Mediaboss Marketing

Dominik AngererContributor

Search engine optimization, PR, paid marketing, emails, social marketing and communications is crowded with techniques, channels, solutions and acronyms. Its little wonder that many startups strapped for time and money find defining and executing a sustainable marketing campaign a daunting prospect.

The sheer number of options makes it difficult to determine an effective approach, and my view is that this complexity often obscures the obvious answer: A startups best marketing asset is its story. The knowledge and expertise of its team, together with the why and the how of its offering provides the most compelling content.

Leveraging this material with best practice techniques enables any startup, no matter how limited its budget, to run an effective marketing campaign.

I know this approach works, because this is exactly what I did with my co-founder Alex Feiglstorfer when we set up Storyblok. To be clear, we are developers not marketers. However, our previous experience building CMS systems taught us that the main driver of organic engagement for most businesses was customer conversations around content.

Specifically, sharing experiences, expertise and what we learned. We had committed nearly all of our available cash to developing our product, so we knew that the only way to market Storyblok was to do it all ourselves.

As a result, we focused solely on problem-solving content. This took the form of tutorials on web development and opinion pieces on headless CMS and other topics within our areas of expertise. The trick was that what we published wasnt made just for marketing, it was based on our own internal documentation of problems we encountered as we developed our product. In essence, we were learning in public. Through this approach we were able to acquire thousands of customers in our first year.

Retelling this story isnt to blow my own trumpet, its to make clear that you dont have to be a marketer by training or commit a huge amount of time and resources to successfully market your startup. So, how do you get started?

Although theres no one-size-fits-all approach to how you organize your startups marketing function, there are some basic principles that apply in nearly every situation. A recent survey of 400+ executives from CMS Wire helpfully identified the following factors as the top digital customer experience challenges for businesses:

Challenges two to four are the pitfalls that we can focus on avoiding. They are directly related to how a startup produces, organizes and distributes its content.

With regard to the siloing of systems and fragmentation of customer data, the overriding goal is to ensure all your systems are integrated and speak to one another. In practice, this means that the data gathered in different departments whether its feedback from sales, engagement on your website, customer service responses or product development information is collected in a uniform and methodical manner and is readily accessible across the business.

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Even startups on tight budgets can maximize their marketing impact - TechCrunch