Marketing Your Startup

by Simona Covel

  Manage the Process

  Similar to how you may handle certain social channels, the best way to streamline your content creation process is to create an editorial calendar. Plan out your calendar in advance with new content ideas on a regular basis, such as yearly or quarterly. Your exact process will depend on a variety of factors, including your team and the resources you have available. The cadence of your content production will depend on where you’re publishing, what your audience needs, and the resources you have.

  You can distribute content through your own blog, other blogs, email, social media—wherever you’re connecting with your audience. This is where content marketing begins to overlap with social marketing and PR. If you’ve put in the time to create a long-form blog post, whitepaper, or industry research report, don’t just publish it on your blog and call it distributed. Highlight key findings and trends, and create a guest post on a popular industry site that shares those insights. Submit it to an online publication your audience members read in order to expand the reach of your content. If you quoted someone or used their expertise, send them the finished piece and encourage them to send it to their network. (Check out our sections on social media and email marketing.)

  SEO matters here, too. Every new post you add to your blog, for example, is another page that Google’s going to index. More pages don’t always correlate with more search traffic, but having more quality pages indexed can grant you more opportunities to rank for more search queries. If you target long-tail keywords and topics that your customers frequently search for, you should have no trouble appearing for those searches with your archive of information.

  How Measurable Is It?

  On a scale of 1 to 10, the measurability of content marketing is about a 5. What you can do is easily measure how your content is performing. If most of your content is web based, the backbone of tracking your progress should revolve around your web analytics tool. If you’re distributing via social (which you should be) you’ll be able to use that channel’s metrics to see your click rates and any increases in comments, fans, and followers.

  However, although likes, followers, and traffic are nice—they don’t cover payroll. Before you publish a sentence, develop a set of specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your business model and marketing growth channels. Track them religiously and compare them with other critical business metrics to gauge improvement. Track inbound traffic following publication, and make sure your site is set up to capitalize on those leads.

  Evaluate on a regular basis whether your marketing efforts are effective or whether you need to create a new content strategy. The key items to measure include the amount of traffic, the sources of that traffic, and how long people are sticking around to read your content (time on page). There are many other metrics available, so make sure to measure key KPIs related to the concrete goals you set, and take this data into account when planning your content strategy.

  How Much Does It Cost?

  When it comes to content marketing the range is huge. If you want to simply tap out blog posts from your laptop late at night, the only cost is your time. But remember, a DIY strategy isn’t without risks. An article or blog post can backfire if you produce your own content and don’t have it vetted.

  One piece did backfire for BCG Attorney Search, a legal recruiter in Pasadena, California. In 2017, founder and managing director Harrison Barnes wrote an article that appeared on the company’s site and also LinkedIn, as he generally does every week. Only this piece—about why an attorney applying for a job at a firm may not hear back—was blasted for sexism, as The American Lawyer reported.10 Here’s the problematic section, via a version cached by Google, since the original was modified when the complaints arose:

  Recruiting Coordinators Are Expected to Be Presentable, and in Many Cases They Will Be Expected to Be Attractive (Most Are in Their Early 20s to 30s)

  If you have not noticed by now, most legal recruiters are women, and most are quite attractive and fit. This is because they are in positions that involve public relations—sort of like an on-air television newscaster. There is nothing wrong with the fact that most law firms put people like this in these positions because they are the public face of the law firm. What is problematical, though, is that some of these people can also—occasionally—be a little ditzy and not have the other sorts of qualifications that would make them qualified for the job. Not only do they sometimes have more beauty and fewer brains, but they also may have more beauty and less interest in people, less ability to connect with people, and similar negative characteristics. This means they expect people to treat them as if they are special and sometimes are more focused on themselves than their jobs. It is not uncommon for recruiting coordinators to use their workspaces as a hunting ground for mates—and it works. Many recruiting coordinators marry (or get married to) associates and partners inside of the law firm. This is what happens when attractive and successful people are put in confined spaces ten hours a day. Once a legal recruiting coordinator gets close to an associate or partner in the firm, the recruiting coordinator may start playing favorites—and often does. People who are close to the associate or partner may get special treatment when applying to the firm, for example. If there is tension in the job of the associate or partner (i.e., getting fired, getting a bad performance review, or leaving), this can affect the performance of the recruiting coordinator a great deal.

  Barnes, as you might expect, took a lot of flak for the post. “These are not [meant to be] stereotypes,” Barnes told Inc.’s Erik Sherman. “[All the items in the article are] observations of some things I’ve seen. It doesn’t mean it’s true about everybody.” As he said, in any industry as large as law, there are going to be people who are bad at their job. “The fact that there are a few people that might be considered incompetent, that’s just a fact,” he said. “Honestly, I’ve seen far more incompetent attorneys than I’ve seen incompetent people in the recruiting roles.”

