Startup vs Established company marketing | Is there or should there be a different approach?
Arun Pariyar
9 replies
I am not a marketing expert in anyway so I am sure my knowledge in this is limited but I want to share this question that has been on my mind.
Although it is possible for startups to take marketing ideas from major players, can/will they really work ?
Startups that are in the process of making often can't be fully sure if there is a market share for what they are building. Hence why they sometimes have to pivot to establish product fit.
What have you seen or experienced that works for startups that different from the norm ? Would love to hear your views.
Replies
Daniel Engels@daniel_engels
there is definitely a difference. To begin with, a startup doesn't have the same budgets. Secondly, it's normal for a startup to take some reasonable risks in communication. Thirdly, a startup might want to focus on a single channel that works while an established enterprise might accept awareness campaigns without an immediate ROI.
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SetOps
Thanks for the clear cut pointers @daniel_engels 🚀
Slow, steady content emissions for startups. You can brute force with paid ads if you have traction already like with an established company, and you arent trying to bring folks into the dark corner of the internet you recently created.
About building and pivoting, this is the beginning of a relationship with your customers, this requires listening and doing in that order, but only once there is something to change.
To counter this, one can try cheaper front-end only product iterations to see if the product as advertised has any traction at all, and from there you can be at least slightly de-risked as you allocate more resources to a full product build
SetOps
Hey @dylan_merideth
Great Suggestion. I agree working with paid ads can be so demanding as well as you are trying to get market share often paying higher bids for keywords. Changes as you said should not made haphazardly but after validating with a larger uses base. Thank you for your comments 👍
@arunpariyar Its hard sometimes, but waiting to hear how your users use the product will tell you what it should be. Thanks for the discussion!
I think it really depends on the stage and the end user (B2C vs B2B).
Some best practices are useful for both, but the major difference IMO is that big companies can leverage Brand reputation and therefore they can use social media more as an acquisition channel because they can reach a lot of traffic from there. Early stage start ups and SMBs cannot do this, they must rely more on organic growth and affiliate marketing.... Interesting topic! Would like to see other comments
SetOps
Hey @ludovico_petrali, in addition to the things that you have pointed out I would like to add my observation. I have seen that establishing a minimum viable community and building in public alongside transparency adding to the communities excitement and engagement. This can become a very powerful grassroot strategy that creates buzz opening more avenues for standard marketing strategy. This I feel is helping startup achieving success. Thanks for sharing your comments and I am sure we will have other people bringing in their ideas to the topic! 🙂
@arunpariyar I totally agree, platforms like ProductHunt are definitely making the whole process much more transparent and powerful