Marketing Your Startup

by Simona Covel

  When a potential customer, supplier, or partner finds you online, having a polished LinkedIn presence is one way to boost your startup’s credibility.

  Start with Your Profile

  The first thing you need to do is build a LinkedIn profile and comprehensive company page, says marketing expert Samuel Edwards. Playing around with an individual profile allows you to familiarize yourself with the functions of the site. If potential customers are going to stumble onto your profile—and they likely will—make sure it’s polished. A few basics to include:

  • A professional image. Profiles without pictures are rarely viewed, while those with high-quality images are perceived as much more professional. It’s best to include a solid white or colored background, wear professional dress, and smile. You want to come off as being sophisticated, yet personable. It doesn’t need to be a professional head shot, but it should look polished.

  • A descriptive headline. LinkedIn allows you to customize your “Professional Headline,” and you’ll want to spend some time crafting it. For example, instead of simply putting “Marketing Professional,” something along the lines of “Founder of marketing automation software company, Zippy” is much more compelling.

  • Relevant work history. The meat of your profile will consist of your work history and resume. While you don’t want to leave off important jobs you’ve held, you also should avoid including things that are irrelevant—like part-time high school summer jobs or memberships in college clubs and societies. Rather than treating your LinkedIn profile as an autobiography of your working life, treat it as a way to show why your experience makes you a credible supplier of whatever you’re selling.

  • A custom URL. LinkedIn gives you the ability to customize your URL. Try using something that’s simple, short, and is associated with your name. If first and last name aren’t available, consider incorporating initials or abbreviations.

  After using LinkedIn as an individual user, you can begin to delve into the business features by creating a company page. As with your individual profile, there are some specific tips and tricks to mastering your company page.

  • A compelling summary. This is the most important part of your company page. The summary appears right under your cover image and allows you to explain who you are, what you do, and why readers should believe in you. While the summary needs to include basic information about the company and what you do, it should also be descriptive, conversational, and engaging. Many entrepreneurs tend to think from the inside out: This is our product, here are its features. Instead, think from the outside in, and audience first: Our customers buy from us in order to achieve this goal, or we’re solving this problem.

  • A compelling image. While the summary may be the most important aspect, your image has the ability to ruin your profile from the start. Make sure the image represents everything your brand stands for and is high quality and unique. This isn’t a place to use stale stock photos; invest in something original.

  • Accurate contact info. Double-check to ensure all fields are complete and accurate. You won’t be able to generate any leads unless you get this information right.

  Once you have your own individual profile and a company page, you’re ready to start generating leads for your business. The first step is simply to connect. LinkedIn is a social network, so get social. Build a list of every single person that you may want to do business with in the future. This list could include investors, clients, and other potential partners. Once the list is done, go through one by one and add them to your network. Include a custom and highly personalized note for each person and begin to send requests. Your entire goal here is to expand your network with people you want to know you exist. As your network grows, you now have a highly focused and targeted list of people that will receive a notification every time you post content.

  Now that you’ve built up your connections, you’re ready to start creating content. Content shows up in online searches as well as appearing in your contacts’ feeds.

  If you’re already producing content, LinkedIn is a great way to spread it to a wider audience. If you already blog, for instance, you can get extra mileage from each post by posting a link to the post on LinkedIn, and then publishing the full version a few days later.

  LinkedIn makes it very easy to produce content via the “write an article” button on your home page. Every time you post something, a notification goes out to all your connections. This means that every piece of carefully crafted content can potentially end up in front of anyone that you are connected with on LinkedIn.

  Another free way to get noticed is by joining LinkedIn groups. Social media is a two-way street. You can’t simply push content on people and expect them to respond. The best way to give back to your users is to join groups and become an active member by providing advice, answering questions, and building one-on-one relationships. In return, your activity in these groups will increase your exposure and possibly position you as a thought leader in your niche.

  The great thing about LinkedIn groups is that people have self-selected (or have been invited) to be a part of a targeted community, notes Janine Popick, co-founder of business data dashboard Dasheroo. And there are literally millions of them. The community is made up of people who like to share their content, get a job description out there (or look at some), and network with like-minded pros.

  If that community is based around an industry you serve, you need to be a part of it.

  It’s simple: In LinkedIn’s search bar, type in the keywords that match your industry. Then assess all of the groups that surface that you want to be a member of. It’s important to make sure you fill out your LinkedIn profile and company profile as much as possible. LinkedIn will go ahead and recommend groups for you to join.

