21 Marketing principles after bootstrapping my startups to $3M revenue

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Written By Reema

A passionate gemstone enthusiast and seasoned business strategist, I blend my love for crystals with practical business insights.

Marketing lessons you won’t find in any textbook!

21 principles on how you should THINK about marketing đź‘‡

Marketing before product

1) Marketing starts right when you’ve figured out what problem your startup will solve.

Begin by talking about the problem & possible solutions on:

  • Communities you’re part of
  • Social media
  • Newsletter

2) Marketing before product. Think how you will market your product & get users, before you think how you will buildd the product.

Community building

3) Be part of a community, and eventually buildd one for yourself. You will also ideally find your first customers in this community.

4) Earn your first customers by selling directly to people you know. Give them an amazing experience, so that they rave about your product when they talk to others.

Launching your product(s)

5) Product launches work best when you already have customers or a community to support you. Think about launching only after you’ve made a good number of sales, and have at least a small community of supporters.

6) Launch multiple times. Celebrate your wins and showcase your major updates as launches.

7) Launch on multiple channels. Launches are unpredictable, so you’d want to hedge your bets by covering as many channels as you can.

8) Prepare thoroughly for every launch. Warm up your community for an upcoming launch and let them spread the word when you actually launch.

9) Launches are always a support strategy. Your primary marketing strategy has to be something more reliable and one which delivers consistently.

Acing SEO

10) SEO gives you passive traffic that stays with you forever. Ignore SEO at your own peril.

11) SEO is NOT just about content or blogs. Embed SEO in every part of your product right from the start.

12) SEO is NOT free marketing. It requires upfront investment in terms of time & money. But over a long period of time, that cost turns out to be negligible.

13) SEO takes time to show results. So, be patient but don’t sit idle. Look for early indicators like pages getting indexed or keyword movement from top 100 to top 50 & so on.

14) For any SEO initiative, you’re always optimising for Google. But remember that your end user is a human and your goal should always be a superior user experience. So, create for humans, just optimise for Google.

Leverage Social Media

15) Social media is a great channel to buildd your community or audience. This is where most of your current & future users hang out.

16) People seek real connections on social media with real people, not brands. So, buildd your own account, not that of your company.

17) Share your personal story, experiences & updates. Nobody wants to just see links to your latest blog or your feature announcement.

Emails are evergreen

18) Newsletters is one of the best ways to buildd a loyal community or audience. Plus, you’re not at the mercy of an external platform or algorithm.

19) Be yourself and write your newsletter like a person would. Nobody likes reading an impersonal, automated email with a bunch of links.

Marketing philosophy

20) Begin your marketing journey with 1 or 2 channels. Crack them, put things on auto-mode or delegate, and move on to figuring out a new channel.

21) Marketing is more of an art, and less of a science. So, don’t crack your head on why a certain thing didn’t work, despite your best efforts. Instead, keep experimenting and always have a mix of channels & strategies.