Every startup is unique and marketing your startup is quite a challenge. Questions like what would be the right approach or what would be the right strategy to market your startup need good answers. You cannot expect great results by doing what everyone is doing. What worked for others may not work for you.
For your business to shine in this swiftly changing startup ecosystem, you need to be unique rather than being mainstream. When you are unique, it helps your customers identify you easily. But how do you bring a unique approach to market your startup?
Here are five ways to make your business shine
1. Employ Different Strategies
Be it a product or service you offer, it must be surely different in some way or the other. Moreover, to stand ahead of the crowd with your offering you need to adapt unique strategies for marketing your business. Be innovative with your content marketing strategy, have an out of the box approach and focus on what makes you different from other. Highlight your uniqueness through the content you post and the way you post it on different social media platforms. With the Internet giving you numerous options for different types of marketing, choose the ones that could be the most effective for you and employ them.
2. Fix your Priorities
Have you ever given it a thought that what exactly is more important to your business right now and in the long term? Early days of a startup are always about beaming with new opportunities and saying yes to everything that comes your way. It teaches you what works for you and what doesn’t, to be more specific, you understand who your ideal clients are. In time you will have to say no to a lot of opportunities that come your way as they may not exactly sync with the kind of work you do.
Define your ideal customer persona or buyer persona. If a prospect or a lead comes your way that doesn’t fit into your ideal buyer persona sketch, keep your sales team ready to ask questions to disqualify the prospect on the basis of your parameters. If the prospect passes your questions, then let them come on board and set your expectations clear with them before having any sort of business with them.
3. Ensure your Vision is Followed
When you start something as big as a startup, you should surely have a long-term goal in mind. That long-term goal is your mission and vision. You need to have good clarity on how you see your startup ten years down the line and what you have to do now to achieve what you visualize. To fulfil your vision, you need to ensure it is followed by your employees. The vision statement of your company should be tied to the goals your employees wish to achieve. Drafting your long-term goals in this manner will make it an important part of daily work. Everyone in the work system, from the CEO to every single employee should put their efforts into creating a work culture that pursues your vision.
4. Hire, Train, and Fire
The success of your startup is defined by the kind of employees you have and the work they do for you. Hire smart employees and train them as per your work culture, the values you stand for, and the vision you are chasing. If for some reasons, a particular group of employees is not able to fall in sync with your long-term vision, it is better to let them go as it serves the greater good. You should not waste either your or their time. Over the course of time, they will get a better company and you will get an employee who relates better with your long-term vision. The idea is to create a team that believes in your vision and pursues it with all its strength.
5. Make your own Rules
Your startup is unique and since you are different from others, there is no need of following the same rules as other companies do. Being different, you need to have different rules in place. Do what works right for you. It is not necessary that you ask your employees to work for fixed hours or to have a dress code at the office. The major objective is having a good work environment that boosts your employees’ productivity even when they do not follow a fixed work hour pattern or a particular dress code. Keep your employees free of such hassles and simplify things for them. In short, whatever boosts your productivity, do it, and make it a rule.
At the end of it, do not follow the herd if you wish to be successful. If you want to make a mark in the today’s startup ecosystem, you need to have a persona that is unique and hasn’t been there before. Stand ahead of the crowd, and eventually stay longer in the ever-changing startup market.