  Once you join, make sure you check in every so often, participate in the discussion, and share updates you think the group might be interested in—it essentially amounts to free advertising. And when someone replies to your updates, make sure you acknowledge with his name in your own reply to clearly indicate that you’ve read what he said.

  Can I DIY?

  Definitely. LinkedIn is all about personal connections—your content would feel awkward if it appeared to be written by someone else.

  It never hurts, though, to get professional editorial eyes on all of your content, including your profile, your company page, and the articles you post.

  How Much Does It Cost?

  So far, everything we’ve talked about is free. If you want to get your content in front of even more eyeballs, try sponsored updates, available through LinkedIn’s “Campaign Manager” tool. It allows companies to push their content to the top of people’s feeds as well as offering targeting by gender, age, location, group membership, company, and a host of other options. It operates on a pay-per-click or pay-per-1000 impressions model (if you care more about how many times the ad is shown rather than clicked on). The minimum costs are extremely low—as little as $10 per day.

  How Measurable Is It?

  It depends. It’s tough to measure the ongoing conversations that LinkedIn may generate. But the moment you make a big sale from a connection you forged, you’ll be glad you put in the time.

  If you’re posting content with links back to your site, you’ll be able to measure referral traffic, targeted page views, and lifts in subscribers or opt-ins. If you’re employing paid content or LinkedIn ads, you have more tools at your disposal; through LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager, you’ll see your engagement rate, which tracks clicks, shares, and comments.

  TWITTER

  Twitter is about getting out there: generating followers and participating in conversations. It’s not an overnight strategy—it takes time and patience to cultivate connections, participate in conversations, and generate followers and retweets. “Twitter is a cocktail party,” says social media strategist Vaynerchuk. “How do you become really good at a cocktail party? You show up, you go into a circle, you start talking,”
he says. “If you are a listener and you actually add something to the conversation, we become friends.”

  You may be tempted to jump in and offer up your service right away or to ask for endorsements. Don’t. Be patient and deliver value; listen before you tweet. You wouldn’t walk into a real cocktail party and start shouting or ask other people to tell everyone that you are cool. “Provide value first,” Vaynerchuk says. “It gives you such a better chance.”

  If you’re not sure where to begin with Twitter, seek out the people you admire most—thought leaders, keynote speakers, authors, colleagues—anyone who inspires you. You’ll get a good sense of their topics of conversation and what their followers are most engaged in. It’s also a good idea to follow your customers and even your competitors to see what they’re up to.

  Then, start retweeting useful or interesting information. You should also seek to provide interesting information that relates to your product or industry, or your community. “Your dialogue has to provide value. You’re a local ice cream shop? Use your Twitter account to highlight good things local charities are doing or even a local Boy Scout troop.

  If you’re tweeting as yourself—as opposed to your company—don’t be afraid to get personal, within certain limits. You don’t want to broadcast everything about your day or your life, but occasionally tweeting the funny thing your teenager or your dog did can be a great way to humanize your company and connect with people.

  For just about every product, industry, or topic, there are influential Twitter users. Connecting with them can make a big difference, either because they have a large number of followers (or highly influential followers), represent your biggest customers (such as a retail chain that might carry your product), or write an influential blog. Choose a dozen, and then build up to a hundred or two hundred. Follow them, and engage with them. You may be surprised by how many are willing to follow you back.

  Think Real Time

  During major global events, Twitter’s usage rate can spike by millions of people across the world as they flock to the network. Users follow event specific hashtags and get insights from their favorite participants on the ground as they are happening and at the same time as the press. When you use a hashtag that’s trending, you have a substantially better chance of getting engagement from people who aren’t your followers, says Vaynerchuk. As the hashtag grows, you may get traction you wouldn’t have otherwise. One way to take advantage of the new eyeballs is to pose your tweet in the form of a question that people will want to answer.

  Beyond breaking news, Twitter’s events calendar helps marketers stay aware of and potentially leverage significant global events that are relevant in some way to their brand. The calendar enables users to filter their search by location, type of event, and date, giving marketers the ability to plan out their strategy months in advance.

  The event insights give users critical data from past events such as audience size, demographics, and more. Relevant hashtags are provided so that marketers can categorize their brand’s tweets with the others related to the event; that way they appear in the most popular searches done by interested parties.

  How Measurable Is It?

  You can measure just about anything on Twitter. While viewing your tweet gives you some basic stats (like the number of comments, retweets, and likes), you might want to dig a bit deeper to find more valuable metrics. The Tweet Activity view lets you do just that: Just click on the bar graph icon and you’ll be presented with a ton of information.

