Marketing a Web Startup: How to Use Technology to Achieve Escape Velocity | Online Sales Guide Tips

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Creating a web application is challenging enough, but the make-or-break hurdle is gaining an audience for it. How does a startup with very little money draw in an inundated and skeptical audience to use its service? The shift from agile, responsive technology delivery to a marketing promotional machine can be a jarring transition for small tech-focused teams, and an even greater challenge on the limited, the bootstrapped budget that startups often work with. Here are several lessons on how to start a business learned from companies that drew in the initial audience, and achieved enough traction to escape failure.

Friends and Family

Much like with early-stage funding for technology, one must look for humble beginnings and promote your product to any of your friends and family that will listen. The reality of marketing is that this is the group of people that will most reliably give your website a chance and visit if, if for no other reason than their relationship with you. Of that group that visits it, a fraction may find it useful, and those people may become your biggest evangelists and promoters, all free of charge. The first thousand users of your service are critical from both a success standpoint and for collecting data to find and adapt to your market. Friends and family should almost always be the first option.

Create the Content Yourself

Many of the most popular web applications rely on their user base to create the content, and thus the value of the service. These network effects create a virtuous cycle of value. However, that cycle can be quite vicious for startups, creating a chicken-and-egg problem of drawing an audience to a site with little content and value. The solution to this issue for a founding team is to create the content yourself. For example, popular content sharing service Reddit survived its initial months of life with the founding team managing hundreds, perhaps thousands of fake accounts, and posting content themselves to make the service appear far more popular than it was. In the heavily trend-oriented world of tech startups, very few people want to visit an unpopular site, so manufacturing this popularity may be the key ingredient for attracting new users.

Pull a Stunt

PR stunts are high risk, high reward proposition. They often come with some form of cash expense and have the potential to be highly misinterpreted by your market. Successfully pulling a PR maneuver takes a great deal of savvy and a significant amount of luck, but the payoff could keep a company alive. One example of such a stunt was accomplished by AirBnB, the now billion-dollar company. The founders, in response to the 2008 presidential election, created custom cereal boxes (AirBnB partly being short for bed and breakfast, after all) to commemorate both Obama’s and McCain’s respective national conventions. They sold the cereal for $ 40 a box and made enough money to lift the company out of debt while gaining national attention for their startup.

Engaging with a Niche

In addition to the approach of starting small with your audience, a critical opportunity is finding niche markets that engage with your service early on. Carefully observe the early traffic to your service and identify trends among the early adopters. If a picture of a niche market starts to emerge, one can use this information to increase engagement. Create a blog that engages with your niche, both to promote your application, but also to generally increase value with your audience. Offer guest blog posts on blogs that serve your niche. Look for feedback from this niche and incorporate changes and updates to your service to serve them. Creating a small but energized community of well-served users can be one of the biggest ways to create a tribe of evangelists and marketers with little financial outlay on your part.

Getting Early Press

Many tech startups fantasize about the feature in the prominent tech blog or website that will propel the service to viral success. While this is certainly an avenue that shouldn’t be ignored, it still carries the high risk to reward ratio that should be managed. Mitigate this risk by becoming press-friendly: create a clear, well-designed press page with graphics, media, and helpful release notes and info for the press to use. Look to be featured in lesser-known blogs and sites as well as the big players, as media is similarly trend-oriented and prone to snowball effects.

While these strategies are in no way a sure-fire formula to gain an audience, they can be a promising starting point for the tech entrepreneur that has exhausted their main capability in bringing a web application to market, and now must navigate the less familiar territory of building an audience and marketing.

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How The ‘Beyoncé of Marketing’ Created A Culturally-Unique Company To Offer Black Folk A Seat At The Table – AfroTech

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For many professionals navigating creative spaces, it can seem difficult to find your own lane in such a saturated market. But for Browned 2 Perfection (B2P) founder Junae Brown, being her own boss was always a part of her master plan to dominate the marketing industry.