  Unfortunately, that’s not how the piece read to many. Even though multiple people in the BCG office reviewed the post, as they always do, the offensive material ran. Then came the attention from the legal press, ensuring that the issue wouldn’t go away.

  Any time you make a remark that could be offensive to prospects or customers, you’re in trouble. Remove the remark, apologize, and you may still have tainted an impression. So read, and re-read. And then have someone else read. And preferably, have an editor from outside your company read, too.

  If you decide to hire a writer on your own, you may pay anywhere from a few hundred dollars per piece for someone with less experience who writes on the side, to tens of thousands to use an agency armed with an arsenal of seasoned writers and content strategists who can create and maintain a content calendar, ensure your content is top-notch, and make sure it’s always aligned to your broader marketing objectives.

  A Word on Video

  When it comes to content marketing, most companies start with articles or blog posts. But video is increasingly popular—and incredibly powerful. According to Hubspot, as of 2016, 45 percent of people watched more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos each week.11

  Video is compelling and shareable—and easy for many companies to execute. Inc. columnist and Jamf software engineer Charles Edge suggests a series of simple steps to maximize the power of video for your business.

  First, make video that’s specific to your industry and true to who you are. If you have a shoe store, you can post videos about the latest hot shoe. If you have a coffee shop, you can post videos about the amazing Fair Trade coffee beans you just received. If you have a music studio, you can post video snippets of your latest soundtracks or records.

  The important thing is to post authentic content that people want to watch—content that’s fun—and then give viewers an easy way to find your website or otherwise engage with your product.

  Once you’ve created great video, you’ve posted it (see our YouTub
e section in this chapter) and you’ve driven people to your site—what’s next? You want to use those videos to push users into a sales funnel. Everything you create should have a call to action. Depending on whether the video is purely education for education’s sake, or if it’s designed to prime users for a product, the call to action may be “learn more” or “make an appointment” or “buy now.” If you have a newsletter or post articles, embedding videos into written content can amplify your exposure to a larger audience. Give each video you make as much of a chance to gain traction as possible.

  As always, rely on your analytics—but don’t be a slave to vanity metrics like views and likes. If you spend all your time making videos that bring people to your site but don’t actually move product, you’re really only increasing your costs (web traffic and production costs) to feel cool. If you post a video and are expecting people to click on a given page but they don’t, you have some incorrect assumptions. The ability to pivot in the face of what you learn is key.

  INFLUENCER MARKETING

  According to AdWeek, what others say about a brand can be up to 10 times more influential than brand-curated content.12 Combine that with consumers’ increasing distrust for traditional advertising and disingenuous marketing messages, and you have the perfect recipe for the rise of influencer marketing.

  Influencer marketing is all about finding people with big social followings and working with them to convey messages about your brand or product. Think celebrity marketing, shrunk. While big companies have long been throwing money at celebrities in exchange for endorsements, today’s landscape is friendlier for smaller companies. In virtually every industry, you can find influential users on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat who can deliver your messages to the right consumers.

  Companies have been quick to try to get a piece of the pie. In 2017, there was a more than 100 percent increase in Google searches for “influencer marketing ROI.”

  Getting Connected

  One of the best ways to connect with known influencers in your niche is simply to build a relationship with them. This won’t happen overnight, unless you’re willing to pay for product endorsement. But paying is rarely a good idea: These days all audiences are wary of manufactured connections, and in particular millennials demand transparency and can smell a fake from a hundred yards away.

  A more powerful type of influencer campaign is one where the person genuinely likes your product enough to sing its praises. And that leads to more followers and ultimately, sales. To make a connection, once you locate the influencers who mean something to your audience, follow their posts and engage with them, click, like, comment, and share.

  True influencers are picky about the brands they partner with—because they value their relationships and treat their audiences like their best friends. “I’m careful about which brands I partner with because my audience has been built on my candor and honesty,” says Emma Johnson, founder of WealthySingleMommy.com, which has 100,000 monthly unique visitors. “That is why this business works for me.”

  How It Works

  When you work with an influencer, you have to be willing to cede some control. It isn’t like an ad buy, where you control the language and the imagery. When influencers write or talk about your company or products, it has to be in their own voice—that’s the whole point of working with them. Their voice gives your product credibility with their audience.

  So don’t expect that your influencer will hold up your product and outline its features and benefits. You can—and should—provide specific information and descriptions to ensure accuracy. But from there you have to let them be a vehicle for sharing your products in their own unique and individual way.

