How to get more customers in 2014: Our top marketing posts this year

It doesn’t matter what industry you launched your business in, if you’ve got a start-up, you’re also in the marketing business.

 

But marketing is a million-dollar industry, and hard work. For many founders, juggling looking after their current clients with the perpetual need to attract more can be overwhelming.

 

To support you towards greater sales next year, here are the top three marketing posts published on StartupSmart this year.

 

The seven marketing steps that landed us with 30,000 clients

 

This post by BigCommerce founder Mitchell Harper was our most popular marketing post this year. In it, he shares the seven steps he and co-founder Eddie Machalaani took to go from great idea with a few first customers to over 30,000 clients.

 

“It’s simple: If you want to get to seven figures, you must understand marketing. Period. A poor product that is marketed well always outsells an excellent product that is marketed poorly (or not at all).”

 

Read his seven tips here. 

 

Top three guerrilla marketing techniques for start-ups

 

Harper’s post on guerrilla marketing (sneaky marketing on a shoestring budget) clocked in as our second most popular marketing post this year.

 

He explains what guerrilla marketing is, how to do it and where it fits in their marketing strategy.

 

“Because we’re on a shoestring budget, we need to get a good return for every dollar we spend.

 

“Our aim is to take our profits from guerrilla marketing and put them into search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM), which we will automate (more on that in future columns).”

 

Find out the three tips here.

 

Top five experiential marketing tips

 

There’s marketing, and then there’s experiential marketing. If you’re not sure what that is, this post of marketing maven Meredith Cranmer’s tips on how to make it work for your start-up is a must-read.

 

“We often have to deal with very dull products, so instead focus on the founders. The owner or founder may think the product has differentiating features, but often they’re not that different from a competitor. And at the end of the day, people buy people,” Cranmer says. “When you look at start-ups, the best story is usually about the founder and their journey. Never shy away from that.”

 

Discover her five tips here.

 

Four other honourable mentions for marketing articles from 2013 worth a read:

 

1. Sales and marketing can be time consuming and stressful. So it’s essential you know if you’re prospecting, or just making noise. Mentor Greg Ferrett shares his tips.

 

2. Trying to be everything to everyone wasn’t working, so this start-up focused on one product for one target customer type and saw their sales quadruple.

 

3. Whether you target a niche or chase the mainstream market is more than a marketing decision, it’s a fundamental strategy one that will shape your start-up. Phillip Alexander, the executive director at Venture Advisory, explores the two approaches here.

 

4. Content marketing has been a buzzword for a while now. But done well, it can catapult your business into new opportunities. We spoke to one bootstrapped start-up about how content marketing led to a 1300% increase in revenue.