How to Grow Your Startup Business: 12 Expert Marketing Tips

Growing a startup business is exciting, inspiring, and empowering – even if it’s not always easy. After all, you’re turning your dream business into a reality, and there are so many ways to expand. The direction you take will depend on your startup business plan. One thing that every successful startup has in common is collaboration. Nobody can do everything on their own, and by asking for advice and using oven-ready services to plug the gaps, you can accelerate through those first tricky startup stages.

To help you with your new business, we chatted to three experts: Mark Walker, Eventbrite, who gave us some insights on using events to supercharge growth; Tom Davies, Partnerships Coordinator at Mailchimp, who told us about the importance of email marketing; and Eléonore Hébrard, Social Media Coach at Hootsuite, who explained how using social media can help creators to connect with influencers.

Event marketing

If you’re planning to grow your business through events, Mark Walker of Eventbrite says there are four main things to consider:

1. Make sure your events have clearly defined goals. What do you want to get out of it? Leads? Brand Awareness? Product feedback? You should then align your event to achieve those goals and ensure you provide value to your attendees that aligns with the theme of your event. Make sure they have some genuine incentive to be there – whether you promise to feed them, entertain them, or simply educate them. Matching your event goal and attendee value will help make it more successful for everyone.
2. ‘People buy from people’, so to onboard those first customers and build close relationships with early supporters and fans, it’s a great idea to host events that give you that offline connection. It’s worked for companies as big as Twitter, who got their break at SXSW Festival in 2007 by presenting a huge billboard that showed people’s live tweets. During the event, they tripled their app’s usage and it helped build the momentum that’s led to them being a £30bn company today. Live events might be off the table right now, but you can still create exciting virtual events that will engage your audience and build that connection.
3. Maximise the impact of your events by ensuring you tie them to your digital strategy. Make them social, encourage people to tweet and use your company hashtag, and amplify the online conversation. You should also invite influencers to help spread the word about your event and your company.
4. Make sure you offer a great experience to your attendees from the start. As this might be the first time they’ve interacted with your brand, it’s essential to present the right impression. This means using an event registration system that’s simple, easy, and painless for you and for your guests – our services are a great example.

Email marketing

Tom Davies from Mailchimp shared a few gems around how to maximise the success of your email marketing:

1. If you want to grow your email list (and you should – it’s still one of the most effective forms of communication), then you need to give people a reason to sign up. What’s in it for the subscriber? Why are they signing up? If you can figure that out first, and make it clear, you should start seeing a lot more sign-ups. You can also improve the experience of your visitors, and increase sign-ups, by using dynamic sign-up forms such as those provided by AddThis and WisePops.
2. As a startup, it makes sense to work with best-in-class tech and your favourite existing products. That’s why Mailchimp has an API that lets you connect to all of your favourite apps (including Eventbrite and Hootsuite) so that you don’t need to spend time learning new tools.
3. Always be testing! Take the lean startup approach to email communication. Segment your lists to be more relevant, test what works and what doesn’t, and run A/B split testing on send times, subject lines, “from” names etc.
4. Last but not least, keep your lists in good health by regularly cleaning out old and uninterested contacts. They’re not doing you any good, so why hold onto them? It will be of longer-term benefit to have a smaller but highly engaged list. Keep GDPR regulations in mind too!

Social media marketing

Social media is an important part of any startup marketing strategy, and Eléonore Hébrard from Hootsuite says there are four main things to think about:

1. Identify which social platforms your audience is using so you can engage with them where they’re most comfortable. Don’t spend tonnes of time and money trying to get people to change their behaviours or communicating in places where your target market doesn’t go.
2. Social media is a great place to listen to conversations and competitors, and to gather feedback and competitive intelligence – all for free.
3. If you want people to pay attention to you, and build a great brand reputation, then you need to commit to publishing valuable content that will add value to the communities you want to reach.
4. Use social media to identify and connect with influencers from your market or industry and use those relationships to help boost your growth. You can also use paid social ads to reach a wider, global audience.

Growing a startup business is easier with firm foundations

When it comes to startup marketing, there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. However, your strategy is more likely to succeed if you follow some basic principles. Understand your audience, know what makes your brand unique, and use those findings – along with the expert tips above – to scale your business.

To maintain your growth, don’t forget to measure your ongoing performance and look for ways to finance your events.