Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Mastering Startup Marketing: Tips for Scaling on a Budget

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 394

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Navigating the complex landscape of startup marketing presents unique challenges, from building brand awareness to defining audience and managing budgets. By adopting strategic approaches, startups can transform their marketing hurdles into opportunities for growth and success.

Inspired by the books I have written, including my recent Digital Threads and Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth, here is my definitive guide to startup marketing, including advice on:

• Building brand awareness through digital channels 
• Defining ideal customers with data-driven decisions 
• Overcoming budget constraints with resourceful spending 
• Prioritizing quality leads for targeted engagement 
• Competing with established brands through creativity and agility 
• Strategies for scaling marketing efforts sustainably

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Speaker 1:

Why does marketing feel like an uphill battle for startups? From building brand awareness to competing with established giants, the challenges are real, but so are the solutions. In this episode, I'll break down the top hurdles that startups face in marketing and share practical strategies to overcome them, inspired by insights from my books.

Speaker 2:

Tune in to transform your marketing struggles into startup successes on this next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Seo, SEM, PPC, email marketing. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, Because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing. One episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neal Schaefer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, this is your digital marketing coach, neal Schafer. Welcome to episode number 394 of my podcast. You know, as a fractional CMO, I tend to work with a lot of entrepreneurs, small businesses and, yes, startups, and I realized going back into my podcast catalog that I had yet to create content specifically for startups. Now I just got back from a business trip in Japan and there is a huge boom in startup culture there, with a lot of investment from a lot of cities and prefectural governments being funneled into encouraging startups to invest in their cities or states or prefectures. In fact, I'll be going to an event in Nagoya, japan, which is going to be hosted by the Aichi Prefecture. You'll hear a lot more about that in upcoming episodes called Tech Gala. So I'm really excited to go a little bit deep into startups over the next several weeks as I gear up for that event. But let's begin with the overwhelm that startups face when they deal with marketing. See the startups that I've dealt with and I'm sure if you're a startup listening to this as well your main challenge is really your product, developing that product, creating that MVP, the POC, and then getting feedback and then getting initial customers and going from there. But obviously, above and beyond that, how do you switch, how do you transform your organization from an outbound prospecting to an inbound marketing, gaining brand awareness and, at every step of the way, really improving your cost per lead time, per lead time, per conversion, cost per conversion and all those other marketing metrics as you grow your business? One customer by one customer. So, as someone who's worked with entrepreneurs and written extensively about digital marketing and social media strategy, I've seen how these challenges play out and how to overcome them. So what I'm going to go through here are the top, let's say, six or so challenges that I see the startups that I've dealt with face and some tips on how you can overcome them.

Speaker 1:

Now, this podcast episode is geared towards startups, but you don't have to be a startup to take advantage of this advice, guys, because it really is applicable to anyone and everyone listening to the show. So let's begin with challenge number one building brand awareness. Now, in the old days, before social media and the internet, it was really really hard to build brand awareness without massive budgets. That is not the same today. So, obviously, if we go into the SCS framework that I talk about in digital threads, search email social. Well, we're starting off with non-existent email, obviously, but it doesn't mean we can't take advantage of the search and the social to try to build brand awareness From a search perspective. It really comes into building our library of content, of gaining authority in Google's eyes, and the interesting thing is this is where the emergence of generative AI can really benefit startups. Now I'm not talking about a one-button press create content, but I'm talking about using generative AI to help you co-create content, help you optimize your content for SEO, make sure you have information gain and all the other SEO best practices in this era, post helpful content updates. But nevertheless, it is as easy as ever, once you understand how to use ChatGPT and tools like that as an assistant to scale your content production, to be able to help you build this library of content so that not only will it feed search engines, but if prospective customers happen to land on your website, or when you feed that content into social media, attracting people back to your website, there'll be deeper content for them to dig into. And if you do this right, every single piece of your library of content will also help generate demand for your products and services.

Speaker 1:

Now, obviously, there is more to it than just that. There is a niche strategy. Right of really focusing on niche markets before expanding with your brand awareness. Now, you're probably doing this as a startup anyway, trying to focus on the niche to really generate momentum, right, generate interest, generate revenue. What have you? Well, this can be the same with your content, for your library of content, for SEO purposes You're not going to be targeting those keywords that every other big brand is targeting, but really focusing on the niche where you can bring the biggest value to your content, to your potential customers and, you know, be creating content that just doesn't exist on the internet. Right, and with that in mind, that's sort of the search side.