  You can see data showing the number of impressions and total engagements, as well as a breakdown of the various engagements. Through that, you’ll glean important details about how your tweet performed—and make decisions designed to increase future engagement. Here are a few metrics to keep an eye on:

  • Impressions. Impressions are the number of times people view your tweet. When this number is high, it seems that the other metrics follow the trend upward. Using strategic hashtags that are relevant to your content will help distribute your tweet to a wider audience beyond your followers, which will boost your impressions.

  • Retweets. Measuring retweets shows whether or not your tweets are being shared by your audience. When someone retweets, it exposes your tweet to their followers. Retweeting is one of the primary ways content goes viral on Twitter. To boost your own retweets, consider retweeting your followers more often. They will take notice and begin to reciprocate by retweeting you more often as well. Also, make sure to send over a quick thank you tweet to those who retweet you.

  • Link Clicks. Driving traffic to your website, blog posts, or videos should be the focus of your marketing efforts on Twitter. The end goal for a marketer on Twitter is always to successfully convince someone to leave the platform and go to your website where they can make a purchase of your product, buy your book, or hire you. Measuring the number of link clicks your tweets are generating is essential in determining your effectiveness on Twitter.

  • Engagement Rate. Your engagement rate shows the number of engagements divided by impressions. Depending on your industry, tweets with images or video may show a higher engagement rate.

  • Profile Visits. Twitter shows you how many people are visiting your profile—an indication that people want to learn more about you. Make sure your profile is complete and compelling when they get there. To generate more profile visits, be interesting! Give away some free information that compels people to want to know more about you. If your tweets are boring, nobody will visit your profile.

  Not for Everyone

  While Twitter might be a darling of the tech industry and valuable when it comes to staying up-to-date with what’s happening in the world, for many businesses, it’s not the best place to acquire new customers. “As a startup you have to pick a couple things and do it really well,” says Corbett Drummey, CEO of Popular Pays, a company helping brands like Macy’s, TOMS, and KIND connect with social influencers and content creators to execute Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Facebook campaigns. “If you were a makeup company you might do YouTube tutorials and Instagram. Or, if you are a lifestyle company you might just do Instagram and Facebook ads.”

  CASE STUDY

  Twitter Tips Make TheBeautyBean.com

  “I REALLY DON’T THINK I would have an online magazine if it weren’t for Twitter,” says Alexis Wolfer, founder of TheBeautyBean.com, an online beauty and health magazine for women. “I was working in an editorial job part-time and finishing graduate school and I wrote my thesis on women’s magazines and their influence on body image,” she explains. “And I started posting health, beauty, and nutrition tips on Twitter. They were much like what women’s magazines would provide, except I took out all the focus on weight loss. It was all about healthy living, and in one month I had 1,000 followers.”

  Wolfer had already thought about starting an online magazine offering health and beauty tips without weight-loss advice. “Had I not received the Twitter response that I did, it would have been much slower to develop. But the response I got from Twitter in particular made me feel there were other women out there looking for healthy living information.”

  How Much Does It Cost?

  Posting from your account is free. When it comes to advertising, Twitter is different than Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Each of these social networks offer separate business/brand accounts and personal accounts. Advertising is only available to business accounts.

  On Twitter, there are just accounts. Anytime you hit a little jackpot on Twitter and see something really taking off (whether it’s a tweet you’re pleased with or piece of content you want to promote) you don’t need to set up a business page. You can just spend $50 against that post to amplify it.

  When to Promote Your Tweets

  Promoting your tweet allows you to increase the number of impressions, getting your message in front of the eyes of more users. If you press the Promote Your Tweet button, you’ll be presented with a panel where you can select a target locati
on, choose a spending budget, and plan an estimated reach if you decide to go forward.

  Like other platforms, pricing is determined by supply and demand. There’s no minimum cost. The more you pay, the more people in your desired audience will see the tweets appear in their feeds. In many cases, you can spend just a few dollars a day to do some testing and see what’s resonating to help you decide where to put the most investment.

  While you don’t need to promote every tweet—and probably shouldn’t—investing in the right ones can really pay off.

  And, if you select your top-performing posts, the true unicorns in the bunch, the cost per click can actually be very low. Twitter uses an algorithm to determine the price, and engaging content is rewarded with lower costs.

  To find your top-performing tweets (and confirm your suspicion that the epic meme you shared a while back really was solid gold), head over to the Analytics section. Then, select the Tweets tab and click the Top Tweets button.

  Event activation enables you to link tweets to an upcoming event, like the Oscars or the Super Bowl. You can create paid campaigns targeting the event, then home in on the target audience by segmenting via gender, language, and even by the type of device they use.