A Perspective on Location Services, Mobile Entrepreneurship & Startup Life

Martin Oetting from trnd (the real network dialog) is asking in a blog post how his marketing and trend agency can help startups with their marketing strategy. The goal of their efforts shall be an improved, more effective and viral marketing for your own startup.

I am not sure if startups that are working on a shoestring budget, shall involve third-party marketing agencies. It always depends on the situation but let’s do a short brainstorming to give them some input.

1. Guy Kawasaki said during one presentation that the next slide will explain everything in marketing you ever need. It is, create a value for your customers and be unique! So this should be the marketing strategy, make clear that you provide a value and that your company or better your product is unique. If trnd can support startups with this, their service is useful.
2. Name instruments how to create virality and passionated users. For example, perfect industry design (Apple), addictive features (Facebook’s activity stream), news people love to speak about (newspaper reports about weddings and born babies through eHarmony or other success stories for PR), quality content (MySpace announcing new partnerships with famous bands), founder blogs that provide new perspectives,… There are many instruments and I am still looking for some frameworks that support you in creating virality.
3. Show and explain marketing campaigns that worked with similar products.
4. Find the right marketing instruments with a broad reach. You can invest your money in hundreds of different marketing instruments but which ones have been proven more successful than others. e.g. Avoid expensive TV campaigns but look for highly specific Google Adwords.
5. Be creative. Don’t do what everyone else is doing and avoid being a follower instead of a leader. An easy and cheap way to get some professional feedback about new creative and maybe risky marketing efforts would be helpful.
6. Consulting about the different marketing channels and how you can leverage them best for your startup. e.g. Facebook Social Ads, founder/company blogs, press releases, TV, radio, newspapers,…
7. Create and test a strategy how your product development goes hand in hand with a feature marketing, so that you produce regular attention and press releases.
8. What are current trends and how do they affect your startup? As a startup it is difficult to get access to expensive trend reports, help on this topic is appreciated.
9. Finding the connectors for your product, the persons that will spread the news out of an intrinsic motivation.
10. Get access to marketing research material that effects your sector. e.g. how to do technology marketing, international marketing or marketing for health related sites,…

Any additions? Just post a comment.