Speaker 1:

If we switch over to the social side, right, obviously, leveraging platforms like LinkedIn for credibility. Now, if you're a B2C brand, obviously Instagram, tiktok might be the places where you're going to plant your flag. Or if you're targeting a more aged demographic, maybe Facebook, but if not, it's going to be LinkedIn. And even if you are a B2C brand, I would still say that LinkedIn helps establish this credibility, not only for your corporate brand but for your employer brand, and can also help with partnerships going forward, obviously, within social media. Now, we're not going to be promoting our product.

Speaker 1:

We really want to tap into storytelling to differentiate our brand. Now, this is a book that I've yet to write, something that I'm working on in the background, but really, the story of not only your brand but also your founders right, I think that every startup has an interesting story as to why you were founded, who founded you, what was their background, what led them to this discovery of this need, of the solution of the product, and everything along the way. In fact, the storytelling can also include some sort of behind the scenes that is as relevant on a site like LinkedIn to teach others as it is on a visual site like a TikTok or an Instagram, so that storytelling really differentiates your brand and makes you an only one type of existence in social media. Obviously, you want to sprinkle the storytelling with more information about your company, about your technology, about your services, about your library of content, but really it's this focus on the niche and, using storytelling, it's this combination that can really help your brand stand out in a very, very crowded space in order to build brand awareness.

Speaker 1:

If you have a little budget, obviously tapping into influencer marketing, even at the nano or micro level if you have more budget to build trust with your audience early on can really benefit you as well. In fact, if you've read digital threads, you know that I really focus on building brand awareness in social media, really focusing on creating or having user-generated content created on your behalf, either through customers, partners, fans or through these influencer collaborations, and then going from there. So you rely less and less on your own content. Let others do the speaking for you. But obviously, if you want to tap into influencer marketing early on at a greater level, you'll definitely want to read the Age of Influence, the definitive book on influencer marketing strategy. So hopefully, with this advice, you began to build that brand awareness.

Speaker 1:

Obviously, it takes time. It does not happen overnight and I know a lot of startups that go immediately for the PR play. They want to get featured in a top magazine, top media. It costs a lot of money. It can be hit or miss. Obviously, if you have a lot of budget to do that, that's awesome in your own following and community. That will also help build your brand awareness in areas where traditional media might not have as much influence as well. So, like I said, I know a lot of startups that go immediately for the PR budget. But, man, with that same PR budget, if you can shift a little bit of that into paid social media ads, what have you? It can go a pretty long way right, especially when you consider that PR agencies often require monthly retainers for a minimum X month contract. So just a shift in mindset can really help you, and you could also try this way for a few months, see if you get traction and if not, at least you would have done your best at the minimum budget before shifting over to more of a traditional PR strategy. So these are things I've seen play out in different ways, but wanted to give you that advice because obviously there are paid options that will help you accelerate that, but they aren't necessarily the best for every potential startup.

Speaker 1:

All right, let's move on to challenge number two defining a target audience. So the idea here is you really want to identify your ideal customers to avoid wasted efforts. Obviously, you know, reading the Lean Startup or any of these classic books on startups, it's all about that minimum, viable product, the proof of concept, finding those early adopters right, and we may think we know who the ideal customers are, but we might not right. And this is where social media well, I would say your library of content as well becomes a very, very interesting experimental testbed, because, as we put out different content for different audiences that we think are our ideal audience, we are going to get feedback based on the engagement. And this is where, if we use a little bit of paid ads, we can then target micro audiences and see which resonates with this content better or worse. So, whether it is organic or paid, social media and the data that it provides us gives us the ability to really hone in on who our ideal customers might be and who they are on social media, where they are in social media, which is only going to positively impact our brand. Building organic efforts there Now, in Maximize your Social, I wrote a lot about building a social media marketing strategy, about starting with data.

Speaker 1:

Using the analytics or even simple surveys to define who your customers are and where they spend their time online is going to be essential for your success. So, as part of this, as I hinted at, you should be emphasizing experimentation Early on test different messaging to see what resonates. It is an iterative process, just as being a startup and developing your first products and services is also an iterative process. If you treat social media and your content in the same way and you experiment with a little bit of paid advertising, that's really gonna go a long way to help you find traction with specific audiences there. That's only gonna help your efforts there going forward, all right.

