Startup Mixology

by Frank Gruber

  Pounding the Pavement

  When you're first starting up, you'll likely need to rely on your relationships to get your company off the ground. We just talked about relationships in the previous chapter, and all those will come into play as you reach out to your allies via e-mail, LinkedIn, Facebook, the phone, or even in person to scramble for your first few hundred users.

  Content Marketing

  Content marketing includes producing blog posts, e-books, webinars, videos, and infographics. It's using content you create to pull people into your website and hopefully convince them to stay and use your product.

  To start, Renee Warren of Onboardly suggests that you brainstorm the core keywords related to your business, then come up with a list of 10 topics to write around each of them. I look at it a little less scientifically: just use your content to become part of a larger conversation in your industry and provide value to your audience in an authentic, nonpromotional way. Guest writing on another blog that your target audience reads can be a great platform to do this. For example, Tech Cocktail offers an easy way to sign up for an account and become a contributor. We get lots of submissions from founders looking to share their expertise and (in the process) get their company name out there.

  Social Media

  Cultivating relationships via social media is one of the most powerful ways to market your business. The variety of social media tools available allow you to connect on new levels with your customers. Why would you want to? Because relationships can be your competitive advantage. Leverage appropriate social channels to be genuine and reveal a little more about your company, your brand, and yourself.

  Amy Jo Martin

  A Twitter pioneer, Amy Jo Martin is the one who helped Shaquille O'Neal build up his personal brand on Twitter. She met him while working as director of digital media and research at the Phoenix Suns basketball team. After two years there, she grew tired of the constraints and rules and set off on her own, founding a social media consultancy called Digital Royalty. O'Neal was her first client, and she went on to work with The Rock, DoubleTree, FOX Sports, and many others. Digital Royalty is now based in Las Vegas and funded by Tony Hsieh's Downtown Project and began offering social media education programs through its Digital Royalty University in 2012. Martin is also the author of the book Renegades Write the Rules.

  Amy Jo Martin is the founder of Digital Royalty, a social media consultancy and education platform. She was one of the early adopters of social media, working with people and brands that included Shaquille O'Neal, DoubleTree, and The Rock. In her book Renegades Write the Rules, she says, “We all want to be seen and heard by others. We want to be valued for what we can offer others. We all want to belong to a community of others who value what we value—who are, in some important way, like us. What happens when a brand fulfills these wants? People stick around for more.” Without that intangible, you're simply competing on performance—and if your performance slips, your users may look elsewhere because they don't feel real loyalty.

  Social media can also be used to build relationships with influencers and potential new customers. AddThis community manager Ifdy Perez follows hashtags on relevant topics and contributes to the conversation when it makes sense. In some tech startup markets, hashtags are a great way to keep track of the pulse of the city. For example, in Washington, DC, you can track the #dctech hashtag; in Las Vegas, #vegastech; in Chicago, #chitech; and in Miami, #miamitech.

  Pay-per-Click Advertising

  Pay-per-click might mean using Google or Facebook ads to drive traffic to your landing pages or website. Google lets you target by keywords searched, and Facebook lets you target certain demographics. You'll want to go into this with a set budget and then measure click-through rates and conversion rates to see if it's worth the money.

  Lead Generation

  Lead generation, or lead gen for short, involves finding potential customers who show some interest in your product—essentially, building a list of e-mail addresses (or phone numbers) so you can follow up with them. To build your list of leads, you need to ask them to perform various actions that demonstrate their interest: signing up for an e-mail list, answering questions, downloading something, attending an event, or talking with someone on your team. All these activities are lead-generating activities.

  To collect leads online, you can create a free offer and ask for something in return. For example, you could give away an e-book in exchange for an e-mail address. With your lead gen process, be sure to keep your customers in mind—you want to be attracting the right people. Whatever you're offering should be appealing to your target customers; otherwise, none of your leads will pan out.

  E-mail Marketing

  E-mail marketing can be quite effective, so it's valuable to have a list of addresses you can use. For example, once you are collecting addresses (your leads), think about the different points of contact in the customer's journey. Perhaps it's to get them in the door, or when they've just signed up for your product, abandoned a shopping cart filled with items before buying them, or purchased something.

  Strike a balance between sending too many e-mail updates and fading from the recipient's memory. If you don't, you'll know—thanks to all the unsubscribes you're getting. We've all done it: signed up, received way too many updates, and then unsubscribed. Don't drive your users away.

  Elizabeth Yin is the cofounder of LaunchBit, a company that focuses on helping software-as-a-service companies acquire new customers. She thinks that weekly e-mails strike that balance between too many and too few. For open rates—that is, how many e-mails actually get opened—she recommends shooting for more than 20 percent. Your e-mail software should show you those metrics.

  Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, HubSpot offers a set of software tools for inbound marketing. HubSpot's tip is to make sure your e-mails add value, rather than just promoting your product. But equally important, e-mails should have a clear call to action, the action you want the recipient to take. Then, track the click-through rate and conversion rate (how many people took some action that you asked them to take) so you know whether the campaign was successful.

  SEO and SEM

  Web search is another way that new customers can find out about your services. Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) can help increase your visibility in search engines. Learning SEO and SEM can be time-consuming, so you might want to find some experts to help you.

  If you understand some of the basics, such as optimizing your website or on-page SEO, your site will get more traffic. One place to start is to figure out the search keywords that you want to rank highly for: choose keywords that aren't so competitive, because it's hard to beat established players on common keywords.

  Here's a quick list of other items to be thinking about as you optimize your website for SEO:

  Make page titles short and readable, and put keywords up front. Also use keywords in headings.

  Include metadata, the description of a page that shows up in search results.

  Include links to other content.

  When adding images, put keywords in the file name (rather than Image01.jpg). Don't use too many images, because it could slow down your page and decrease your search ranking.

  Produce content regularly so Google crawls your site more often.

  Put keywords in your URLs.

  One crucial factor in SEO that's hard to control is how many pages link to your website. Guest posting on other sites that offer a byline and a link back can give you a big boost. Keep in mind, however, that Google and other search engines are always changing their algorithms. Something that works today may not work tomorrow.

  Word of Mouth

  With all your marketing initiatives, the big, ambitious goal should be to cultivate word of mouth. As Sweetgreen learned, if what you're doing makes people tell others about it, you'll spend less on marketing and quickly become known by more and more customers. This may be the most valuable way to market y
our product.

  You can achieve word of mouth when the whole experience around your product delights, enchants, and surprises consumers. Basecamp doesn't have a marketing department or even a marketing person, and cofounder Jason Fried says marketing is everyone's job: “Bad software is bad marketing. Bad customer service is bad marketing.”

  Having personality can boost word of mouth. In Personality Not Included, a book based on his experience with hundreds of brands, author Rohit Bhargava writes, “Personality is the key element of your brand and what it stands for, and the story that your products tell to your customers. Every element of your business, from your interactions with your customers to the packaging of your product, is an element of your brand personality, and these are the elements that inspire delight or indifference.”

  Dropbox

  Dropbox is a file storage and file-sharing service that lets you keep files in the cloud and access them on multiple devices. Founder Drew Houston originally applied to Y Combinator for the summer 2007 program, and he was accepted and told to bring on a cofounder. He brought on Arash Ferdowsi, and together they've built one of Y Combinator's most successful startups. Based in San Francisco, Dropbox has raised more than $250 million and had 175 million users as of July 2013.

  Brian Solis, author of What's the Future of Business?, believes word of mouth is increasingly important as customers consult multiple sources before buying something, and recommendations from friends weigh heavily. He echoes Bhargava, saying that every touchpoint with customers—from responding to critiques to the moment they “open the box”—is an opportunity to create a brand advocate.

  If you can't get organic word of mouth, you can create different incentives within your product or service to encourage it by rewarding customers for sharing. For example, you can earn more space on Dropbox if you refer friends and they sign up for an account. Or you can get a LivingSocial deal for free if you share it and three of your friends buy it.

  Putting All Your Marketing Together

  Using all these methods and channels in a lean way—from social media to content marketing to e-mail—you test and iterate in order to hone in on the right set of customers and ensure you're communicating the right value proposition to them via the right channels.

  So how do you pull all this together? Understand where you are now with your analytics, and set goals for improvement on specific numbers. Track which channels bring in the most customers for the least amount of time and money. Track new customers and repeat customers. Activities happening on your site should be accounted for with a number or metric.

  Just remember that you don't have to do everything. Figure out what's right for your business and goals and go after that.

  For a list of marketing tools, check out http://tech.co/book.

  The Harsh Reality

  As much as you want it to, sometimes your marketing just doesn't work. And if your marketing isn't working, it might be because you haven't hit on the right product or found the right product-market fit. If your product is subpar or if consumers can't understand the need for it, you're going to have a really difficult time selling it and being successful. Yet even good marketing efforts won't always go viral, like you hope.

  Even worse, sometimes you offend people with your marketing efforts. Groupon learned this lesson after being called offensive and racist for its 2011 Super Bowl ad, which started as an apparent plea for Tibet's plight and turned into advertising for the company's daily deals.

  Along the way, you'll also run into marketing crises. For example, on February 15, 2011, a Red Cross employee—obviously having a lot of fun—accidentally broadcasted this tweet from @RedCross rather than her personal account: “Ryan found two more 4 bottle packs of Dogfish Head's Midas Touch beer…when we drink we do it right #gettngslizzerd.” The tweet was sent using HootSuite, which viewers could see. HootSuite knew this could spell major bad press for them.

