Brand chemistry: 5 Stages of Business (desktop)

Proven marketing strategies for tech startups at every growth stage

GIVE US A HOLLER

READ THE EBOOK

If you’re involved with a tech startup, it can be easy to get spooked by statistics.

Yes, there will be a lot of obstacles that could trip you up on your way. But you can avoid these pitfalls by understanding your customers and how they relate to your business at each stage, and crafting a solid marketing strategy to smooth your path to growth.

Stage 1: Pre-launch/concept

READ CHAPTER

By this stage, you should have an MVP. It won’t be perfect, but it’s a good start, and you can begin applying the build-measure-learn feedback loop to continue iterating and perfecting the product as you go. But in order for the feedback loop to be effective, you first need customers – ideally, lots of them.

Stage 2: Launch

READ CHAPTER

Phew! It’s been a hard slog, but you’re finally over the startup hurdle. By this stage, you’ve established product-market fit; you’re beating your competitors; and you’ve got your customer acquisition process running like a well-oiled machine, driving traffic, leads and conversions, and generating consistent revenue. But don’t pat yourself on the back for too long – the work doesn’t end there.

Stage 3: Growth and establishment

READ CHAPTER

By now, your company has firmly established its place in the industry, and is seeing a steady growth in revenue. The time has come for world domination. At this stage, you’ll be automating your processes, expanding your product range and thinking about tapping into new and emerging markets.

Stage 4: Expansion

READ CHAPTER

You’ve now made it through the expansion stage – products have been successfully launched, markets have been successfully conquered. You might still be seeing growth, though the rate of growth will likely have slowed substantially from the last stage; or you’ll have hit a point where your revenue has peaked and stabilised. At this stage, you, as an entrepreneur, are faced with a tough choice: do you continue pushing for expansion, or do you simply make a graceful exit?

Stage 5: Maturity

READ CHAPTER

Conclusion

It’s true – a lot of startups fail. But you don’t have to be one of them. By having a thorough understanding of which stage of growth your tech company is in, as well as a solid marketing strategy to get you through that stage, you can vastly improve your chances of succeeding (not to mention save yourself a lot of time and heartache in the process). But remember – you don’t have to go it alone. No matter what stage you’re in, a marketing agency (like ours!) can be a valuable asset and partner when it comes to getting you to that next step in the tech startup evolution process.

Want to know more about how we can help you grow?

Beating the odds

Want to learn more about how we can help you grow?

Tap each item

For instance, you may have heard that 90% of startups fail. Well, the good news is, that figure might be more like 60%. (Of course, good news is relative - because that’s still a greater than one in two chance that your startup will be just another upon the heap of failed startups that have come before.)

So how exactly do you do this? This ebook explains how your marketing approach should be tailored to provide maximum benefit at each of the five stages of your tech startup’s growth. By doing that, you’ll be able to establish and expand your business not just quickly, but also mindfully and cost-effectively.

Those five tech startup growth stages are: 1. Pre-launch/concept 2. Launch 3. Growth and establishment 4. Expansion 5. Maturity So let's go...

let's go

Conclusion

3 Content Distribution

2 Buyer Journey Tools and Tactics

1 Buyer Personas

The Technology Marketer's Guide

Conclusion

3 Content Distribution

2 Buyer Journey Tools and Tactics

1 Buyer Personas

The Technology Marketer's Guide

Beating the Odds

Introduction

Stage 1: Pre-launch/Concept

Stage 2: Launch

Stage 3: Growth and establishment

Stage 4: Expansion

Stage 5: Maturity

Conclusion

Beating the Odds

Introduction

Stage 1: Pre-launch/Concept

Stage 2: Launch

Stage 3: Growth and establishment

Stage 4: Expansion

Stage 5: Maturity

Conclusion

START MY SELF-ASSESSMENT NOW

At the beginning of this stage, you won’t have much except for an idea. Maybe you ran into a problem yourself, and thought, "If only I had an application or software that did XYZ, my life would be so much easier right now!" But how do you know if your idea is actually a good one? Check if you have a problem-solution fit. And how do you do that? Simply by following growth marketing consultant Lauren Bass’ advice and asking yourself two questions: 1. What problem am I compelled to solve? 2. Does my proposed solution solve it effectively? If you have a clear answer to question no. 1, and a resounding Yes for question no. 2, then huzzah! You’ve got yourself a problem-solution fit. Now it’s time to pressure test the idea and see if you can turn it into a viable business. This means talking to potential customers to collect ideas and gauge interest, and testing if there’s enough demand for the product to warrant proceeding to the next step: actually building something.

STAGE 1

Prelaunch/concept

BACK TO CHAPTER

By the end of this stage, you should have a minimum viable product (MVP), which, according to Eric Reis, is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. MARKETING BEST PRACTICES Market research like crazy Develop a hypothesis on who your target user might be, and then go and find people who fit that profile and interview them. Ask them how they view the problem you’re trying to solve, and how they’re currently managing that problem. What are their biggest pain points? What are their dream features? All this valuable information should not only feed into your product, but also plant the seeds from which your marketing strategy grows. Start building hype and testing demand Get the word out there about your product however you can: talk to your family, friends and neighbours about it; find social media groups and forums where your potential customers are hanging out; go to networking events.

