In Part 4 of the series "Getting your first 100 Customers", we will deep dive into marketing. At this point you have 1. Established what your business stands for 2. Understood your potential customers 3. Nailed your products. Now, it’s time to spread the word!
Over the years, I have heard way too many founders speak of an illusion that once you have the best product and you are filling in a gap in the market effectively, your product will sell itself, and therefore, there is no need for marketing.
Right?
Wrong!
I respectfully and completely disagree with that thinking. If you don’t talk about what you have to offer, then a few people may accidentally stumble upon your product, sure, and maybe even love it too. They may even tell their friends about it but it’s highly unlikely that you will hit the tipping point and scale your business for the long run in that way.
Communicating your product offerings, your value proposition, your differentiating strategy as well as what your brand stands for, your core values, mission and vision to your target audience will not only inform them but will also give them the opportunity to get to know you and join your community. More broadly, marketing and promotion will allow you to accomplish the following:
Create brand awareness
Generate demand for your products and services
Boost your sales
Get new people to try out your products and services, and give you feedback
Prove your unique selling point (USP) and your differentiators against your competitors
Build a community and network
So how do you effectively spread the word to get your first 100 customers (and beyond?) without having to spend a lot of money and resources. Below are my 9 strategies:
1. Leverage your network: Start with your close friends and family - they will be rooting for your business success simply because they care about you! Next, you might look to your wider network e.g. your career network, your school alumni networks, your local neighborhood network, etc. Ask them to be your guinea pigs, try your product and share their feedback. Incorporate their feedback and input into your product development, and turn them into loyal users of your product. (it’s ok to give them free trials / free products / free memberships) Once they are on board, get them to become your brand ambassadors. Most people tend to buy something that is recommended by people they trust. Your friends have friends who have friends, etc. Ask them to spread the word by sharing about your product, offering them a discount code or offer to share with their networks.
2. Tastefully and delicately design your offline (e.g. storefront) and/or online presence: Your storefront, which in the digital world are your website and social media pages, is your customers’ window into your world, so do make sure to spend enough time, effort, and resource into making it inviting, welcoming, educational, easy to understand, engaging, and on brand. Make it easy for your customers to understand your business and your offerings, and try them out. If you are selling online, make the purchase flow easy and quick. If you are an educational platform, make sure your content is easy to find and consume. If you are a service provider, make sure your customers can contact you easily to avail of your services. Make sure your website and your social media pages are well-structured and optimized so that when you use paid advertising, online or offline, (more on this down below) you can direct your customers to your website to achieve your call to action (CTA) - whether it is signing up for your newsletter, purchasing your product or service, watching your content, or subscribing to your beta program.
That said, the fact that you have an amazing website (congratulations on that - it is a big accomplishment and will do you good) doesn’t mean you don’t need to be on social media. While you can be selective on which social media channels to use (E.g. if you are targeting Generation XYZers, you might go for Instagram and Tiktok; where if you are targeting the 30+ working professionals, you might decide Linkedin and Facebook are more appropriate) you do not want to miss out on the 4.2 billion active people who use social media today. Your social media presence is complementary to your own website and can be used to share similar / same content and functionality as well as sending traffic to your website. The key to social media presence is to be engaging, relevant, and current (i.e. regularly posting and updating) so people have a reason to visit and follow your page.
3. Create outstanding content: According to a Demand Metric study, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing & generates about 3 times the leads. Engaging, relevant, and useful content is a prime way to attract and retain your target audience. If you are selling yoga gear, for example, you might have a blog where you share content related to yoga, fitness, and healthy living in general. According to a Hubspot report, businesses with blogs generate 126% more leads than their competitors who do not have blogs, and 64% of customers make purchase decisions by relying on blogs rather than newspapers. When you publish a blog that your audience wants to read, not only will you attract and retain your target market, but you will also be likely to get more views as search engines will reward you for being relevant and interesting. You will appear against search queries that your content will be relevant to, and more people will engage with your content, learn about your business, and will likely become a customer.