Speaker 1:

Challenge number three budget constraints, I think I've already hinted at. I've had startups that have spent a lot of money on PR relationships where they might've been able to more wisely spend that money elsewhere. I've also seen startups spend a lot of money on, say, google ads or even social media ads, without having all of the other fundamentals in place to take advantage of the experimentation, of the targeting, et cetera, et cetera, or just simply they weren't ready for prime time yet, spending money on Google ads hoping to get conversions when they were not going to get any. So there is an order of things in digital marketing that I talk about pretty passionately in digital threads, and this is really, as a startup, your limited budget. We need to see how we can market effectively with those limited resources.

Speaker 1:

This is really my forte, to be honest with you. So you know, drawing from Digital Threads, where I talk about aligning your budget with business goals, every dollar should go towards measurable growth. Whether it's building your email list, whether it's lead generation, whether it's building a community on social media, really all of your marketing efforts should translate into a KPI, which translates into some sort of business growth. So here is where we can look at, well, what are the free or really cheap ways of leveraging resources to get the biggest bang for our buck? So obviously, this comes down to people, process and tools, and I have dedicated chapters on each one of these in digital threads. For the people, it is really tapping into the outsourcing opportunities that exist. There are thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands or millions of people out there in the world who are already doing digital marketing and all the different aspects of it for a lot of really famous brands and maybe not so famous brands, but there are just so many people out there that can help you around the world in a very, very economically efficient way. That is going to be something that startups should absolutely leverage.

Speaker 1:

Now, obviously, it takes time to project manage, it takes time to find, but it's, at the end of the day, going to be less expensive and I believe in many ways, the work might actually be better, especially at the startup phase right, where you're wearing a lot of hats. You have a lot going on. You may not have the money to invest in a dedicated marketing resource, which gives you all more of the reason to start working with a community of freelancers that can help implement all of your digital marketing. You're not going to hand over your strategy to them, right? You need to own the strategy. Read digital threads. Read Maximize your Social. Read the Age of Influence. Develop your strategy.

Speaker 1:

But in terms of some of the work that is actually involved, you can definitely find people to work with and achieve great success without having to spend a lot of budget. So that's the people, right? We have the process. So, within the process, obviously, there are free things we can do. Organic social media is free, right. Email marketing, once you are able to build a list. Yes, it takes time to actually craft emails, but should you create emails and put them in a sequence and use marketing automation? This is where we are creating processes and, with the help of generative AI in terms of our content marketing operations, we can really streamline this and really scale at. Once again, a very, very limited budget. And then, finally, we have the tools right again, a very, very limited budget. And then, finally, we have the tools right. We have tools like Adobe Express or Canva for design that can help us create logos or any other visual thing that we need, very, very inexpensively and also, more importantly, very quickly right. There are other very, very inexpensive or even free email marketing slash CRM platforms. Social media marketing dashboards do not have to cost a lot. In fact, you may not even need a social media marketing dashboard as you start out. So another interesting development is that the social media platforms themselves are adding AI, like meta. You know adding AI to Facebook, to Instagram, linkedin If you're a paid member, you have an AI solution there as well and even YouTube is adding more and more features. For instance, you upload a YouTube video, you can generate a free transcript. So you don't even need to have a budget for a transcript tool like otterai to be able to create a transcript and then repurpose that with the help of a chat GPT. So you know thinking about the tools and the process and the people together, you can see how savvy startup marketers today can get a heck of a lot done with a very, very limited budget. Once again, you'll want to reference digital threads for more information on what I'm talking about here.

Speaker 1:

Challenge number four generating quality leads With startups. I believe it's really about that lead quality. If you get a quantity of leads that lead your startup into multiple directions, that can challenge you and sometimes break you, because you really want to stay focused on that ideal customer, on that ideal early adopter. So, by prioritizing lead quality and I talk about this in maximizing LinkedIn for business growth Now, the lead quality maybe this is more for B2B brands out there, although for B2C generating initial interest, maybe it's more about the customer quality but in maximizing LinkedIn for business growth, I talk about how LinkedIn really is a goldmine for startups, especially in B2B, and focusing on building relationships with decision makers rather than casting a wide net. So this comes down into how you target your content, target your relationship building on a platform like LinkedIn, and this is where you will want to create lead magnets.

Speaker 1:

Once again, I have a dedicated chapter about this in digital threads. But whether it is a free trial, whether it is a webinar, whether it is an ebook, you know if I was to come out with an ebook that said marketing or digital marketing for startups versus digital marketing for entrepreneurs versus digital marketing for business owners versus digital marketing for executives. I am targeting four distinctively different personas, four distinctively different audiences, and if I define a quality lead as coming from a sweet spot that I foresee in the market, then I should be targeting my content towards that. And obviously one of the best ways to generate leads is through not only lead magnets but the follow-up email marketing and marketing automation that we can do after that right. So that's where those lead magnets come into play. When we have the right target.

