TL;DR the startup edition – Blogs that Startups should read from 2017

2017 Go to blogs for startup marketing

Here are the blogs that we have written over the year that are important to the Startup people.

Just recently I was talking to a founder of a startup about how it was going. His response is that I gave it up and went back to trading instead.

His reasoning behind it is with trading, especially if it is only for your gains, is easier to predict. Full disclosure, he had been working in that field for a number of years prior to the leap into the world of startups.

He felt that it was actually easier for him to make money trading as the odds were in his favor in comparison to the odds of finding product market fit, relevant funding, the right co-founders/team, connections, etc. Then as a founder it is necessary to wear a number of different hats. Recruiting specialist, marketer, finance manager, sales rep and also balance that with a life.

That being said, if you are starting from zero in both areas, then it is easier to understand that a startup can be more influenced by your own determination and hard work, you just have to be very smart about your time.

To this end, we have produced some blogs that we feel are very relevant to anyone starting a company. We will give you nice easy summaries to help you save even more time.

Startup marketing 101

You are funded and now need to make a marketing splash. Out come a thousand different ideas to spend that money. Is SEO more important than PPC? Is a part time senior hire better than a full time junior? Should there be a dedicated person or can the team split the tasks…all of these issues can burn money quickly. Find out what we recommend.

It is time for content, without it you are just posting cat videos on social media and not driving any traffic

Self hosting your precious content is a must. It protects you as much as possible from algorithm changes or potential instability of platforms. Just this year SoundCloud almost disappeared. Use other platforms to boost your reach and remember that rel= canonical is your biggest asset here.

Find out how to self-host your podcast as well.

How long should the post be for Google to be happy? That question is probably the most asked question we get from startups that have 50 other things to do. The annoying answer is you are supposed to produce Quality (deep content) and Quantity (1-2 posts a week). Both are hard to do in a startup. Use the whole team here, but also try a mix of shallow and deep content to keep up the pace until the team grows to move away from shallow. Also, feel free to revisit old blogs and turn shallow topics into deeper dives.

Getting a website live as quickly as possible is another task that faces founders. We tested how easy it is to the a site live by hosting it on Amazon Lightsail, and it is very quick and pretty much a click by click guide.

Going to or hosting an event is not enough, you need to be seen DIGITALLY. Here we talk about some of the top tips about covering an event as part of the hosting team. A lot of these tips can be used as someone who is attending the event to make the biggest digital impression possible. Tip 11 is the most important!

Influencer marketing as a term became so popular to talk about it is the bitcoin of marketing! Is there a viable model behind this? The short answer is yes, but you have to be clever and do your leg work. Live in the niche as it tends to be a place where trust has been built and thus a recommendation there is worth a lot more.

Social Media tips

If you have been following us long enough, you will realize that we are a great fan of the level playing field that twitter offers over other platforms. Unfortunately, trolling is still a big problem but

As such we have written about different ways to use twitter and share content quickly that you find. Here we show how, through the use of a Chrome extension, you can turn a slice of text into an image and post it directly to Twitter. Finally, a picture is worth a thousand words plus at least one hashtag as well.

Twitter is at its best when it is a conversation. For a long time, it was only possible to embed a hashtag search into a blog. That has changed and it is easy to now add the entire thread to blogs, just follow this guide to leverage the twitter interactions that you have.

In the Digital world it is easy to lose touch with the new up and coming tools and how they are being used by younger generations. We decided to outsource a blog here to Rolf’s niece who give a valuable insight on how to reach a younger generation and also on which platform.

 

App and tool tips

Leads, Leads, LEADS! This is where marketing meets sales. If the sales teams don’t have them, revenue doesn’t happen. There are a number of tools that can be used to support your website to become a lead generation monster. Here are a few that we have tested. Remember, your goal is to have every visitor take an action to leave some details. #GatedContent

 

Voice is back! This year has seen a resurgence in audible content. The Burger King /Google Home ad won an award and showed the ad world that it is possible to activate the home assistants. We have also seen an enormous rise in podcasts. With new tech out there, what was once a long process can now be reduced or even automated with ease.

• Create podcasts on Anchor
• Use Speechkit to turn your written content into podcasts

Facebook is a misunderstood and badly utilized tool for marketing in general and lead generation in specific. We have seen too many companies posting on Facebook through a sense of FOMO. This leads to a hootsuite account pushing the same content with the same message across many different platforms…YUCK! Please stop being lazy or using the tools you have incorrectly.

With no coding needed it is possible to turn your Facebook ads into a main lead gen source. Facebook+Zapier+Mailchimp = Marketing automation

As a special bonus, Luca was invited to try out automatically promoted tweets by Twitter as he is power user.

 

The Reading List

We have our favorite places to find good content and some of them are a little hidden, that is why we thought about sharing a few hidden gems with you. Please feel free to add a few we should look at in the comments.

Stay curious and read a lot about your profession. Here are a few under the radar sites that we like to read

As you can guess most modern marketing departments now behave a lot like startups so there these blogs are likely to speak to them as well. We will be releasing a summary blog just for corporate clients very soon.

If there are any other marketing topics that you are looking for a little help understanding, just send us a comment and we will add it to our 2018 blog list.

Most underrated marketing channel…NEWSLETTER!