You don’t have to hire an expensive firm to have a Public Relations (PR) strategy as a startup. The beauty of today’s internet is that anybody has the power to reach tens of thousands, even millions, with a properly timed tweet, hacker news mention, or mention on an influential blog. You don’t have to make it onto a cover story in Inc. or Entrepreneur in order to achieve your PR goals, in fact...
The first step in developing a marketing plan is to become obsessed with knowing your audience. That’s right, obsessed. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on Google Adwords, or how many conference booths you rent out if you are off-course with knowing who your audience is.
In the past few weeks I’ve been writing about getting to know your audience and finding their pain points to form the foundation of your marketing efforts. This week I’ll describe assembling that data into an avatar, or creating a character with a story, with needs and desires.
Product positioning is a technique used in marketing that seeks to bring a specific idea to mind when presented to an audience. For example, when I think of Apple laptops, I think “high-end laptop geared towards creatives.” When I think of HP laptops, I think of “affordable laptops geared towards the masses.” These are product positions, and they are re-iterated by the marketing, the pricing, and...
Startups spend a great deal of time and money getting people to visit their marketing site (aka, their website). A startup’s marketing site typically exists to establish brand awareness, promote a sense of reliability, generate leads, and sell products or services.
Honing your skills as a writer is of course essential for blogging. However, when it comes to our marketing websites, doesn’t the product speak for itself? Isn’t copywriting just fussing over the details? Why spend all that time and energy to eek out a tiny percentage increase in signups?
Why do 3 out of 4 venture-backed startups fail? I mean, these aren’t stupid ideas. Someone has to come up with an idea, validate it’s market demand, create a plan for execution, and articulate this via presentation to venture capitalists, who reject approximately 99% of the ideas they agree to sit down and listen to. The few that make it through this process must have a pretty good chance of...
It’s finally here. After months of planning, writing, and interviewing folks, I’ve released SaaS Marketing Essentials. Early response has been wonderful, with people commenting how much value they are finding in the product. Others have been asking me just what my process was in creating the book. For those, I write this article.
Do you have a product idea floating around in your head? Perhaps you actually have a list of ideas you keep in Evernote, of ebooks to write, apps to build, or services to offer. Without spending the time and money to build all of those product ideas out, how can you figure out which ones will be worth building? How can you validate your idea?
Most entrepreneurs would love to have a secret sauce for growing their audience. For many, content marketing is a great, but slow, way to attract new customers. The question is, does this copy/paste trick onto other sites hurt your SEO rankings? Though it only takes a couple extra minutes per post, will this strategy lead to growth or penalties?
HI, I'M RYAN. I believe the best way to learn and remember is by writing things down and sharing them with others. This blog exists to help me synthesize and process my journey towards self-improvement.