BACK

BACK TO CHAPTER

It’s also worth investing in a public relations campaign to really create some buzz around the product. Test for demand using landing pages or crowdfunding campaigns – are people signing up? Do they sound excited about the prospect of your product? You want to make sure there’s a healthy demand before you invest too much into building anything.

BACK

BACK TO CHAPTER

Many startups try to focus on scaling at this stage. But premature scaling can be a really bad idea. Not only does it suck up precious cash more quickly, but committing yourself to a certain strategy or direction makes it much harder to pivot quickly if you need to. Instead, you should focus on finding product-market fit. This is the bedrock upon which everything else is built – without this, to put it bluntly, your tech company is dead in the water. In an infamous blog post titled "The only thing that matters", serial startup entrepreneur Marc Andreessen put it like this: "Do whatever is required to get to product-market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital – whatever is required. When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else." Product-market fit is basically a fancier way of asking, "Do people want what we’re trying to sell?" If the answer is No – well, then, clearly you have a problem.

STAGE 2

Launch

BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

BACK TO CHAPTER

The goal is to find customers who not only want to pay for your product, but want to keep paying for it on a regular basis – this customer retention rate is a key indicator of product-market fit. You also want customers who love your product so much they’ll tell anyone who’ll listen just how great it is – net promoter scores (NPS) are another good indicator of product-market fit. So how do you find these customers? By establishing your: 1. Buyer personas 2. Brand positioning 3. Brand strategy MARKETING BEST PRACTICES Develop buyer personas One of the first steps to achieving product-market fit is working out exactly who your customer is. Many startups tend to fall into the trap of targeting too broad a market, in the false belief that a bigger target means more potential customers. But, in reality, a product for everyone is really a product for no one. That’s why it’s important to get super specific and really try to zero in on exactly who your target customer is.

BACK

BACK TO CHAPTER

Buyer personas – fictional characters that represent a specific user or buyer type – are an excellent way to start the customer discovery process and find the market segment that really responds to your product so you don’t end up wasting precious time and resources targeting segments that maybe aren’t going to deliver as many returns. They also help you to identify and re-validate your target’s pain points, which is highly valuable information that can be fed right back into your product via improvements or new features, getting you ever closer to perfect product-market fit. Knowing your persona’s pain points also helps to mould your value proposition, strategy, messaging and so on, so you can deliver messages that are really going to resonate with the person on the other side of the screen. Create your brand positioning Once you feel like you have a good handle on who your customer is, you need to create a killer value proposition that will tell your target customer, in a nutshell, what value you offer that no one else does. In other words, why should your target customer come to you, and not your competitors, to have their need fulfilled? This is where brand positioning comes in. In essence, you should be able to encapsulate your entire brand promise

BACK

BACK TO CHAPTER

– the unique value that your tech startup offers your customers – in a single positioning statement. This is not your strapline or slogan (though it does influence it). This is your guiding north star. Your positioning statement should direct your strategy, your operations, your product – it should even influence how you answer the phones! If you want to know more, check out our blog post on 3 crucial steps that will lead to a compelling brand positioning strategy. Craft your brand strategy So you’ve got a highly specific buyer persona and you’ve got your brand positioning that outlines exactly what it is you offer customers that your competitors don’t – it’s now time to put this information into action with brand strategy. You don’t have a lot of resources, though, so you have to be clever about trying to reach your ideal users as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. You also want to be laying the foundation for those longer-term tactics that will help propel you into the next stage of growth, and even beyond.

BACK

BACK TO CHAPTER

A few things your strategy should be particularly focused on at this stage are: - Finding product-channel fit - Finding language-market fit - Content marketing and paid amplification Product-channel fit At this stage, the normal inclination is to dabble in a few different channels and see what sticks. But this thinking is actually flawed. According to Brian Balfour, founder and CEO of Reforge and former VP of Growth at HubSpot, most high-growth companies get 70% or more of their acquisition from one channel during the early stage, so you need to be deliberate about testing channels to find which is going to provide the highest yield for your particular product, and then focus heavily on the one or two most effective ones. A deep understanding of your customers (as provided by your buyer personas) will help you to zero in on top-performing channels faster.

BACK

BACK TO CHAPTER

Language-market fit Once you know where to reach your customer, you need to know how to talk to them so they immediately get what you’re all about, and how you can help them. Your personas and positioning are of course crucial when it comes to achieving language-market fit, but it’s also important to regularly perform A/B tests around different messaging, so you can continue to refine things like your taglines, features and benefits and call-to-actions. Content marketing and paid amplification As a burgeoning startup, you will come up against an initial lack of trust and social proof. Content marketing can help you overcome this by establishing you as an authority in the field, and really helping to drive home the fact that you possess the solution to the customer’s problem. The beauty of content marketing is that it is marketing capital that continues to grow and build on itself, so starting this early can put you in much better stead once you get to the next growth stage.

