Seattle Startup Week: Big Marketing, Little Budget

This week I had an opportunity to be a moderator and presenter at Startup Week Seattle, Techstars. Today’s talk, Big Marketing, Little Budget was a sexy little title that didn’t really bely the meaty nature of the topic. What it all boiled down to, is that marketing for startups is about in helping your market understand why they should trust your business.  And that’s no easy project.

,Audiences are skeptical and savvy.  They don’t want to be taken in by marketing and they can smell a “campaign” a mile away. If the focus of your marketing moves away from convincing them to buy your product and towards helping them solve their problem in a trustworthy way, your odds of winning are much higher. 

Of course, you’re well aware that this isn’t a quick and dirty strategy.  It requires an investment and a commitment. But, if you’re not willing to be a company who invests in your customer base, maybe you’re focus is skewed?

The founder of Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi, a content marketing evangelist, recently released a book with his right-hand man, Robert Rose, an expert marketing consultant.  It talks about a lot of things, but the one that struck me is how businesses need to build audiences first.  If you don’t have anyone to listen to you, it doesn’t matter how loud you yell.  If you’re producing content that people want to listen to, and you’re helping to solve their challenges, you’ve got a market that’s primed to buy from you.  Why?  Because they trust you.  ​

Show the Market Why They Should Trust You

​So, how do you build a marketing department or marketing program that builds trust and delivers leads that convert? Start with The Trust Triangle™. 

Let's dive in! 

Customer Experience

Customer experience serves trust by delivering on what you promise. Whether it's product use, employee interactions, the way your website works or support; cynical customers will be waiting patiently for you to fall down on this job.  Don’t.

Use the ten commandments of customer experience to ensure your customers walk away pleasantly surprised.

1. Show value - And to add value, you need to know your customers and to know your customers you need to ask them questions and understand them.  Make sure to create personas to understand their challenges so you can add value to their lives.
2. Show why you’re better - That means you need to know why you’re better. Know your competitors, understand how you stand out. Make sure you highlight that in the copy you write, the products you create and the conversations you have.
3. Say what you do in one sentence - Know your value, your company and your product so well that you can boil it down to one sentence.
4. Share how you’re giving back - Customers care about your philosophy and your politics. Make sure that the company you are reflects your beliefs.  In turn that will attract the crowd that makes sense for you, philanthropically. It helps set the tone for everything, employee performance, marketing, sales, customer expectations… seriously… everything.   
5. It should be easy to buy your product - Please, oh please don’t make it hard for me to purchase your product. Evaluate your purchase path, and navigation.  Sean Van Guilder, the Dir of SEO at Point It, one of my client, says it should take fewer clicks to check out than it took you to find the product.  Do that.
6. It should be easy for customer to get help with your product/service - So, they’ve bought the product, and now they have questions or challenges. The way to create loyalty is to faithfully help them. Think of them as a member of your family and you don’t want them to get lost in your house while they’re visiting.
7. It should be easy for customers to talk to a human - When they’re struggling and they just want to talk to someone, you’ll make a customer for life if they can get real, live help.
8. Actively solve challenge - What I mean by this is you should be tracking issues with your service, product and website and actively be solving those problems in the production process. They’ll show your customers that you care and you want to improve.
9. Your packaging should be beautiful AND useful - Packaging applies to both real packaging and virtual packaging.  Whether it’s the box on your product or the website in which you serve your product/service it should never just be beautiful or useful, it needs to be both.
10. Deliver on your promises - There’s a book called “The 4 Agreements” and one of the agreements is “Be Impeccable with your word”. This is the agreement I think we fall down on most often as a business because we think that we’re exempt from delivering on our promises.  When in fact, it’s more important than ever. Highly recommended book. 

Demonstrable Expertise

When your thought leaders demonstrate expertise, you do three things: show the customer that the company hires great people, shows the customer that there are real people behind the products, and shows the customer that those people understand my problems.

Sharing your thought leaders with the world gives depth and authenticity (are you sick of that word yet?) to your brand that generates trust. It shows that a company goes beyond good marketing and handy website.  They really GET IT. And they hire people who GET IT. So, if you want your customers to fully understand your capabilities, build a thought leadership program: 

• Find people who live at the intersection of expertise and your company’s values.  They should have knowledge, presence and be enthusiastic about sharing this knowledge publicly.
• Create a clear content strategy that includes a list of your products and services, highlights your business challenges that your products and services solve and finally those environmental factors (think industry shifts, political shifts, seasonal trends) that impact the business challenges facing your customers.
• Create a solid social media plan. Ensure that you’re on platforms that your customers are on and make sure that when you’re on said platforms that the profiles are complete and fully filled out.
• Create a simple content execution model.  This is especially important if you can’t afford a team of writers.  Create some interview questions, record the interview, find a great transcriptionist (I use Rev) and an outstanding editor (if you're in a pinch, you can hire Scribendi).  All of this will help reduce the cost of writers and often comes off as more authentic than when you hire someone who isn’t indigenous to your industry.

Meaningful Connections

You can broadcast or you can engage.  Which do you think makes you more trustworthy? All of the ideas here are low costs ways to get your name out in the market in a way that will help you build trust with your audience.

• Facebook Groups –Because algorithms on Facebook aren’t doing your business any favors unless you pay to play, it might be a better use of your time to build out or participate in a community about a topic that is larger than your brand and the products you sell.  These topics should live at the intersection between what you stand for and what your audience is passionate about.
• Facebook Advertising – You’re not going to beat them, so you might as well join them. Create a low budget advertising strategy that supports your evergreen efforts to ensure you’re taking advantage of the targeting available to you.
• Twitter Community Involvement – Twitter is dead…blah blah blah. Every active community on that platform will laugh at you when you say them.  I’ve had the pleasure of being both an expert and a participant in several marketing-related communities that have helped build both my network and my pipeline.  Don’t discount it.
• Slack Community Involvement – Did you know there are slack communities for everything? Well there are.  I’m personally involved in no less than seven at any given times.  Topics range from retail disruption to content marketing and public relations.  I’m able to garner information, add influence and build community in each of these amazing spaces. Here's a list geared for entrepreneurs, but look out for things that are specific to your industry too.  
• Guest Blogging – Have blogs you love?  Ever wondered if you could write for them?  You should ask.  It’s one of those resources that provide you the audience and the opportunity to connect with that audience in a meaningful way.
• Speaking -  Are you working with particular verticals?  Industries? Make sure that you’re submitting proposals to speak!  Each opportunity to speak gets you closer to the who's who of the speaker circuit.  Getting in front of this audience who seeks expertise sets you up as an expert and gives you an opportunity to showcase your skills in a low-pressure sales environment.
• Awards - These tend to be pay to play, but the award win tends to pay dividends well worth the $250 per entry.  Website, customer and industry credibility will come after a few well-placed award entries.  And because so many of the organizations also run conferences, it’s likely that you’ll have an easier time getting a speaking spot after an award win!

Sum It Up

So, that’s it.  You’re short on cash and have a great product or service, and I’m big on marketing ideas.  That’s why we both do what we do.

What's Next?

If there’s anything I can help you with, let me know. I love working with startups. Get the deck for the presentation.