  Most influencers will simply take the product and run with it—they know what to do. The reason you’ve hired an influencer in the first place is because they’ve managed to build up a large, engaged audience. They know how to present a product in a way that doesn’t feel overly salesy and will resonate with their audience.

  It can be hard for a founder to relinquish control over the message. But don’t make the mistake of attempting to control the creative process. While it’s important (and even necessary) to discuss your goals with the influencer, you’ll find they do their best work when they have control over how they present your product.

  If giving up control scares you, remember this: Most influencers will do whatever it takes to make sure you’re happy and that the campaign is successful. Otherwise they’ve lost a customer.

  Promote, Promote, Promote

  While you signed up a certain influencer because they already have a significant following, do not stop there. Once the influencer has posted on your behalf, make sure you’re tapping into other distribution channels, too. Repost or retweet where relevant. Post the content on your site. Plus, if the influencer has a blog or site with significant traffic, negotiate to have her create content for that as well—not just social media. Longer-form content like a blog post can be highly effective and helpful for search engine optimization, too.

  Screen Your Influencers

  Engaging the services of the wrong influencer can have a catastrophic impact on your brand. This is why it’s vital that you properly screen anyone who will be representing your business online.

  Vet the person in a similar way to a potential employee. Make sure he responds quickly to calls, emails, or texts. Look closely through his social media accounts, making sure there’s no history of criticizing brands or products. Also check for controversial posts—politics, religion, or anything else you wouldn’t want to be associated with your brand.

  As part of your due diligence, consider screening your influencer for fake followers. While it can sound crazy, the practice of paying for fake social media followers is more common than you may think. Ask for screen shots of social media analytics that show more than just follower counts, where you can make sure your target influencer has genuine engagement from fans. If the influencer uses a newsletter, ask for open and click-through rates.

  Don’t Forget About Micro-Influencers

  When we think of influencers, we typically think of celebrities. Household names with legions of fans, online and off. But for a startup, it may behoove you to think smaller. Micro-influencers—minor celebrities or niche bloggers—may actually have a bigger impact on your business. They may not have the huge following of a celebrity, but their audience may feel closer to them and trust them more.

  These people may be hyper-connected bloggers who connect to a certain audience—think so-called “mommy bloggers” who are relied on by millions of new moms. Or they may be top industry analysts who aren’t well-known outside the industry but are revered within. You know best who is best positioned within your sector or niche. So be creative when you’re making your list of potential influencers for your brand.

  How Much Does It Cost?

  In 2017, Influence.co found that the overall average price companies paid influencers on Instagram was $271 per post.13 But that average belies a significant point: There was a huge difference between higher-profile influencers and those with smaller followings. The average price for micro-influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers was $83 per post, while the average per-post price for influencers with more than 100,000 followers was $763.

  That doesn’t mean that everyone is using a pay-per-post model. Some companies pay for performance—but that can get very expensive very quickly, with no recourse. Most small companies will want to start with a safer pay-per-post approach. Some micro-influencers may even accept free products and experiences in exchange for a promotion. Obviously that’s the most cost-effective option, but it’ll limit your pool.

  It can be hard to know what’s an appropriate payment, especially if you’re working with a micro-influencer. One way to try to figure it out is with tools like the Instagram Money Calculator. It will show you the estimated earnings per post for different influencers. Just enter their Instagram username. The tool makes
its calculations based on the number of followers and the engagement rate of recent posts.

  CASE STUDY

  Instant Pot Courts Home Chefs

  IN 2016, AMAZON TOUTED the success of its second annual Prime Day promotion in a press release, rattling off how much stuff people bought in different categories:

  90,000 televisions

  2 million toys

  1 million pairs of shoes

  200,000 headphones

  215,000 Instant Pot 7-in-1 Multi-Functional Pressure Cookers

  One of those lines stands out—the very specific mention of pressure cookers. It’s one of the only products mentioned by brand name, in a sea of broader categories (“headphones,” and “pairs of shoes”). Here’s how it happened.14

  The Instant Pot is a product of a small Canadian company with 25 employees and no traditional advertising. Micro-influencers have long been a part of the company’s marketing strategy. Over the last seven years, since it first hit the market, the company “has provided free Instant Pots to 200 bloggers and cookbook authors who represent many styles of cooking, including Chinese, Italian, sous vide, and vegan,” according to NPR.15 Company CEO Robert Wang has noted in interview after interview that his goal has always been to use self-generated recommendations to build buzz among an engaged audience of home chefs.