Startup Commons

  • Startup Commons
    • About Us
    • Our Team
    • Our Customers
    • Services And Pricing
    • Our Business Model
    • Our Digital Solutions
    • Our History
    • Contact Us
    • Partner With Us
    • Request For Speakers
    • Job Opportunities
    • International Internships
  • Business Creators
    • About Business Creators
    • Creating Businesses
    • What Is A Startup
    • Startup Development Phases
    • Growth Academy Elearning Platform
    • Founders Shareholders' Agreement and Team Building Online Training
  • Support Providers
    • About Support Providers
    • Learn About Startup Ecosystem
    • Startup Development Phases
    • Providing Support Functions
    • Innovation Entrepreneurship Education
    • Innovation Entrepreneurship Curriculum
    • Growth Academy eLearning Platform
    • Certified Trainers
    • Become Growth Academy Provider In Your Ecosystem
    • Growth Academy Training On-Site By Startup Commons
  • Ecosystem Development
    • About Ecosystem Developers
    • What Is Startup Ecosystem
    • Ecosystem Development
    • Ecosystem Development Academy eLearning Platform
    • Subscribe to Support Membership
    • Ecosystem Operators
    • Development Funding
    • For Development Financiers
    • Startup Ecosystem Maturity
    • Case Studies
    • Submit Marketplace App Challenge
    • Become Ecosystem Operator
  • Digital Transformation
    • Digital Transformation
    • Ecosystem Operators
    • Apply To Become Ecosystem Operator
    • Applications Partnership
    • Ecosystem OS
    • Circle Pass User Accounts
    • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
    • Digital Ecosystem Applications
    • App Developers
  • Contact Us
  • Startup Commons
    • About Us
    • Our Team
    • Our Customers
    • Services And Pricing
    • Our Business Model
    • Our Digital Solutions
    • Our History
    • Contact Us
    • Partner With Us
    • Request For Speakers
    • Job Opportunities
    • International Internships
  • Business Creators
    • About Business Creators
    • Creating Businesses
    • What Is A Startup
    • Startup Development Phases
    • Growth Academy Elearning Platform
    • Founders Shareholders' Agreement and Team Building Online Training
  • Support Providers
    • About Support Providers
    • Learn About Startup Ecosystem
    • Startup Development Phases
    • Providing Support Functions
    • Innovation Entrepreneurship Education
    • Innovation Entrepreneurship Curriculum
    • Growth Academy eLearning Platform
    • Certified Trainers
    • Become Growth Academy Provider In Your Ecosystem
    • Growth Academy Training On-Site By Startup Commons
  • Ecosystem Development
    • About Ecosystem Developers
    • What Is Startup Ecosystem
    • Ecosystem Development
    • Ecosystem Development Academy eLearning Platform
    • Subscribe to Support Membership
    • Ecosystem Operators
    • Development Funding
    • For Development Financiers
    • Startup Ecosystem Maturity
    • Case Studies
    • Submit Marketplace App Challenge
    • Become Ecosystem Operator
  • Digital Transformation
    • Digital Transformation
    • Ecosystem Operators
    • Apply To Become Ecosystem Operator
    • Applications Partnership
    • Ecosystem OS
    • Circle Pass User Accounts
    • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
    • Digital Ecosystem Applications
    • App Developers
  • Contact Us

5 Brand Marketing Tips for Startups

1/7/2015

Comments

 
Picture
The success of your startup depends a lot on your brand. According to Marketing-Schools.org, a brand represents a company’s market identity: who its members are, “what they do, what kind of quality they provide, their reputation for trustworthiness, and more.” Building a strong brand is an investment which pays off a lot in the end: your brand starts working for your financial benefit. Fierce competition and abundance of marketing information can confuse customers: they can be easily attracted, distracted and taken away by competitors. One of the most effective ways to secure the position of your business in the market is creating a good brand marketing strategy: a strong brand helps customers to filter out marketing information, directs them to your products or services and eventually establishes their loyalty. Brand marketing is not an easy task, however. Here are 5 tips which you might find useful for developing your startup’s brand.

1. Communicate clearly. Company X is a leading mobile app developer in country Y. This sentence is a marketing cliché: there are many companies which can easily fit in. The mobile app industry is developing so fast that every day can bring new ‘leaders’, who can become your direct competitors. So if you want to stand out in the market and have a reputation of a reliable company, you should choose words to promote your brand more carefully. If you, however, still consider yourself as a market leader, you should simply explain your achievements. Without a clear explanation, it is just an empty phrase. The same applies to other cases.

2. Analyse your customers’ needs. Despite so much emphasis on the customers-go-first idea, top-down brand marketing is still very popular. What is wrong with it? Customers have changed a lot: they are more aware of different opportunities and their own needs, more critical, demanding and independent decision-makers. Top-down marketers, however, seem to be ignorant of these changes. They still believe that they have some sort of authority to tell customers what to buy and do not see any business potential in treating them more like partners whose suggestions matter. Laura Schwab, Marketing Director at Land Rover, has predicted that in 2015 brand marketing will concentrate on customer experience: companies will be competing for providing the best experience for their customers. There is still a lot of time left to test the accuracy of her prediction but what is already clear is that customer choices are becoming more personalised and sophisticated. As a result, brand marketing campaigners will face more challenges.  

