When Do You Start Marketing Your Start-up? Episode 10 of #InTheLab

This week on #InTheLab, the Strategy Lab video series, we answer questions from a couple views.

Question 1 from Shalyn:

Is it smart to have social media in place in your start-up as soon as it opens?

Well Shalyn it depends. If social media is innate to you, if it’s easy to snap pics here and there, you’re on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram a lot than yes you should be setting up your start-ups social accounts. But don’t wait till you have the business, start today. What do you have to lose starting early?

You’re going to grow a larger network, engage with more potential customers, and most importantly, you’re going to have an audience to bounce ideas off of. A Social network on any of the platforms mentioned above have a lot of benefits and many unforeseen benefits in the future. You never know what positive things can come out of building your tribe early.

If social comes easy to you, it shouldn’t be difficult to draft a strategy to get your company a wider following. If social media does not come easy to you, there are many different options to communicate to your audience and potential audience.

Question 2 from Liam:

How do you begin to market your business before you find out additional ways to market a business?

The age old entrepreneurial dilemma. What should you be doing to market your start-up? We get this a lot. A brand new business offering a brand new product or service and the come to us asking how do we get our message out to the masses?!?

My answer? You don’t. If you’ve built a product or service that needs you to go out there and proactively sell it, you have a problem. It’s far to inefficient to try and tell everyone about what you’re doing. And in the future you can bank on it getting even more difficult. So how do you market your brand new company? 

Make your product or service so good, or so different people can’t help but notice it. You don’t need to tell a thousand people about what you’re doing hoping it’ll go viral. You need to create something that gets better over time based on feedback, but has some “remarkable” features built into it. The Remarkable part is the part that gets talked about.

Advertising and many part of marketing are very expensive with an unknown return on investment. Building remarkable things has an ridiculous return on investment, but most people just aren’t willing to try.

The world doesn’t need more mediocre products or services folks.

Marketing’s dead. Long live marketing.

If you want to read more about the new world of marketing and what you can do to start marketing yourself, try James Altucher’s Choose Yourself. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

If you’re more curious on how to build a start-up Peter Thiel’s Zero to One is a must read. He was one of the first investors in Facebook, is a venture capitalist and is a brilliant thinker.

If you have any questions about the non-profits Creative Options Regina is one of the most amazing organizations we’ve ever worked with. Go on, check em out!