BACK

BACK TO CHAPTER

The downside of content marketing, though, is that it can take a while to generate real results, and you can’t sit there twiddling your thumbs in the meantime. That’s why paid amplification, such as via pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, is also crucial at this stage, so you can start building your customer base as quickly as possible.

BACK

BACK TO CHAPTER

If you want to take over the world, as should be the goal of any tech company, this stage is when you need to move into top gear. Here is where you need to be focusing on scaling your efforts and doubling down on the strategies and tactics that have been shown to work, in order to build on your income and prepare for consistent – or even sudden – growth. In this stage, there is also often one or more rounds of fundraising, so it’s important at this time to show you’ve established a proven marketing funnel and lead nurturing process. This will help fuel your assumptions for growth projections and business plans when talking with potential investors. MARKETING BEST PRACTICES Perform funnel optimisation Sure, your sales funnel is working well enough – but is it working as well as it possibly could be? Funnel optimisation is about smoothing out any elements of the user experience that are causing friction, thereby optimising activation, conversion and retention. As Lauren Bass puts it, "The heart and soul of any successful funnel optimisation effort is to uncover the ‘Aha Moment’ for users and get to it as quickly as possible."

STAGE 3

Growth and Establishment

BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

BACK TO CHAPTER

For example, if your retention rate increases after adding a certain feature to the product, then perhaps that signals a particularly strong pain point for your customers, and your messaging needs to shift to address that. Refine personas This stage is a great time to use all the data you’ve collected thus far to validate what you know about your personas and refine them further, particularly if you’ve expanded your product offerings and are targeting slightly different segments of the market as a result. This process should also feed back into funnel optimisation, to further shorten the sales cycle. It’s also particularly important to identify your radical buyers – your most loyal and lucrative customers, those who love and actively promote your product – so you can target these types of customers more deliberately and effectively.

BACK

BACK TO CHAPTER

Revisit branding and strategy By now, you should have a better sense of what your mission is, why you are driven to do what you do, how you benefit your customers and so on. Just like a teenager going into adulthood, your company is also becoming more grown-up – and your branding and strategy should reflect that. Your inbound and content marketing strategies should be evolving and growing in sophistication based on the data you’re collecting, and you may be employing marketing technology, such as a marketing automation platform, to scale your efforts in these areas. You should also be increasing your budget for paid amplification to continue to expand your reach.

BACK

BACK TO CHAPTER

It can be easy to be overconfident here, because you have a proven business model that, in theory, should be applicable to new products and markets. But be careful – there are absolutely no guarantees, and there are countless stories of big and well-established organisations who have tried to take on new markets and failed (think Starbucks’ disastrous venture in Australia). In order to give yourself the best chance of success, it’s crucial, therefore, to plan carefully. Be highly mindful of the resources you have available, and weigh up the costs and effort with the potential returns. And don’t forget about your existing customers – after all, they got you to where you are today, so maintaining the quality of your product and services is essential. MARKETING BEST PRACTICES Tweak existing strategies for new markets, products and channels. The beauty of this stage is that you already have proven sales, marketing, and operations models, so when it comes to adding new target markets and products into the mix, there’s no need to start from scratch – you can apply your existing models and just tweak

STAGE 4

Expansion

BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

BACK TO CHAPTER

them accordingly. This is why this stage is typically accompanied by a rapid growth in revenue. You’ll likely also start to find that the channels you’ve been focused on thus far are reaching the point of saturation, so you’ll need to start experimenting and investing in other channels in order to find new avenues for growth. This may involve hiring channel specialists in order to maximise these opportunities. As sales and profits start to take off, you can also start to increase your investments in promotional activities to further maximise your potential for growth. As you continue to scale your activities in order to reach new markets, products and channels, you may need increasingly advanced marketing technologies to support your efforts. Consider complexities of regional marketing While your existing models will give you a bit of a head start in terms of entering a new regional market, you should never underestimate the importance of cultural nuances. It’s important, therefore, to have local teams on the ground in order to really understand the intricacies of a particular region.

BACK

BACK TO CHAPTER

If you decide on the former, you’ll continue investing in growth teams and looking towards partnerships, or even mergers, to take your business to the next level. If you decide on the latter, it’s time to consider selling the business and moving on to the next great idea. MARKETING BEST PRACTICES Look towards partnership marketing strategies Partnership marketing with another successful company is a mutually beneficial arrangement that has been shown to lead to aggressive growth. We’ve seen, for example, how Google’s partnership with Samsung continue to take both companies to new heights; in fact, Samsung have recently announced they’ll be partnering with Google to bring augmented reality capabilities to its smartphones. There are several types of partnership marketing, including affiliation marketing, distribution marketing, licensing and joint products, so think big when exploring opportunities. Consider mergers and acquisitions If you feel like your company has done all it can do flying solo, it may be time to consider a merger or acquisition to diversify or sharpen your business focus, and continue to grow market share.

STAGE 5

Maturity

GO BACK TO EBOOK

BACK TO CHAPTER