Speaker 1:

And I would say you know, for B2C brands as well, if we were offering coupons or free product or BOGO, it's really the same thing. Your decision of what product you are giving away or providing a discount on, together with the messaging, the branding, the communication that you provide around that is also going to help define who those target customers are going to be. And, on another note, if you were doing outreach whether it is for your B2B brand on LinkedIn or B2C brand on an Instagram or, you know, a Facebook or what have you really leveraging the generative AI tools to help you personalize that outreach? It is not hard to do, but I think you know we've gotten to a point where people are very used to these mass outreach tools that exist that are very, very impersonal, that don't really speak to that individual person, and with social media profiles or individual business. But with social media profiles, with websites, with all the information that are available about businesses, about people on the internet, and with the help of generative AI, we can really personalize and optimize every single message that we send out, whether it is a direct message on an Instagram or LinkedIn or an email right. That will improve the engagement and it will improve, ultimately, the number of people that respond and, more importantly, how they respond in a positive way. So generating quality leads is always a challenge and I'm not promising you it's going to be easy, but hopefully following this advice will help you a little bit by prioritizing lead quality over quantity and really staying hyper-focused on those lead magnets that you offer as well as on your outreach All right.

Speaker 1:

Challenge number five competing with established brands. This is always going to be a challenge, regardless of industry. Really, the key message here is position creativity and agility as startup advantages. You could be more creative, right, you can be quicker, because bigger brands are often bogged down in processes, in larger administrations working with multiple agencies, working with a larger team that's often geographically distributed, right? You don't have those issues and you could be a heck of a lot more creative. You can tap into current trends quicker than they can, because they work on longer plans, on chains of approval that, once again, sometimes go across geographies that require time and what have you? You don't have those restrictions, right.

Speaker 1:

So, as I talk about in, maximize your Social. You can't outspend them, but you can outsmart them, experiment with emerging platforms or unique campaigns that they haven't adopted yet. So, if you are tuned in and this is advice that I give in digital threads as well, but you should be tuned in to role model content creators in your industry, right? If you are plugged in and you have your algorithm on whatever social media app you're on, tuned in to what your target customer would be seeing in their social media feed and I give advice on how to do this in digital threads you would be able to understand the current trends in terms of memes with TikTok, memes with TikTok or, you know, content that gets engagement on LinkedIn, whatever it is, and you can then begin to see ways of being inspired by those for your own brand, because businesses often there's this gap between the content that businesses are publishing on social media versus those that social media users and especially content creators, are creating. You can bridge that gap a lot faster by being in tune and being more nimble and agile with your content creation.

Speaker 1:

And you know, we see influencers do this all the time, and I think of a platform like TikTok I think of like a Duolingo, like a language learning app that just absolutely, you know, dominated TikTok and was able to really harness it for their growth. Right, because they were early there and they were very creative in their content, very agile, and they absolutely crushed it. You know, we could say the same thing about Chipotle. Chipotle really wasn't a household name, I think, until they leveraged TikTok extremely intelligently. It doesn't have to be TikTok, it could be LinkedIn, it could be Instagram, it could be any network. But this is where social media organic social media, with a little bit of paid boosting as well can really help you. And, once again, if you don't have that creativity, this is where collaborating with content creators as part of this influencer marketing initiative, of tapping into the creator economy, can help foster that creativity, can help you get directly inspired by content creators that are working directly on your brand and that can be the beginning of some wonderful creativity that can help you compete with established brands, especially when it comes to social media.

Speaker 1:

All right, we are now at challenge number six, and I talk about this order of things in marketing, especially digital marketing, and challenge number six is really the scaling. Right Now, what I talked about here I talked about very randomly and anecdotally and, hey, this is all easy to do. This is all not easy to do. This requires a little bit of time in order to do this, and I know a lot of startups and, as a fractional CMO, I see it as well without a dedicated resource even if it is an intern, a part-time resource or hiring someone like myself to help in those early weeks or months, it could be hard to be consistent with all this, the consistency that you need in order to build the brand awareness, develop leads and do everything that I've been talking about. That you need in order to build the brand awareness, develop leads and do everything that I've been talking about. So, once you get to a certain point where you're doing some of this, it's all about how startups can grow sustainably.

