What is the biggest lesson you've learned marketing for a startup?

Here's a few. Manage expectations. SEO isn't "free traffic". Choose your channels based on (1) your sales process: self service or handover to sales team (2) ARPU (3) Are you building in a new category with low active intent. Branding is more important than you think (look at Fast). Your plan should include what you WON'T do this coming quarter/year and why. Make sure you know your numbers. If your company is venture funded, connect with investors to manage their expectations. Stay away from lengthy product onboarding exercises, hardly any impact. Marketing automation in early stage b2b has poor ROI: expensive software, large impact on content creation, you need at least a dedicated marketing ops person. TALK TO CUSTOMERS. In B2B early stages: Google analytics won't help you: Build a state machine to direct your decision making. Most of the time, start by working backwards from the transaction to the top of funnel. #1 position on SERP only has 20% CTR. A/B testing is mostly useless in early stages, only do it top funnel: variations of ads.

Using the many free tools available out there like Buzzsumo for looking into competitor content and seeing how well it performs as part of SEO strategy. Also worth considering bringing in outside expertise for areas you want to improve on!

Believe in yourself

The biggest lesson about marketing i learned is the Omnichannel 🕸 If you want to communicate the Value of your company, you have to do it synergistically in every channel! 🌀⭐

That your marketing should also scale up equally as the product does.

I think the main insight that I've learned is - consistency is better than being a hit. You can get Reddit frontpage and it will drive X sales, but that's not repeatable, better build up your sales capital over time with community building, engaging, helping etc.

I learned that personal brand can go a long way. Build up readership, create a community of single-minded people that share your values - and nurture them into becoming your customers and best advocates! This worked for us on twitter :)

The lesson we learnt from our startup is that you don't need huge investments right away to test your hypotheses. You should start small and scale when you find your market fit. Don't go deep into developing various features you think are important unless you hear your PAYING customers asking for them. Also, don't be afraid to try new things that can seem crazy or irrelevant. And don't wait with PR for too long until you think your product is perfect. Release immediately when it's good enough.

If you are a product company. The best marketing strategy would be to build product around your customer. If you are into service sector get letter of intent (interest) from early believers - mostly big players. It will help on quick traction. Build fast, involve all, share result and fail early. Your customers will be integral part of your product strategy and will be supportive throught initial push and ups and downs. As a result you won't end up with a product your customer don't give a shit. All other marketing and sales efforts will follow early traction and will help build successful business on top of it.

Hello, I am working on my own blog currently. Initially I thought that I could rank by writing good content only. Later I found out that backlinks are extremely important. A very well written content with low backlink counts might get lower rank compared to average quality content with high backlink counts. Btw which method works really well for getting backlinks?