Marketing strategies that startups cannot ignore, low-cost promotion and advanced solutions

Make a product with great care and ensure it won’t sell? Is it not possible without marketing ?

First of all, this question is the same as the paradox of "as long as I am good enough, I will definitely have a girlfriend."

Users are lazy. In today's large market, who has so much time and energy to understand the pros and cons of each product one by one? Why must users use your product? Whoever ignores marketing will be ignored by the market.

Secondly, answer the following question: Resources are limited for startups . How can they conduct brand marketing at low cost at the beginning? This question.

The more limited the resource cost is, the more cautious each step of the marketing activity is. It must be precise enough. For entrepreneurial companies, marketing must also be carried out according to the product stage. It is not recommended to do brand marketing in the early stage of the product. Especially when the product is not profitable in the early stages, you should not blindly learn the brand marketing methods of big companies, as that would only lead to your own death.

At different stages of a product's development, different priorities must be addressed. For each stage of promotion , there must first be a product promotion goal.

Therefore, in the early stages of a product, the first thing to consider when doing low-cost marketing is to bring in " effective traffic " (effective traffic refers to people who will buy your product, continue to use your product, and share your product).

The core principle of obtaining effective traffic is to clearly understand what your product is. For whom? What problem does it solve? How to solve it?

If you cannot answer these questions, it means that you cannot clearly describe the product in your marketing promotions, you do not know what kind of marketing content to produce, and your marketing content does not address user pain points.

How to obtain effective traffic through precise marketing? Please see the 5 marketing links to obtain effective traffic:

1. User Survey

User surveys are something that 90% of companies are unwilling to spend energy on, but they are crucial in marketing work. If you don't conduct user surveys and just make decisions based on your own ideas about what products and content to create, it's normal that users won't buy into them in the end.

Find your target users , communicate with them one-on-one, and find out what issues they care about most. What do you want? What benefits do you want to gain? (User surveys here can not only guide marketing, but are also very important for guiding products)

Based on your business, think about what kind of feedback you need to get, and then verify it. From product launch to product maturity, that is, user surveys need to be carried out throughout the entire stage of the product, rather than just for your own pleasure.

Adjust your products and produce marketing content based on real feedback from user surveys to let users know that your products or content can bring them benefits and solve their problems.

Through user surveys, what business information do we generally need to know? Who are the main target audiences? What are the target audience attributes? What are the core needs of the target audience? Where are they active? What is your acceptance of the product price? How do they know you? What attracts them to your product? What is the core selling point of your product? What new needs do they have, etc.

Different survey goals are set according to the different stages of the product, and the product, market and operations are guided based on the feedback data.

For example, if a paid product has just been launched on the market, you can set the following survey directions and survey questions. This is just an example and the details are not included for now.

How to make users willing to cooperate with the investigation? There is only one principle to make users willing to cooperate with the investigation: make them feel that it is beneficial to them. It works every time.

2. Content Production

Through user surveys, after obtaining the business information we need according to the business type and survey objectives, we can use this statistical result to guide product and marketing content production. Regarding the production of marketing content, many people have the following misunderstandings: holding back on the "big idea", always thinking of making a big splash with a small investment, equating marketing content with copywriting , and self-satisfaction.

When producing marketing content, it is necessary to design it according to the characteristics of the user group. When there are zero users and when there are various users, there are different strategies for content production. For example, when the product has zero users, the production of marketing content should focus on one type of people, find out the core needs of this type of people, and create core selling points based on these core needs. Then, by combining different content formats, the selling points can be made into a needle that penetrates deeply into the core pain points of this type of people.

When you have various users, you should spread out your marketing content so that the various needs of various users can be well matched by different advertising forms. The highest stage of marketing content production is content productization, which can bring effective traffic in a sustainable and stable manner. In addition, the conversion process should be designed before content creation begins.

Good marketing is absolutely about providing continuous value to users. Marketing content is an extension of the product. Only by creating stable content that attracts traffic and turning the content into a product can you continue to bring traffic to the product.

▏3. Distribution channels

Most marketers have this misunderstanding about promotion channels:

Follow the crowd and hype whichever channel is popular (in fact, you should consider whether this channel can help your business? Is the popularity of this channel related to your business?)

The process of selecting promotion channels should be based on your own business, and then repeatedly determine based on feedback data whether promotion in one channel can obtain effective traffic, and then expand more effective channels.
How should you build your own promotion channels at different product stages?

Product embryonic stage: paving. Quickly test multiple channels, find the channels that produce quick results based on data feedback, and then optimize them in detail. The goal is to quickly screen out the channels that are most likely to obtain effective traffic.

Product development stage: specialize. Specialize in a few effective channels in order to continuously bring in stable and effective traffic. Invest your money in the most effective channels. The key is to dig deep into the channels with good results.

Product maturity stage: pavement + specialization. The goal is to maximize marketing effectiveness. It is necessary to conduct continuous delivery tests and collect data to continuously optimize the channel delivery effect.

4. Data Analysis

Data analysis is like a seed that wants to grow into a big tree. It not only needs to know when the soil is good and where the sunlight and rain are good, but also it must not grow crooked.

There are two key points to keep in mind when analyzing data:

1> What data?

Some people always like to collect industry data and industry reports, etc. However, it is actually useless to use these data as a basis for their own business. Only data related to your specific business is meaningful.

Don't be superstitious about things like forwarding volume and reading count. When content A is forwarded 2,000 times, it brings in 20 traffic but 0 conversions. Content B was forwarded 20 times, bringing in 200 traffic and 50 conversions. Which one do you think is more effective?

The purpose of promotion is the final effect, not to look good. When selecting data, be sure to choose data that is useful to the business, rather than a bunch of useless numbers that look good on the surface.

2>How to analyze?

Data analysis is about how to analyze and how to analyze at different product stages. The focus of data analysis is different at different product stages. In the embryonic stage of a product, the focus should be on conversion. A data recovery method should be established and conversion goals should be set. In the product development stage, more attention should be paid to optimization, and the product and marketing processes should be optimized based on the recovered data. Don't analyze data for the sake of analyzing it, but you also need to know that the data does not 100% reflect the facts, and you need to make a comprehensive judgment. Based on your own business, you should know clearly what feedback information is needed, such as conversion rate , and then analyze the feedback from the relevant data to adjust your business.

▏5. Adjustment and Optimization

Combined with the collected relevant data and analyzed, we can find the basis for adjusting and optimizing products, marketing and operations.

There are generally seven focus points for general optimization in product development: product complexity, landing page, product functions, conversion paths, marketing content and channels, payment process, product usage scenarios, etc.

All of this work is done to obtain effective traffic and effective marketing. We must first keep the product alive, and then focus on how to survive well. We must make the product truly solve the real needs of users, and let users clearly know what problems the product solves for them.

When doing marketing, you should always think: What is the product? For whom? What problem does it solve? How to solve it?