Another effective way to visually communicate about your business to potential customers is video marketing or vlogging. You can create videos that are detailing the features and benefits of your product and services, you can offer an inside look into the product (e.g. unboxing videos), you can talk about your business values and vision. You could also encourage your customers (including your friends and family we talked about under point 1) to shoot videos when they are using your product / service or ask them to submit testimonials about your business. Upload your videos into your Youtube Channel, Tiktok, Facebook & Instagram pages etc. as well as linking to them / embedding them on your website to encourage as many views as possible. Posting regularly on social media will not only keep your audience engaged (consistency is key!) and make sure they keep you top of mind, but also it will help your online credit in that search engines and social media algorithms will know you are active and current, therefore will reward and prioritize your content. Educational content is always useful as mentioned, though you might also jazz things up a little with fun games, quizzes, polls, contests with prizes attached. Get some inspiration for fun social media contests here
3. Build and market to an email list: Make sure you are getting the email addresses of people who have engaged with your content. Whether visited your website, your social media pages or posts, checked out your podcast, or listened to you speak at a conference / webinar, you can direct them to your newsletter / email list sign-up form. You can also ask customers directly for their email addresses, especially if you are engaging with them face to face or over a phone call. Once you have an email list, make sure you are sharing a diversified non-commercial content that is useful and interesting. If you are too sales-y, i.e. if your emails only contain content to invite people to buy from you, then people will likely unsubscribe. It’s important, therefore, that you are providing utility and purpose. You could, for example, include your articles from your blog, you could include tips and tricks (e.g. if you are a food company, you could write about cooking tips; or if you are a make-up company, you could write about skincare tips), you could talk about your own updates if your business is related to you (e.g. if you are a freelance travel consultant, you could talk about your own travels and what you specifically enjoyed)
4. Give talks, webinars, be featured as a guest speaker at events: Any opportunity you get to spread the word on your brand, cause, purpose, mission, vision, and products is a pathway into educating people on your value proposition and getting a following. It is expected that founder(s) who are passionate about what they have created and what they are pursuing to join conferences, seminars, workshops, and other events to talk about their business. I have spoken to a few founders who say that they are too busy making the business, the product, the customer service, and everything else great while also fundraising and fixing things that break and, therefore, have no time for events. So could they send someone else on their behalf? While that might sometimes be ok, I would generally advise against it. Having an educational webinar series or classes around your product or your philosophy (e.g. Lululemon, a yoga gear brand, has free yoga classes taught by different yoga teachers) by other people will be great for brand awareness and knowledge, telling your story and what your brand stands for cannot be as effective if done by someone else. It’s very understandable that founders are busy, but factoring in time to promote your brand and tell your story should be part of the priority list. (and yes, even if you are an introvert!)
5. Effectively build and utilize an influencer community: According to Malcolm Gladwell in his book, "The Tipping Point", there are three types of people who make change happen and help businesses tip: mavens, who are knowledgable about things and like to share their knowledge with others, salespeople, who convince others by ‘selling’ an idea, and connectors, who with their many links distribute and collect information. Find your mavens who are passionate about your business, are willing to study it and share their knowledge with the world while offering advice, mentoring people, running workshops and courses, writing blogs, creating voice and video content (and the list goes on). Next, connect with your connectors (get it?). The connector is an information conduit, networker, communicator, she is the link between people in a network and between networks, and will be able to naturally be your link to people you need to and want to meet. Ask them to connect you with the right people and groups, and they will happily put in a good word for you and pave the path for you to tell your story. The salespeople (not necessarily people hired by you as salespeople) are naturally gifted at selling an idea, a product, a service, a concept, a philosophy. They are your friends who are able to convince their kids to eat broccoli (they sold it to them somehow!), the people who noone seems to be able to say "No" to. They are known to be charming and charismatic, and are people magnets. They are important to your business because.. well… they will be able to sell your products / business to potential customers. Identify who they are and introduce them to your business (if they haven’t been introduced yet) and incentivize them (by either hiring them, proposing a commission based arrangement or by onboarding them as an advisor / investor to your business or partnering with them in any other creative way) so they can use their talents and skillsets to be your extended marketing team.