3. Don’t be hyperactive online. Website / blog / Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / YouTube / e-mail newsletters – these are only a few options of how you can increase your brand's visibility. It is not as easy as it seems at first sight. Being active online does not mean you need to start using everything at random. You should not share tweets with links to articles that are not directly connected to your startup’s activities nor post them on Facebook only to collect more likes – no random actions if you really want your brand to be associated with quality, reliability and professionalism. Each action you take online has to be meaningful: you need to know what you want to do, why and how it will affect your company’s reputation. You should also pay attention to the form: pick up as many communication formats and channels as you can manage well. In other words: you need a clear online communication strategy.

4. Tell stories. Storytelling is an integral part of brand marketing: a brand is promoted in the form of engaging stories about a company, its products, services or other activities. Brian Honigman, Content Marketing Consultant and CEO of Honigman Media, has also observed a new trend in brand storytelling: brand marketers have started “branding themselves as storytellers”. What does it mean in practice? For illustration, he refers to the case of OkCupid’s blog. Each post is a story on user dating experience: there are many insightful comments on dating trends illustrated with specific user data. This helps to retain interest in OkCupid’s service and build loyalty to its brand.

Why not to follow OkCupid’s example or try to develop your own storytelling technique? For example, you can encourage your customers to share their experience of using your product or service on social media or a blog. You can also regularly post some user data which might attract your customers’ interest and encourage them to comment. To get the attention of more demanding customers, once in a while you can also publish reports with more detailed user data and some comments. In short: continuous interaction with your audience can be essential for marketing your brand.

5. Use videos. Mark Evans, Marketing Director at Direct Line, claims that hyper-individualistic culture we live in has also affected brand marketing. He has observed that “people want to do business with people” not with impersonal distant companies. They need to see human faces behind a brand to connect with it better. In Evans’ opinion, one of the easiest ways to do so is short video production. If you deliver engaging and useful content, you increase chances of customer loyalty and interest in your brand.

There are a lot of high-quality startup promo videos. However, some of them can both quickly attract and lose attention. Why so? Let me try to explain it with this example: a startup has uploaded a short video in which all of the co-founders heavily promote their product. They present themselves as cool guys who try to convince that you need to get their product if you also want to be cool. This promo video has quite an attractive form but lacks effective content: Is being cool enough to engage customers for a long time? How can the startup compete with other startups which use exactly the same brand marketing idea? Finally: What unique value does it bring to customers? These are only a few questions to consider before filming.

Please share with us some other tips on startup brand marketing based on your personal experience.

​Are you a consultant or an entrepreneur?
- Learn more about Growth Academy Online Training & Certification Programs

Download our startup booklet and watch our videos to learn more about our framework to help startups to grow without "reinventing the wheel" and without wasting lot of time trying to connect the dots.

The framework is based on the startup development phases and aims to remove the highest universal risks on the startup journey.
Learn more

The author of the text is Birute Birgelyte, PR and Communications Trainee at Startup Commons. You are free to re-edit and repost this in your own blog or other use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License terms by giving credit with a link to www.startupcommons.org and the original post.
Comments
    Our Services
    Supporting startup ecosystem development, from entrepreneurship education, to consulting to digital infrastructure for connecting, measuring and international benchmarking.
    Picture
    ​Subscribe for updates
    Startup ecosystem development updates with news, tips and case studies from cities around the world. 
    Subscribe

    Join Us?

    Are you interested to join our global venture to help develop startup ecosystems around the world? 
    Learn more...
    ​

    Archives

    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    October 2019
    June 2019
    February 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    July 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    July 2013
    June 2013

    Categories

    All
    Accelerator
    Africa
    Asia
    Australia
    Commitment
    Concepting
    Design
    Digital
    Ecosystem
    Establishing
    Europe
    Event
    Growth
    Incubator
    Infrastructure
    Innovation
    Investment
    Leadership
    Lean Startup
    Mentor
    North America
    Report
    Scaling
    Startups
    Team
    Validation
    Vietnam
    Vision

    RSS Feed

Startup ECOSYSTEM DEVELOPMENT
To Scale INNOVATION Entrepreneurship

Business
​Creators

What is a Startup?
Startup Development Phases
Business Creation
​
Growth Academy eLearning 

​​Support
​Providers

Supporting Startups
​
Startup Curriculum
​
From Technology Transfer to Open IPR
Support Providers
​Knowledge Center
​
Funding Sources
Growth Academy eLearning ​

​​Ecosystem
​Developers

What is Startup Ecosystem?
​From Innovation Ecosystems to Startup Ecosystems
Startup Ecosystem Development
Startup Ecosystem Maturity
Ecosystem Developers 
​
Development Funding 

Ecosystem Operators

About Ecosystem Operators
Funding Sources
​Digital Ecosystem Applications

EcosystemOS​


Picture
Subscribe to our mailing list
Entrepreneurship, innovation and startup ecosystem development updates, with news, tips and results from cities and organizations around the world.  #startupecosystem
Subscribe
Growth Academy eLearning | Resources | Blog
Join Us | Sharing Policy
Picture
Service by Digiole Oy
​© 2023 Digiole Oy some rights reserved