Daily Marketing Steps and Routines For Startups
To start, let’s get some key thoughts out of the way.
First, stop assuming you will get your first 250 paying customers by a massive word of mouth campaign. Even if you’re solving a very common problem, a huge traffic bump from Product Hunt or TechCrunch is not enough to get past the pre-chasm stage.
Be realistic in what drives sustainable growth that you can replicate every day.
Second, drop the idea that you need to release a feature before you market your product. It’s easy to procrastinate your marketing efforts when you want to release your killer feature first.
Swallow your pride and start marketing your incomplete work.
Finally, remember this whole process is an odds game. In poker, you can hold pocket aces pre-flop and lose, but that loss shouldn’t always change your decisions when you get pocket aces the second or third time.
Assume your marketing efforts have a 10% success rate and try at least 10 times before pivoting to the next marketing effort.
Following me so far?
This framework is a collection of hacks and processes I provided for my company and is a brute-force method to seek your alpha. Every day, follow the headlines below and learn how you can use marketing routines to grow your company like the ones you see on Inc 500.
I wrote this post, as a software engineer, to bridge you into the mindset of a marketer, with content trimmed down to inbound-minimal-viable-marketing. You should feel uncomfortable and you should feel this is “a lot of work”.
Your Daily Marketing Routines:
- Guess a specific audience
- Validate your audience
- Create content to capture your audience
- Promote content and engage audience
- Measure
Execute this activity 60 minutes a day.
Ideate on what an ideal customer would be for your company.
Think hard and be creative with what kind of customer you want. Try not to multitask while working on this. It’s challenging to be creative when you’re distracted, so make sure you’re conducting this process in a distraction-free zone.
If you already know your ideal customer, don’t ignore this step. There’s more you can think of. You need a lot of segments to increase the range of potential marketing channels you can tap into.
When you come up with a few ideas, write an audience ideation list on Google Sheets. It should look something like this:
Create specific audience groups
Stay close to your product category and find specific audiences for it. You don’t want to target the world but you also don’t want to be too narrow. Create a specific audience instead of a narrow persona.
✅ Examples:
- Founders who read HackerNews.
- Developers who read HackerNews.
- Founders who read IndieHackers.
- Designers who read Web Designer Depot.
❌ Don’t do this:
- All viewers who read HackerNews.
- All viewers who read IndieHackers.
- All viewers who read Web Designer Depot.
When you target a specific audience, you can guide the content to what will mobilize that audience. Whether it be a click, retweet, or clap (if you’re into Medium), specialized content will increase your odds of success.
The key is to not overcomplicate the process. It took me 2 minutes to create 5 items. Do you think it would be too hard to think of 50 audience segments? How about in 1 day? For one hour?
Execute this activity 120 minutes a day.
Now that you have some narrow audiences, it’s time to execute on validation. Find content on platforms targeting the same audience.
If you were in your audience’s shoes, what would they search for, what posts would they like, what makes them happy?
Here’s what to do:
- Comb through comment threads on Twitter or LinkedIn.
- Look for a competitor post or topic-related posts that have similar targeting goals.
- Search through Quora and other Q&A sites to find the problems your audience has today.
Search for your audience’s pain points on social media, and validate if the results match. You’re looking for clues that point to the same conclusion that you reached in your first routine.
For ChipBot, I go on Twitter’s Search Bar and type: #chatbot problems, then I’ll do another search for #chatbot issues, and then I’ll try to find faq solutions. I’m reading carefully for anything that will tell me if this is a worthwhile audience.
Lurking in the search results on Twitter is a great way to see real-time discussions from your potential audience.
Don’t lurk too long though, timebox it for 20 minutes. It’s easy to do this for the rest of the day but you only need a small sampling to make a conclusion.
Your goal is to see if your hypothesis was right about your audience. This is also a great opportunity to talk to your potential audience and confirm your findings.
Create a list of keywords you think your audience talks about and review the top blog posts. Use keywords with 3 or more words to narrow the segment.
You’re looking for key posts that address your audience directly with quality content. If you’re stuck on keywords, try Google Search Console on your own website to start.
Ensure all the Google results you’re reviewing are organic. Paid traffic isn’t a good indicator since many ads use broad audiences.
You want to see who spent the effort on their SEO process, to be ranked on the front page of Google, and why.
Look for key phrases throughout the post and see how the post’s call-to-action relates to your audience. Review any comments and any potential link backs at the bottom of the post.
These posts won’t always lead to buying a product, but you’ll get the gist on why they targeted these people.
Find where your audience encounters the most pain and answer those posts. Search using identical keywords to what you used for social and Google. Set your filter by “1 Hour” if you intend to answer, but use “All Time” if you’re simply searching.
Your goal is to get about 15 upvotes on Quora, across all answers, per audience segment.
If you’re having difficulty getting upvotes, you may need to tweak your segment. Ensure your answer is well structured and thoughtful. Bad answers will only waste time for both the original poster and your research.
There’s so much data available to you for free, don’t leave it on the table!
Execute this activity 240 minutes a day.
This is the moment you’ve been waiting for: creating blogs, posting on social media, and answering targeted Quora questions.
Before you post, organize your marketing channels to match specific pieces of content.
This is a simple 2 column list of what the channel is and what content you are trying to push. For example:
- HackerNews – Blog Link
- Indie Hacker – Blog Excerpt pointing to Blog Link
- Twitter – Twitter Poll, Tweet
- Facebook – Video
- Instagram – Video, Image
- Quora – Answer with breadcrumbs of your Blog Link
This is the time to go on the offensive and create an attack strategy.
Now you post. It’s easy but time-consuming, and you most likely already know how to do this. I always say that this process is like the annoying parts of software development (like cross-browser testing).
Luckily, this is a well-saturated topic and you’ll most likely have your own opinion on what you want to create. I’ll list some of the key tips and resources that were differentiators for me.
Tips For Blogging:
- Unique case studies from 6 other startup founders.
- 4 steps to effortlessly boost your SEO traffic.
- Bonus ✨: Use the trial version of Ahrefs.com to find out your competitor’s web of backlinks.
Tips for Social Media:
- 500 Social Media Marketing Tips. At first, I thought this was going to be a terrible book because the title seemed it was for noobs. But I was wrong, the quality and relevant topics are there.
- Facebook Video Tips. I find it more successful to concentrate videos on Facebook and Instagram. For some reason, the attention span there is much different than anywhere else.
- Bonus ✨: Use Buffer to schedule your posts 30 days out across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Please don’t bother with Google+, they’re dead.
Tips for Quora:
- Post on subject matter expertise.
- Quality > Quantity. Although this tip is the same for everything else, Quora seems to be sensitive to bull****.
- Bonus ✨: More tips on Quora, from a Quora answer!
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