Promoting startups: 10 hard-hitting promotion methods

Any product needs any advertisement, be it a mobile app or field-specific software. Promoting startups has various types, so here are 10 well-tried methods: check if you’d used all the possibilities to tell about your project.

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Promoting startups with a budget on marketing

This method will allow you to change loyal users into ambassadors of the projects and develop the startup. Motivate your clients, who have made a purchase, to advertise your product in their encirclement — as people are more likely to trust personal recommendations, rather than advertisements. Offer your clients discounts/bonuses in exchange for attracting a new user and track the results. Considering the existing solutions, Ambassador is one of such services, which includes all key stages of the referral program.

Your product is the centre of the challenge. Such a method will help not only to increase the audience and promote the brand, but also to make the challenge participants think about your product and learn about its functions. You have to launch a viral marketing company to promote the project with this method. You need to start with an interesting and realizable task for the audience, which will be the easiest to solve with the help of your product. When Codecademy was a startup, they launched a New Year’s Eve challenge, inviting people to set a goal for themselves to learn to code for a year. The Challenge became a viral success and helped to promote the platform — the company has a large base of interested users.

Via mail out, targeted advertising, communities dominated by the target audience of a competing product, and therefore your potential customers, tell them about the benefits of your product and what problem it solves.

It is an expensive but effective way of promotion. The majority of companies spend money on advertising to attract new users or promote a startup, so why not give it directly to every new client? When PayPal was a dark horse project, it paid $10 for each new customer and $10 for existing customers for each new customer.

Make a list of those who have competency in your product’s sphere and have an influence on your target audience, get to know these people or their representatives and include them in your promoting strategy. Be in touch and inform them about the updates in your product and by realizing your influence-marketing strategy, you can get things rolling for your startup and make a significant contribution into achieving product metrics.

In the perfect case — use a humorous style. Hundreds of founders managed to promote their startups in such way. The more shocking, hilarious, “edgy” the video is, the larger audience it will be able to cover, and more people will get to know about you.

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“Free” promotion method

Find a well-known brand that is interested in cooperation and offer it a mutually beneficial cooperation option. You will get his audience in return, and he will get an opportunity to present a new feature to your audience.

It is another long-running method to promote the startup. This method allows you not only to increase the audience but also to create an advantageous company image. By buying your product, people will know that they are helping to achieve a high purpose: be it the help to sick people, homeless animals or nature itself.

Yes, it can be pretty free in a startup, if the content plan will be realised by the team itself. A personal blog is what will provide the project with fame. By generating high-quality content that is useful for the target and near-target audience, you will attract new customers and gradually become recognizable. The blog can be kept both on your own website and on special websites such as Medium, vc.ru (for projects from the CIS), Habr and/or in social networks relevant to you.

Register on free platforms for startups (Product Hunt, AngelList, Wefunder, Y Combinator), so there you will find your expert audience and receive feedback from a competent community. Use websites for ask-answers (Quora, Answers, Reddit, Yandex.Q), create your product’s profile and answer questions, which are somehow connected to the startup’s operational sphere.

And in conclusion: you can promote your product through your personal brand as well. To do this, try to communicate more with people who make decisions in your and related spheres, write an expert column in the media that your audience reads, don’t be shy to give interviews and comment on events that are important for your clients. It should not be all at once, but over time it will pay off handsomely.