Brown — a Harlem native whose been dubbed by her peers as the “Beyoncé of Marketing” — knew early on in her life that she always had a knack for marketing and event planning. Coming from a strong-spirited entrepreneurial family, Brown tells AfroTech that seeing so many people around her take charge of their own lives inspired her to want to do the same.

Being the planner of her friend groups and family was a natural talent for Brown, and after serving as the President of Student Activities at her alma mater — Five Towns College — she realized that she had great potential to succeed in the marketing industry.

“I really love being able to take something from point A to point Z,” she tells us. “Most people that I encounter, whether it’s a solopreneur or a large corporation, typically [have] a great idea but they just don’t know how to translate it to the masses and make the people who should care about it know that it exists.”

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After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Business Management and a concentration in music, Brown dived headfirst into the music industry working for label giants like Sony Music, Columbia and RCA Records. Her various roles at these companies allowed her to both spearhead projects and work behind the scenes with names like Beyoncé, Chris Brown, Usher, J. Cole., Tyler The Creator, H.E.R., Jazmine Sullivan and many more.

Brown’s years of experience working in the music industry allowed her to study marketing from another lens and apply that logic to her own agency, Browned 2 Perfection. The marketing maven already wasn’t in love with the idea of sitting behind a desk for the rest of her career, so she took matters into her own hands to launch a culturally-creative boutique marketing and event production company that’s prioritizing Black and brown folks.

“I particularly like to do [marketing] with Black and brown entities because we’re often starved for resources and opportunities, and I’ve just seen the difference that it can make when we know how to position our ideas, products and brands,” she says. “It’s been a great journey [running B2P] and I always say I’m really grateful I was able to bring in my expertise outside of music and entertainment because in hindsight I think you hit a bit of a glass ceiling if you only have corporate or cultural experience. Now I feel like the agency is able to bridge the gap between corporate and culture for whichever client.”

Through her own agency, Brown shares that her and her team have the opportunity to work on campaigns and projects outside of music — including working with tech brands, apps, product brands, media personalities, public figures and more. Moreover, she’s made it a point to build her staff up with nearly all Black women at the helm.

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According to Brown, what makes the agency so special is the fact that Black and brown clients can come to B2P to meet their bottom line but also get the cultural aspect that other companies are missing in their strategies.

“This is [still] business and you have to make money at the end of the day,” she says, “but I think we figured out how to do it in a way where it’s not compromising to the culture, brand or person.”

Not only has Brown created a culturally-unique company that’s providing Black and brown professionals a seat at the table, she’s also making a name for herself on her own merit based on Google’s SEO rules. In an effort to make her name stand out amongst crowded Google searches for terms like Beyoncé and marketing, Brown figured out a way to merge the two in a way that represents everything she stands for.

“I really think [Beyoncé] embodies Black excellence as a person and as a brand. There’s a certain standard that everything she comes out with meets and she’s worked for that,” she says. “That’s someone who doesn’t just want to do their job, they want to do it [excellently]. So that’s something that I’ve [always] strived for in everything that I do and no matter what I want to meet that standard.”

Going the extra mile for her clients, especially Black founders, is all a part of Brown’s recipe for success that’s amplifying the ideas and creations in our culture. Authenticity is a principle she prides herself on and while her peers hone in on mostly end results, Brown is focused on building meaningful relationships to leave an even bigger impact on the world.

“A lot of my peers get caught up in results and numbers only, and I always say numbers are a guide [but] they don’t tell the whole story,” she says. “It’s people first for me. So, a lot of what I do is figuring people out and observing them because [at the end of the day] all of that matters.”

Looking ahead, Brown looks forward to ramping up on event planning with her agency now that things are starting to open back up. In addition to in-person events and brand activations, she’s also working on releasing an upcoming membership program for up-and-coming Black marketers looking to break into the industry.

For more information about Brown and her agency, follow her on Twitter and Instagram.