Marketing Your Startup

by Simona Covel

  Test and Test Again

  How you send your email is as important as its content. Numerous studies have shown that marketing emails are much more likely to be answered if they are sent when prospects are not juggling all the daily emails that get traded during normal work hours. That assumption, though, depends on your audience. Twenty-something retail shoppers will behave differently than desk-bound mid-career professionals. You can test sending at different times to see what works for your customer base.

  CASE STUDY

  Rinse and Repeat for a 46 Percent Open Rate

  GERRY BLACK, A MARKETING CONSULTANT and writer, shared with Inc. his method for testing email subject lines and increasing open rates.

  “Create your email promotion and write out three subject lines. Take your best subject line and include it with your first email. Let’s say you email 1,000 people and 150 of them open it. Delete those names off your ‘send’ list and re-send the email using a different subject line. Once your open results come back from the second email, delete those names and do your third email using your third subject line. You could triple the amount of people who open your email.”

  Black shared the results from one client’s efforts. The first email was sent to 306 recipients, and 84 people opened it. The second email was sent to 222 recipients, and 38 people opened it. The last email was sent to the remainder of the list. Twenty people opened that. Altogether, the same email with different subject lines was sent to 306 people and was opened by 142 people for an open rate of 46 percent.

  A cautionary note: You’ll need to carefully time when you send the emails, with enough time in between. Fail to do that and customers and clients might notice your strategy and be annoyed by the repeat send.

  The format that resonates best will also depend on who you’re talking to. If most of your audience is opening on a mobile device, focus on short copy and minimal imagery. Test and find your most effective email formats—text vs. HTML, short vs. longform, etc.

  Making sure your email gets through—and gets noticed—starts at the very beginning, with your list. It’s not the number of email addresses in your list that count; it’s the percentage of email addresses belonging to prospects who might buy from you. Think quality over quantity: You want customers or clients who are more likely to purchase your product or service.

  The way to get those people is to build your own list. Encourage customers to sign up directly from your website, where they can quickly provide their information and choose exactly what kind of information they want to receive from you. Offer sign-up sheets at your retail counter, conference, workshop, or presentation. If you have a guide or e-book, provide it to anyone who opts in. You want subscribers that want information about your company, product, or service—which makes buying or renting lists a dicey proposition.

  Stay on top of your list after each deployment. If your email isn’t getting opened, delete that address. Perhaps most important: Offering an opt-out option is essential to not annoy customers and clients, but also as a measure of protecting your brand. You don’t want your company emails to be associated with spam.

  If you’re working with a new list or with a new format or email element, start with a subset of your list first (e.g., your Gmail or Yahoo emails) to make sure there aren’t any issues with deliverability or formatting across email clients. This will save you heartache; you don’t want emails to 100,000 people to get stopped cold because of something that was easily fixable.

  Finally, if an email (or email campaign) was successful, don’t be afraid to re-use it. At the very least, re-send it to all those people who didn’t open it the first time. And recycle it back to your non-buying prospects a second and third time down the road after some time has passed.

  How Much Does It Cost?

  Firing off an email costs nothing—but that’s probably not how you’ll want to execute your email marketing. Basic email marketing services from reliable vendors are almost always free up to a point—possibly a couple of thousand contacts or a certain number of emails deployed each month. At that point, you’ll pay a monthly fee of $100 or more, depending on the size of your send as well as bells and whistles like time zone-specific sending and extensive testing and reporting.

  When you’re considering providers—and there are dozens—balance complexity with power. There is a cost to switching platforms that is many times the cost of the service. Choose wisely and don’t be lured by features you’re unlikely to use. Mail Chimp and Constant Contact are popular options, as are the more robust vendors Infusionsoft or Hubspot, which go way beyond basic email sends and have broader marketing capabilities (see Chapter 12 for more on marketing software).

  Can I DIY?

  Absolutely. Choose a software provider that offers design options that make sense for your business, and don’t underestimate the power of professional copywriting, if you can afford it. It may also be worth upgrading to a software package that includes technical support, so you don’t waste your valuable time trying to troubleshoot if you run into hiccups.

  How Measurable Is It?

  Data junkies love email marketing. You can see who opens your email, which links are being clicked, who forwarded your email, bounce rates, and how many (and which) readers unsubscribed. Many software services will serve up this data for you in the form of post-send reports. A few metrics to start with: First, test your open rate using different combinations of the subject line and the first fifteen words. Second, test for response rate using variations of yes/no questions. Finally, test for conversion rate by tracking which responses turn into purchases.

  SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

  Here’s what we know: Social media marketing is essential. Your customers are out there, connecting with peers, influencers, and brands.

  But here’s what we don’t know: What’s next, and what’s on its way out. Social media moves incredibly fast. Brands can only react: Audiences control the medium while brands merely ride the wave until the next new channel comes along.

