Today’s guest post on startup marketing tips is by Alec Winmill, VP of Marketing and Communications at the Fargo-based drone startup, Botlink. This is the first in a three-part series on marketing for startups.
When I started my career in marketing at Titan Machinery, I never imagined 5 short years later I’d be diving head first into getting the word out about a drone software startup. Selling tractors and selling SaaS are two completely different worlds, but the end goal has never changed: let as many people as possible know about my company.
Why is Emerging Prairie letting me write about marketing on their blog? Probably because they asked, knowing I couldn’t say no. It might also have something to do with my track record: building a massive following during my time at Titan Machinery’s Outlet Store, including a Facebook fan page with 225,000+ farm equipment lovers, sending weekly emails to 17,000 eager subscribers, and putting together a 20 page quarterly magazine reaching over half a million farm house mailboxes. In those 5 years, sales of agricultural & construction equipment through my store more than doubled, to over $50,000,000.
At Botlink, the news about our game changing technology has been spreading like wildfire through earned and owned media, as well as press coverage from outlets such as Popular Science, Aviation Pros and UAS Magazine. We’ve also worked with Emerging Prairie to start a monthly meetup and annual conference, called DroneFocus. All with a marketing budget that breaks down to about $5 per day.
The following is part one of what’s shaping up to be a three part series – if you have any questions, ask in the comments or shoot me an email at alecwinmill@gmail.com.
Content
Some of the best marketing a company can do is to write down helpful hints for potential users, include some pictures and share it on social channels. The only cost is a few minutes of your team’s time! We’re admittedly not doing enough on our blog, but are actively working on increasing content on our site.
How to posts, list posts and controversial posts are the most popular types of content both on blogs and through social channels. Learn what your audience craves and give it to them!
Tools I love for content marketing:
Skitch for quick markups of screenshots
Google Docs for collaborating on posts (like this one I’m working on with Marisa!)
Quora for getting inspiration or information for posts
Examples for Inspiration
For Further Reading
Social Media
Social media is where most startups cut their teeth on marketing. It’s generally free, save for paying your community manager (or intern, lead developer or CEO depending on your situation) and we all use it all the time anyway. It’s getting tougher to break through the noise on social media, as non-promoted posts on Facebook are taking a backseat to boosted posts as well as posts from friends, and Twitter’s increasing user base makes it tough to get a word in edgewise. Best bets for keeping social low cost are Instagram (all your posts are seen in the order they reach your followers’ feeds), Vine and/or Snapchat for quick, branded video content and Pinterest if you have a physical product to sell.
Botlink’s social channels have been extremely well received – we’ve got a solid following on a few key networks and have plans to expand to new networks and bolster our current efforts in the future. One thing we for sure need to to work on is engaging our 18,000+ fan base on Facebook, but we’ll get there.
Tools I love for social media marketing:
Buffer helps you schedule content to multiple social accounts from one simple dashboard
Mention is like Google Alerts for the social web
Hootsuite helps me manage multiple accounts – personal and business
Canva is like Photoshop without the pricetag or learning curve
More tools: here, here and here
On strategy: here, here and here
Product – Don’t Suck
It’s weird to think of anything other than getting in front of potential users as marketing, but having a great product is one of the most important parts of marketing. It goes without saying that Coca-Cola is one of the best marketers out there, but not good enough to make New Coke not suck. Hell, Google owns the Internet and they can’t figure out how to get users on their social platforms (anyone remember Google Wave? Google+ can’t quite take off, either). The moral of the story is this: make a product so great that it sells itself. Make it so incredible that people feel left out if they’re not using it. Making the best product you can is the best marketing a startup can do.
At Botlink, we sometimes take this whole “don’t suck” idea a little too far – our programmers hold off on releasing updates until everything is perfect, driving us business guys crazy but the end result is a top-shelf product that we are all extremely proud of.
I don’t have as many links for this one, but here are 25 more examples of bad products you may or may not have heard of.
Part 2 coming soon!
Feel free to follow me on Twitter or Instagram – @al_winmill
Thanks, Alec Winmill!
