When it comes to choosing your brand archetype, it's important to consider your company's values, goals, and target audience. You want to choose an archetype that not only embodies your brand but also resonates with your audience. Once you have chosen your archetype, focus on aligning your messaging, branding, and marketing efforts with the characteristics of your chosen archetype to create a cohesive and compelling brand identity.
We’ve all heard of growth hacking. And if you haven’t, growth hacking is a marketing strategy that focuses on rapid experimentation and testing to identify the most effective ways to grow a business. It typically involves a combination of marketing, analytics, and product development techniques to acquire and retain customers. But growth hacking doesn’t establish early-stage companies for long-term success. It might be tempting to dive right into marketing activities with a growth-hacking mindset but marketing is not just about the now. Taking a sustainable approach to growth marketing is what will set you up for success in the long term.
A Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, has one goal: collecting information. An MVP is a basic prototype you build to determine what your market wants.
But entrepreneurs often get the wrong idea and think their MVP is something it is not. In most cases, it won’t make very much money at all. Instead, it will show you how you can solidify your business model to make money in the future.
Because of this, startups can fall into several traps, including:
Choosing the wrong problem to solve
Skipping the prototype step
Targeting the wrong audience
Inappropriate development method
Analyzing feedback wrong
This guide will first examine what an MVP is and is not and how you should build one. Then, we’ll go over all the development traps you should avoid.
As startup founders, we know marketing can feel like a necessary evil. And not only can marketing feel overwhelming, but it's also constantly evolving. As social media platforms change their algorithm, Google makes another update, and new platforms break onto the scene, it can be stressful to keep up in this ever-changing industry.
Conversion rates don’t have to be as overwhelming or confusing as you think. In this blog, we’ll break down the basics of conversion rates, from why they matter to how to put them into action. Read on to learn how to build a realistic plan for effectively measuring all of your marketing efforts—and determine how you stack up.
As a graphic designer, I’m here to share some insider tips along with a few common design mistakes and how to avoid them. With a lot of free and (relatively) easy-to-use tools out on the market today, it’s more common for people to want to take on creating marketing assets themselves rather than hiring out a designer. However, as someone who has been doing this for years, I can always spot the DIY graphics mixed in my social feeds and emails. Here’s how to not be a newb.
PR is an essential part of any marketing strategy. Most often, when founders consider PR, it’s grounded in the notion that you have a product/service/idea that you believe the press should write about. When a marketer thinks about PR, it’s about added reach to deliver on goals. Why is this important? Because the first thing you should always be thinking about is goals and what’s needed to achieve them. And when it comes to PR - this is a critical channel to reaching the goals of early stage startups.
Founders are pulled in a million different directions and their decisions often have to be made on the fly - especially when it comes to marketing. Part of this process is failing in order to succeed. But knowing what mistakes to avoid within that process can propel a startup’s success into the positive, so we decided to share a few here to keep you on track.
When you’re first starting up, social media can seem like a daunting task because it takes a lot of time, resources, and above all else, is a big line item in your budget. But that’s not always true. By taking just one hour per day for 21 days, you can improve your follower count, up engagement, and effectively reach your target audience without wasting your most precious resources: time and money.
Let’s face it - you have this brilliant idea/product/service and you are ready to bring it to the world! You realize you need someone to help you spread the word and immediately think marketing. But rushing to hire a CMO is a bad idea no matter how great your idea, product or service may be. We get it - we’ve been there, and been that marketing hire. But it’s important to take a step back and understand when and how you should think about your first marketing role.
Understandably, most startups are working with a limited budget, limited resources and limited time. But budget, resources and time don’t need to be constraints against producing a beautiful, functional and optimized web experience. Below are 7 critical steps to ensuring you have a great website now and in the future.
We are often witness to the frequent internal debate regarding spending the time and money to design a brand. Many of our clients initially hired a friend or family member to create a quick logo as they got their idea off the ground and are desperate in year two to build a formal brand. While this is one of my favorite parts of being a marketer, it really is important to assess the timing of branding/re-brand. For an early stage startup, it’s pretty likely you have a limited budget and when it comes to marketing you want to spend your budget the most efficient and effective ways.
So you know content is part of your marketing, but maybe you don’t know exactly how you should be thinking about content. Even large brands struggle with this part of the plan; I know because I’ve seen it from the inside. I’m going to make it a little less daunting and a little more applicable to your business in this quick guide.
Customers are the most important component to your continued success. So big or small, B2B or B2C, you should be collecting the most accurate and informative data you can from the very beginning. For many startups, this is a time consuming task that is often put aside. In our experience, taking the time to figure out your data strategy from the beginning can help save you time and set you up for long term success.
“What is the one thing you recommend I do with my marketing?” I’ve heard this question from those I mentor, employers and cocktailers. And I always answer the same thing “know your audience!” The fact is, if you don’t do this correctly, then all your other marketing will fail. It sounds pretty basic, but you would be surprised how complex it actually is.