  Successful brands have to evolve with their audience and platforms. Too many marketers, at companies big and small, have thrown money at social media marketing without knowing the “why” behind their strategy. Like any part of your marketing arsenal, you should consider social as one arm of a larger strategy. Forrester puts it best when they say that you don’t need a “social marketing” strategy; you need marketing that uses social tactics and technology strategically alongside other channels to achieve your goals.1

  So how do you know where to put your scarce resources? Like so many marketing channels, it comes down to knowing your audience inside and out. You need to “think about where their audiences are, what they are reading, what they are doing,” says Kenneth Hitchner, public relations and social media director for Creative Marketing Alliance. “If you are marketing to seniors, you’re not going to be using the latest social media app like Snapchat because the audience isn’t there—just like if you are marketing to teens you probably aren’t going to use something like LinkedIn.” It’s impossible to be omnipresent: Your brand’s social media strategy should be centered on the platforms where your target audience is spending the most time, so you’re not competing in a sea of noise.

  One of the biggest early stage mistakes is to spread yourself out across multiple social networks. Instead, find out where your audience is hanging out and be there. Then master those two to three networks. Show up consistently and engage in conversation.

  Once you’ve identified the right channels (we break that down for you next), consider the balance between paid marketing and organic reach—that is, the impression you get when someone comes directly to your page, not by clicking an ad. Organic visitors sought you out; they’re more highly qualified and more likely to buy. Great social content can be incredibly effective in generating that all-important organic reach, particularly when it’s coupled with a strategic media spend.

  For example, says serial entrepreneur and famed social med
ia strategist Gary Vaynerchuk, if you just start using the proper hashtags on Instagram, you can easily start being discovered over time. Whether you’re a local pizza shop or a car dealership, or an artist, or a Fortune 500 B2B company, using hashtags is an organic way to hit discoverability and create amplification for your content. And if you have paid media dollars, even just spending $100 to $300 a week on the amplification of your YouTube and Facebook video content can make your content explode, he adds—as long as that content is high quality to begin with.

  Next: Uncover the kind of content that works best in each channel—and how they all fit together as part of a larger strategy.

  Facebook

  Companies using Facebook to reach their target audience used to have it easy. No more. Today, the world’s largest social network is teeming with companies and influencers vying for attention. But you don’t have to be huge or deep-pocketed to succeed on Facebook, the behemoth of social media platforms.

  As an entrepreneur with a limited budget and resources, it may seem like a fool’s errand to try and compete against massive companies with seemingly bottomless pockets. It’s not. Regardless of your budget, the market responds to brands that offer value—and that value comes in the form of great, relevant content.

  One of the most important things that you can do with regard to Facebook marketing success is to create content with the goal of developing a community, says Neil Patel, co-founder of web analytics firm CrazyEgg. Start with unpaid posts. Write content that provokes conversation. If you do this, you will increase audience engagement and increase the odds of your content getting shared. Most content marketers today try to shoot for the moon with every piece of content, creating mountains of work and lots of stress.

  To create great, relevant content, start by looking at what’s already working for other companies—both in your industry and out—and model their success. Depending on what you do, that may mean how-to articles, quick tips, or conversation starters. A yoga studio with a professional clientele, for example, may post tips about proper posture at work. A meal service company may post recipes. A software company may post articles about customer relationship management.

  Once you have started creating high-quality content on a consistent basis, the next step is to use that content as a springboard to build a community, Patel says. You want your content to convey that you truly understand your audience. It should be audience first; meaning, you’re publishing content your audience needs—not pushing out things that are linked to your latest product launch or campaign. If your audience truly finds your content helpful, they will start to promote your content for you through sharing. That’s far better than any sort of paid advertising you could do on your own, and it’s free.

  As you post content, track and analyze it. Find the weak spots in your arsenal as well as the strengths you didn’t know you had. Facebook Insights can help you here. Using that tool, you can see:

  How many shares are you generating for each type of post?

  What sort of posts generate more engagement?

  Are you reaching the conversion rates you thought you would?

  The data doesn’t lie, so don’t make excuses for your underperforming content. Once you answer these questions, you’ll see the changes you need to make.

  Paying for More

  Is it worth taking it a step further and paying for Facebook advertising? That depends on your goals. Facebook is increasingly powerful for geo-targeted ads. It’s also a gathering place for audiences that belong to a certain niche on the Internet, or with a self-identified interest. You can focus on defining characteristics of your ideal customers, including their likes and interests, the pages they follow, the apps they use, and more. You will need to do some research and look for individual publications and blogs your ideal customer will likely follow and use this insight to focus in on what pages your customers likely follow. This is one of the most effective ways to ensure your ads are getting to the right people.