6. Invest in promotional campaigns: I know it sounds a little cliche but people love a good promotion. Whether it’s free trials, coupons, discounts, freebies, swag, people are drawn to them because everyone loves free items - it’s basic human psychology! A promotional gift, especially when thoughtful and targeted at the audience and fit for context can be excellent for brand awareness and recall. It will make people remember you and might even turn them into your brand ambassadors and mass spreaders. E.g. a solar panel company was handing out organic non-toxic hand sanitizer with their company logo on it at a clean energy conference I attended in San Francisco last year - The attendees are clearly environment conscious and the pandemic was still winding down, the conference was outside but people were still worried about viruses spreading, so the context as well as the audience’s needs and preferences were well-captured. I used the hand sanitizer for months to come and quite a few people asked me about the bottle (which was very sleek) and what the company was so I ended up being their free marketeer.
7. Encourage reviews and referrals: According to Trustpilot, 89% of global consumers say checking online reviews is part of their buying journey. It makes sense because people want to see if they can trust your business and what you are saying about your offering before they buy from you - someone who has tested your offering will be more trustworthy than you talking about your product. They will be more honest, so if they are raving about you, that is more valuable than you raving about your own product. People are short on time these days so give them an incentive to write a review for your business / product and have a referral program that you use to encourage your existing customers to bring their friends along. It might be a discount or a voucher, or some sort of carrot (like a freebie!). A word of caution though: What I see increasingly is that businesses advertise their referral programs as something like $50 if a friend signs up with your unique referral code, and then when you read the fine print, the terms and conditions are different. For example, for a well-known payment platform, signing up to an account is not enough (though you would think it would be from the way it’s advertised) they need to sign up for a credit card and make three qualifying credit card transactions. Make sure you don’t repel people with your referral program like this payment platform does - if they feel "tricked" your brand image might suffer.
8. Form partnerships and alliances: Find the groups or businesses that your target audience already are affiliated with and trusts and offer them a strategic partnership. If you are a healthy juice company for example, you might be interested in partnering with nature and hiking clubs. If you are selling baby products, you might like to partner with moms groups. Partnerships are hard to form, usually tend to take a long time and they come in many different sizes and set-ups. You can sign an exclusive sponsorship agreement, give them an opportunity to use your services for free or just wow them with your story so they are willing to feature you, let you come and talk to their audience for free, etc. Don’t try to rush into them or approach it with a "one size fits all" approach. Instead take your time and talk to your potential partners to come up with a win-win arrangement that works for both sides.
9. Pay for digital advertising: Traditional advertising such as TV ads, print ads, billboards, direct mail etc. tends to be quite expensive, so unless you get a great sweet deal, I would opt for digital advertising that has vast reach, produces real time data that you can learn from and optimize with, and has a high ROI.
93% of all online interactions start with a search engine. Paid search ads on Google are a great platform for you to appear against keywords that describe your business when people are searching for what you can provide. For example, if a prospective customer searches for men’s red shoes and you sell men’s red shoes (among other colors), bingo! They will view your ad, click on it, and be on your website - your storefront - where they can view and purchase your products. This is known as pull marketing. You can also use display ads on the Google Display Network, Facebook, Instagram as well as video ads on Tiktok, Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube to tell your story and to get people who are in your target market on to your platform - this is known as push advertising. No matter what you do, don’t forget to include a call to action (CTA) on your ads and direct them to a destination URL where your potential customers can easily understand the connection and -hopefully- finalize the action you have invited them to take.
Congratulations on spreading the word with effective marketing and promotion! Next week, I will be back with the last part of the series: perfecting customer service - stay tuned!
Connect with me at merve@leadrisecoaching.com if you have any questions / comments / experiences you would like to share on getting your first 100 customers!
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