Disclosure: We have a one-day workshop coming up with Sean Percival at Coloft that focuses on these three marketing tactics. Regardless of whether you join us for the workshop, I think you’ll benefit from knowing these strategies exist.
I had the chance to chat with Sean Percival, who recently joined the Distribution Team at 500 Startups where he also blogs for them about marketing. He shared some insight he gained from assisting their portfolio companies with marketing. The most exciting insight to me was that after helping dozens of companies, he’s been able to identify three things that early-stage startups often need help with: drip marketing, retargeting, and SEO tune-up.
Since early-stage companies lack the bandwidth to try every marketing strategy available, it’s important that they quickly identify strategies most likely to be both effective and cost-efficient. Why not learn from the experience of others and focus on what’s working for them?
Drip Marketing
Drip Marketing is where you send multiple pre-written emails to customers over time. Unlike traditional email campaigns where you send an email to everyone at the same time, these messages are usually timed to be sent X, Y, and Z number of days after the user provides their email address.
For example, Neil Patel on his personal blog sets up a series of seven emails where the first six are educational and the seventh is his pitch. There are plenty of things to think about when implementing a drip marketing strategy, so check out this infographic before you start.
Retargeting
Retargeting is where you run ads that only show to people who’ve already visited your site. You can take it a step further and, for example, target a specific ad to people who’ve abandoned their shopping cart. Services like AdRoll make this possible, check out their article: How Retargeting Works.
Though a few years old, this survey amongst marketers suggested Retargeting as the most underutilized marketing strategy.
SEO Tune-Up
If you don’t know what SEO is, it stands for Search Engine Optimization and this breaks down into a lot of smaller strategies that basically help people find your site through search engines. If you want to know all that goes into SEO, two great resources are The Beginner’s Guide to SEO (Moz.com) or The 2013 SEO Checklist (Clickminded.com).
Some Final Words…
Every business is unique, so every company has the responsibility to analyze which marketing strategies work best for them. If you want a broader understanding of marketing a tech startup, you should probably check out The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking by Neil Patel & Bronson Taylor.
If you want to master these three strategies and happen to live in Los Angeles, check out the one-day workshop with Sean Percival on September 28th: Drip Marketing, Retargeting, and SEO Tune-Up (only $299 for early-bird pricing!).
Leave a Reply