  So HootSuite flew into action with two parts charity and one dash of humor, donating to the Red Cross, encouraging others to donate, and sending a care package with a beer koozie to the mistweeter. Soon, with support from Dogfish Head, breweries were offering a free pint of beer for customers who donated a pint of blood to the Red Cross, rallying around the hashtag #gettngslizzerd. And soon afterward, HootSuite launched tools for secure profiles—an extra step to confirm that you want to tweet from a protected account. What could have been a fiasco (and was for a short time) turned into a public relations boon for three companies. We have no idea what happened to the tweeter.

  When Eddie Earnest launched seedRef in 2013, he started by calling it a “Klout score for your character” but quickly figured out that wasn't working. Now, he explains it more simply: a Web-based recruiting application. “It's safe to say that the first few iterations of my marketing copy were awful,” says founder Eddie Earnest. “I actually think I was confusing myself along the way. I knew it was bad when I found myself having to spend massive amounts of time explaining who we were, what we did, and why it's useful. As we've grown, we've worked really hard on capturing the elements of a good story that seem to resonate with people.”

  Cathy Brooks

  With a background in journalism and public relations, Cathy Brooks is a storyteller. She spent 20 years in the tech industry, where her work included business development at Seesmic and producing the LeWeb conference in Paris. After a chance meeting with Tony Hsieh, she moved to downtown Vegas to pursue her other passion: dogs. At the end of 2013, she opened a private park and training academy called the Hydrant Club, funded by the Downtown Project.

  That's why it's crucial to sit down and pull together your story. Cathy Brooks, a storyteller extraordinaire who spent 20 years in the tech industry doing events, media, public relations, and marketing, left a startup in May 2013 and decided to take the summer to figure out her own personal story. She talked to companies such as Intel and Microsoft, said yes to almost all conversations, and finally decided to move to Vegas and start the Hydrant Club, a dog park and training center—not exactly the story she had imagined, but one that was true to her passion and purpose.

  “Storytelling is probably one of the most misunderstood and overused words in marketing today,” she says. The problem is that companies think they're telling stories when they actually aren't. A real story requires a significant investment of time to figure out. “What I would encourage you to do is think about what you're doing on a daily basis, think about the stories you're telling,” she says. “Take a minute to pause and step back from it.”

  Celebrate: Enjoy the Journey

  South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive in Austin, Texas, takes place every March and has become known for big marketing stunts. Brands large and small compete to host the most fun and awesome events. Although attendees go there to learn, network, and celebrate being a techie, it's also the place that helps launch new startups.

  South by Southwest (SXSW)

  SXSW is a huge annual festival that attracts tens of thousands of attendees each year. It started in 1987 with a focus on music, and film and interactive were added in 1994. The interactive component is what attracts startups and entrepreneurs, who spend their time at SXSW looking for press, building relationships, and attending awesome parties. SXSW takes place in Austin, Texas, a city with an eclectic culture that appeals to nonconformist artists and rebellious geeks alike.

  Twitter first started to catch people's attention at SXSW in 2007. In 2009, Foursquare was the talk of the town. The Foursquare team set up a literal game of foursquare outside the convention center, and attendees could get a T-shirt by playing a game. Someone created a venue on the Foursquare app called SXSW Foursquare Court, and the rest is history. And I'm sure the Foursquare team had fun that day; it wasn't a boring, promotional marketing stunt.

  ParkMe took a risk at SXSW 2012 by tagging cars with fake parking tickets and boots—and it paid off. The company booted 500 cars and also included a notice to the driver (pasted on the window) instruc
ting them to download the app and put the boot on someone else's car. The notice read: “Damaging this device is not punishable by law…but it will affect your parking karma.” They used the hashtag #bootedinaustin to spread and track the conversation on social media channels. As a result, they were mentioned on Channel 7 news. Was it clever? Yep. And once the booted car owner read the notice, it was also pretty funny.

  Marketing is where you can really celebrate your uniqueness, whether you're selling a mobile app or cheap razor blades. Dollar Shave Club created a viral video that launched its razor blade product, featuring a toddler shaving a guy's head, a dancing bear, and a brash slogan: “Our blades are f***ing great.” Then, they did it again with One Wipe Charlies, “butt wipes for men.” The company found its preferred marketing medium and knocked it out of the park with humor. In watching the videos, you can tell this quirky humor is just expressing the personality and style of the founder.

  Final Thoughts

  There are lots of marketing tips and tactics you can follow, and you probably have tons of ideas and questions. The most important takeaway for telling your story is to understand your why. If you know your why, it will be easier to tell a clear and compelling story. Stories with a strong why are easier to understand and easier to share because they capture people's hearts and convictions. Sweetgreen followed its why of living the sweet life in creating the Sweetlife Festival. Once you have your why story, the rest falls into place.