How startup founders can start building their brand on a limited budget — Kate Walling // Traction Hero

Quotes

• “The first thing that I think a lot of startup founders overlook is the power of their own personal email list.” -Kate

• “Send out regular email updates about whats going on with the startup. Youll be shocked at how proud and helpful personal networks are for an entrepreneur but there is a specific way to do that content or email.” -Kate

• “Getting my customers from zero to one is often the hardest part, it is about understanding who your first customers are.” -Kate

• “Start creating content for LinkedIn because when people like that content that is going out to their own network, you often see a lot of shares from that. This is a great strategy in relation to the email because you are reinforcing the message in a public way.” -Kate

• “Outside of email list and LinkedIn, what you want to do initially is make a couple of pieces of marketing collateral about what you are selling, something that explains what you are selling and what you are doing.” -Kate

• “With early-stage content what I typically do are using a couple of channels that tests what people like to hear from you. Twitter is a great way to do that even though people think it doesnt have the traction that it once did but the people who are on Twitter are active on it. Its a good place to test content.” -Kate

• “Developing a content strategy is something that you can do on your own, you dont have to a lot of budget, it serves as the beginning of a marketing channel.” -Ben

• “I do recommend investing a little bit of money into really low-cost ways of building out lists and social media platforms. I think it is helpful for a lot of reasons.” -Kate

• “When you get into being able to do some pretty easy marketing automation, you want to make sure that your strategy is right because I think a lot of entrepreneurs want to drive that conversion instead of thinking through what the customer interaction would be.” -Kate

• “When I think about actually spending money at an early stage startup, if Im investing, I want it to be as close to revenue as possible. Im not necessarily trying to generate a ton of awareness, what I want to do is be incredibly efficient, converting those customers that are somehow organically getting to my web products and services and I also want the ability to retarget prospects and lastly create some look-alike audiences off of the people that are actually converting.” -Ben

• “Instead of saying, I am just going to generically market, take the limited data that you can and work your way up the marketing funnel.” -Ben

• “First of all, you have to think about your sales cycle and how that place in marketing. In B2B, events are really important.” -Kate

• “What you can learn from hosting a small event is what was successful there and how do you scale that in terms of the webinar, demo videos and content so that material is helping the pipeline faster.” -Kate

• “As we all know, a hugely critical part of startups is the actual marketing piece and how its going to work. So, Id say that lack of a plan and a strategy are problematic for sure.” -Kate