate your expertise. This helps to drive targeted online traffic to your website. Consistently create new content so that your website will eventually become a trusted source that can easily be found by the right audience – repeatedly. Repurpose your content for social media, email campaigns, and the like to get more mileage out of it. Also, run Google Display, Google Search, and social media ads to get your short-term results up to speed until your organic results catch up.
• Your message should be clear. Throughout all of this, your message should remain compelling and not become muddled and vague. Keep the information to the point and avoid too much marketing hype and fluff. People want to know what you are offering and it should be easy for them to understand what you are saying. They’ll be more inclined to trust your message if you don’t seem to hide behind gobbledygook.
• Create a PR buzz around your brand. For even more mileage, repurpose your content assets to create PR interest as well. A good PR agency will do its best to ensure that there are backlinks to your website so that people seeing your content elsewhere will be able to easily click through to your website. And because the content was created according to sound SEO principles, it is already optimized for search engines. Creating great content from the get-go makes repurposing it later on easier.
• Establish and nurture your good name. Almost nine out of ten customers will read an online review of your business, so your online reputation must be spotless. Ask customers for their feedback – and then be sure that you act upon it. Ask happy customers to leave reviews and always respond to online reviews, good or bad. Happy customers will be willing to write you testimonials.
• Start building up a referral strategy. Word-of-mouth referrals are still incredibly powerful and important. You should give your customers a reason to refer people, so why not consider a referral program for this purpose? Make good use of content created by your users and identify people who can act as promoters of your business.

Conclusion

Success is never automatic. It requires lots of hard work and the consistent application of sound business principles. To give your startup its best possible chance of success, you need to have a single-minded focus on getting the above principles right and consistently applying them. Today’s tech space is more competitive than ever and you have to pull out all the stops to prevent landing on the side of the 90 percent that fails.

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