In this six-part series, Report on Small Business talks with Canadian startup founders and leaders to learn how they think about their businesses. In this article we look at marketing.
Rachel Pautler, co-founder & CEO of Suncayr, a marker with ink that changes colour when you need to reapply sunscreen
The largest exposure we’ve gotten so far has been from participating in different competitions and awards. We’ll apply to literally anything, as you never know where it might lead. We’re also focusing on getting the product reviewed by bloggers, especially tech and mommy bloggers. We’ve spent money to conduct focus groups in order to have a better understanding of our target market segments, especially how they make purchasing decisions in a store, and how they would use our product. We’ve only started making a big social media push in the last month, but we’ve been focusing on posting great content as well as engaging with the content posted by those who we think could bring some value to Suncayr.
Jeff Booth, president and CEO of BuildDirect, an online seller of home renovation materials
Empathy for your customers is key. If you make their lives easier, they’ll talk about you. In my case, I understood the pain that came with many home improvement projects because I used to be a builder. The long delays, soaring costs and multiple setbacks were frustrating, which is why I sought to create a simple and convenient way for people to access home improvement products. Our model works and people love to share their stories with friends. We may also leverage Google here and there too. I love social media because it allows us to interact directly with our customers. Two-way dialogue is important; listening is important. That’s how we adapt our business – we want to know what works for our customers and what doesn’t. It’s also important to embrace social media from day one. Growing your pages at the same rate as your company ensures that you are deeply ingrained with what is being said about you, and allows you to become an expert on that platform. Social media is always changing so you must also be nimble if you want to be successful at it.
Mallorie Brodie, co-founder of Bridgit, a platform for organizing construction projects
At Bridgit, we have focused our marketing resources in three areas that all go hand in hand: content creation, industry events and e-mail campaigns. Establishing yourself as a content leader in your industry gives you the opportunity to continuously provide value to your prospective and existing customers. This foundation has given us the opportunity to speak at many industry events at both a national and local level. Our newsletter content provides our audience with information that allows them to stay on top of industry news and trends. We have positioned ourselves as the go-to when it comes to industry technology trends and actively help our customers with any questions they may have, whether it includes our platform or not. Just last week, our Customer Experience Manager help someone set up their printer!
Mikael Cho, founder of creative talent site Crew
We grew Crew not through advertising but by building useful things for people.
Why? Marketing today is defined by how useful it is to your customers. And the bar for useful has risen substantially. Blog posts, infographics and webinars might have been marketing gold, but we go a step further by making websites, apps, and tools as marketing.
We’ve grown from no sales to $4-million in two years, all from traffic generated by things we made. We spread the word about Crew by building tools and focusing on creating value.
Don’t be trapped into thinking you have to follow what everyone else is doing because it’s supposed to work. If you follow, expect similar results. Nothing more. If you’re trying to get a new idea off the ground, you must aim to create extreme value with your marketing. This is the only knife that can cut through the clutter of today.
Michael Litt, co-founder and CEO of video and marketing platform Vidyard
We’ve invested heavily in inbound marketing to establish ourselves as a thought leader. This happens through our blog, engaging video content, and creative marketing campaigns that help people understand industry pain points and the art of the possible. Social media plays an important role in how we get those stories out, but more importantly, so do partnerships with complementary technology vendors and platform partners like Salesforce, Oracle and Marketo, who have already established audiences that we’d like to communicate with. Chances are very high that the audience you’d like to reach, already exists. We also rely heavily on a marketing automation platform and CRM for managing our campaigns and leads. We monitor and analyze everything we do and constantly tweak to optimize results – we call this Revenue Engineering.
The Think like a Startup series runs in October on Report on Small Business.