7 Essential Startup Marketing Tools
So you’ve finally got some funding for your new tech startup. How’s it feel? Pretty awesome right?
Unfortunately, awesome parties are only part of the story. About 50% of startups close down before their fifth birthday, or up to 90% in the case of tech startups.
Have no fear though, the fine folks at Extreme Accelerator have compiled a list of tools to help avoid common business pitfalls. As part of a new series on the EA blog, we’ll be introducing our favorite tech tools to help kick things into high gear. Since in the beginning, most startups have yet to roll in the dough, we’ll be using exclusively low, or no cost solutions. So grab your coupon book, and your loyalty cards, we’re going on a frugal adventure.
In this very first edition, we’ll be covering some useful promotional tools. As Nicolas Gremion of TechVibes.com writes, for many startups: “Limited cash automatically translates to little or no marketing budget.” In fact, according to a CB Insights report, marketing issues account for 14% of startup failures. Quite simply, you need to effectively advertise to your target market, or nothing else will matter.
Quick Summary
Let’s Get Social
There’s no disputing that social media and online advertising are exceptionally effective. With so many adopters, it’s hard to make your app’s page stand out amongst hundreds of others. Throwing a couple bucks into a platforms premium services may help, but the costs add up, don’t they?
Not necessarily.
Facebook offers FbStart, a program that offers over $80, 000 in tools to startup mobile devs for free. The package includes $500 of Facebook advertising credit, along with 6 months of MailChimp service, and Hootsuite to top it off. This will quickly get you started on grabbing ad space on the world’s largest social media platform, sending a newsletter out to spread the word, and provide the most popular social media management tool out there.
Generating Content
Once you’re set up on social, you’ll need to start uploading content. But instead of having to pay large licensing fees for templates to work off of, where can you get basic stock media?
- Photos: Need a large library of photos to search from? How does more than 33 million sound? While many people have used Wikimedia sites, such as Wikipedia.org, most have never heard of the Wikimedia Commons. The Commons are an online storehouse of a variety of creative commons images, many of which have very few restrictions on their reuse. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the Wikimedia Commons contain the length of 57, 000 copies of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
- Video: Sometimes you’re creating a commercial and need a couple of seconds of stock footage for a quick transition, or sometimes you need base content for making a cool cinemagraph (more on that below). Pexel offers completely free stock video clips, licensed under the creative commons. Our favorite thing about the site is that all the videos come in HD MP4 files, which are widely used and compatible with nearly every program that uses video.
- Music: Bensound is one of our favorites due to the very professional production quality of the music tracks on offer, and the huge variety of genres available. They’re in the vein of modern radio or cinema pieces, and best of all, free with attribution.
Standing Out
Cinemagraphs, like the one posted above, are a great way to make your content pop online. Luckily, EVP portfolio company Flixel offers a free trial of their cinemagraph software right here. Flixel is excellent due to its clean, easy to understand interface. It takes very little time between importing a video clip, to publishing a cinemagraph onto your social media domain. The full version of all the apps are a bargain at only $16 a month all together.
SEA — Search Engine Awesome-ization
Finally, you’ll want to ensure that your content appears high up on search engines with proper SEO. As you may know, the key to high search ranking is ensuring that webcrawlers (software spiders that scour the internet for links), can easily traverse through your content.
UK based marketer Rob Hammond offers a helpful free analysis tool on his website; it simulates the web crawls on your site, ensuring that Google can index them. We here at the Extreme office have used this to find problem pages on our own sites, and after updating, have decreased the time of third party webcrawls.
Finally, if you run your firm’s website through Wordpress, definitely pick up Yoast SEO. It’s a simple plugin that advises you on how best to optimize your articles for search, and manages backend settings in a less messy interface. Best of all, it’s free, and combined with Hammond’s webcrawler, we’ve already seen improvements on our own sites.
We hope you enjoyed the first article of the Essential Startup Toolkit. Like the rapper Drake, you’ll need to keep track of your lump sums and residuals, so our next article will be about accounting software to simplify your startup’s tax season. For the best in personalized support, drop us a message at info@extreme.tech for a quote on our comprehensive startup servics.