  Remember that people use Facebook for sharing content, not for consuming ads. If you want your ads to be effective and to stand out, they need to be as valuable, or even more valuable, than the other content being presented in people’s feeds.

  Thinking in those terms will help you figure out how to frame your posts—but many business owners simply don’t know how to provide value. Many of them fear giving away too much for free. Or they worry that if they don’t use a sales-driven headline that nobody will click. But you have to remember where you are running ads—your users are not primed for sales content. You need to act accordingly.

  Once you start running ads, don’t cheer (or freak out) too quickly. It’s common to experience anxiety once you kick off an ad campaign and you can see the dollars draining in real time. Facebook ads take time to refine and adjust in order to work properly. You can’t run a campaign for a day and immediately chalk it up as a failure—especially if you’re first starting out.

  Once the data come in and you’re ready to make changes, tweak element by element. Leave most things in place, as constants—just tweak one or two variables at a time. Otherwise you’ll never know if it was the headline that made the difference, or the image, or the offer. Seemingly tiny things, like changing “daily tips” to “pro tips” in your copy, can make a marked difference, so don’t overlook the details of your text and imagery.

  The key to creating a successful campaign—without wasting tons of money—is to test before you scale. You have to keep testing until you have found the right audience, ad creative, and landing page that has optimal conversions. When executed adeptly, Facebook advertising is one of the most powerful platforms for paid traffic.

  How Much Does It Cost?

  In theory, an amount as small as $100 can get your message in front of 1,000 people or more. But that doesn’t mean they’re the right 1,000 people.

  When you set up your campaign, you can set a cap on your spend. Many experienced advertisers recommend capping your spend at $50 or $100 a week and tweaking along the way. Targeting tightly on certain geographic areas, interests, or other options will help you make sure you’re not driving up your costs with lots of useless clicks. According to WordStream, the average click through rate (CTR) across all industries is 0.9 percent, with an average cost per click of $1.72.2 But the numbers can vary dramatically by industry.

  Make sure you consider the cost of ongoing testing. Split-testing doesn’t just take time, it also costs money. That’s why you need an ad budget that includes a line item for split-testing.

  Too many marketers make the mistake of budgeting money for running an ad, but never for the testing period. As a result, they eat into their advertising budget when they conduct experiments. That leaves them with less money than they should have for the actual campaign.

  How Measurable Is It?

  You can measure virtually every aspect of a Facebook marketing campaign, and you should. Just make sure you’re looking at the right metrics to truly measure efficacy.

  Consider this example:

  During a recent testing period, you noticed that Campaign A sent ten people to your site whereas Campaign B only sent three people.

  Easy decision. Campaign A is the winner, right?

  Maybe not. You just measured leads in that test, not conversions.

  Suppose only one in ten visitors from Campaign A makes a purchase, but two out of three visitors from Campaign B makes a purchase. Which campaign is the winner in that case?

  The campaign that gives you the most conversions, but not necessarily the most leads, is the one you want to invest in.

  The lesson here is not to get manipulated by vanity metrics. You need to have a clear understanding of what it is that you want to accomplish with your ads. Make sure that you write these goals down as they can govern the decisions you make with your ads. Do you want new customers? How many? Do you want more visits to your website? Are you looking to get people to register for your event? The more specific you are with
your goals, the more you can tailor your ads to help you reach your goals, and the more you can track your progress to make necessary tweaks to your ads.

  Can I DIY?

  Absolutely. Setting up a Facebook ad campaign is straightforward, and you can easily cap your spend so it doesn’t run away from you. One of the problems people run into when they DIY is that they don’t have the expertise to know about all of the advertising-related tools Facebook offers.

  Make sure you use Facebook’s built-in tools to:

  Boost Your Posts. Remember when you post an update on Facebook, only a fraction of your fans will see it. If you promote your post, it will extend its reach.

  Promote Your Page. If your goal with your Facebook advertisements is to grow your Facebook page, then you need to use the Promote Your Page feature. Facebook gives you the option to test different images and add a call to action to your posts if you utilize this feature.

  Send People to Your Website. If your ultimate goal is about getting more people to your website, then you can utilize this feature, designed specifically to help drive traffic to your site.

  And, as we said earlier, make sure to target tightly, cap your weekly spend, and learn and evolve as you go.

  LINKEDIN

  Unless you work in consulting or B2B services, LinkedIn may not be top-of-mind as you consider your marketing strategy. But the networking site offers lots of low-investment ways to raise your profile, no matter what you do.

  First, you should know that anything you post on the site is viewable for anyone on the web to find or see via Google search, which hasn’t always been the case. That means your profile as well as every piece of content you publish on LinkedIn is “public” (unless you change your user settings). You want to be “found” online, and this adds even more SEO juice to your content efforts on LinkedIn.