Speaker 1:

So in Digital Threads, I talk about treating digital marketing like a flywheel about building momentum with consistent efforts across the right channels. Momentum with consistent efforts across the right channels, and two things here that I'd like to recommend when it comes to automation and scaling. The first is I have a dedicated chapter in digital threads on content repurposing. Once you build that library of content, that becomes the core of your repurposing engine, your repurposing flywheel, right, and that's going to help you expand your reach, especially, you know the library of content is textual for search engines, but should you expand upon that based on all the other advice I provided on creating visual content, whether they're images or videos, or even audio content, if you want to dig into a podcast as a way of developing leads, which is a very savvy way of doing it in B2B industries. A lot of startups are experimenting with that.

Speaker 1:

Another highly recommended tactic, one of many that we can talk about here but repurposing content, repurposing the digital assets that you already have, will help you scale your marketing efforts and help you, obviously, expand your reach across platforms, across content mediums, when done right. We also have, you know, scaling AI tools are going to help us scale, are going to help us become more effective as we create custom GPTs, as we fine tune these large language models with our own content. The results are only going to get better and more relevant and the whole process is going to get better and more relevant and the whole process is going to become more efficient. And we also need to talk about marketing automation, right, as a way, on the email marketing side, of really fine tuning and helping you scale all of your efforts as you map out this customer journey. What are the touch points you want, right?

Speaker 1:

And when I talk about lead generation, of really you know, mapping lead generation into this customer journey map and the touch points with your marketing automation and I know this sounds very complex, it doesn't have to be complex, it can be very, very easy. But scaling through marketing automation and mapping of that customer journey, including the lead magnets, including the different triggers for lead generation, the different ways you want to respond as your customers move through your funnel, this is going to be an area that's really going to help you and it could be as simple, you know, for B2C brands. Obviously it begins with your abandoned cart emails, right, but it goes way above and beyond just that, right, with B2B brands with a longer sales cycle, obviously this is where I believe the marketing automation is even more important because you need to maintain that relationship over time. But you also need to be providing the right information at the right time, and this is where marketing automation platforms really shine. So I talked about a lot of things here and I want to sort of summarize with a few practical steps, a few threads if I may borrow from digital threads that are woven into these six different challenges.

Speaker 1:

Number one is this importance of staying data-driven Measure what works and double down on it. And over time maybe you began on a few different platforms and then you realize that you know what. We're not getting any traction on one platform, but 90% of our, 80% of our traction is coming from another 80-20 rule. Let's double down on that. We don't have to be everywhere. Let's find what's working and go from there. We can be an experimental stage because we're a startup, we don't have this legacy, we don't have a legacy audience or a legacy brand. Let's actually use that to our advantage.

Speaker 1:

And in parallel, I cannot emphasize agility enough. Right, as a startup, your ability to pivot is your superpower. Use it to experiment and optimize, and I've already given you a lot of advice here on how to do that. I also want to encourage you to leverage relationships. Startups thrive on connections. Build partnerships, collaborate, tap into content creators and influencers. So marketing doesn't have to be a startup's biggest hurdle. With the right strategies, you can turn challenges into opportunities. If you're looking for more insights, obviously check out the Age of Influencer, digital threads. Maximize your Social, maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth.

Speaker 1:

I have written these all for big brands and small brands, right For entrepreneurs, for startups, for small businesses. I think you're going to find a lot of actionable advice and I'd be curious to hear from you. This is another book that I am working on, a specific digital marketing for startups book, among many other books. I'm always sort of tossing around a few ideas and I'm also trying to figure out, as a startup myself and every book is its own startup which of these ideas has more traction. So you can help me by letting me know which of these challenges resonates most with you. Reach out, let me know. I'd love to hear your story, and if you are a successful startup or a brand that found success as a startup, I'd love to hear your story as well. Who knows, it might just make my next book. Feel free to reach out to me, neil at neilschafercom.

Speaker 1:

I'm the real Neil N-E-A-L-S-C-H-A-F-F-E-R, and if you love this episode, I would be honored if you could hit that five-star rating on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts. Leave a review, take a screenshot, let me know. I would love to hear from you. You know it could be lonely in front of a mic, in front of a computer screen, recording this podcast, without really understanding the impact, outside of the download numbers, that I see, that this podcast might have on you personally, professionally, or on your business. So I would just be honored to hear from you Any comments you might have. Neil at neilschafercom, and that's it for another episode of your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is your host, neil Schafer, signing off.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to your Digital Marketing Coach. Questions, comments, requests, links go to podcastneilschafercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.