Inspiration Archives - Page 2 of 3

6 Startup Founders Share Their Secrets On Startup Marketing

Let’s face it, when you’re getting started with your company, one of your main concerns is going to be growing your company. It doesn’t matter how great you think your idea is, and how big a problem you’re trying to solve if you fail to gain any traction everything might still be all for nothing.

We understand that, when you’re getting started, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to afford a marketing agency or even hire your dedicated marketing team. In the early days, you probably have to take care of the marketing yourself.

In today’s world, there are countless of different strategies to grow your business and do marketing. There are also tons of mistakes you can make as we showed you in an earlier article, but it’s often only a few tactics that will help skyrocket your growth.

In this post, 6 startup founders will share their top marketing tricks. Hopefully, this will give you some ideas on how to go to market and get your company off the ground. Keep in mind though that what works well for one company might not work that well for yours so it’s always important tot test!

Let’s dive straight into their answers, here they are in random order:

How To Write An Effective And Unique Value Proposition

Your product may be the best product in the world, with the most amazing features, your presentation to the outside world might be perfectly executed, and you have the best price in your category, but no one will ever know about all of these fantastic items if they don’t get past your high-level value proposition.

The value proposition is the number 1 thing that determines whether or not people are bothered with reading more about your product or hitting the back button. In this blog post were going to dive into the Value Proposition. What is it, what’s it not and how to create a winning Value Proposition for your business.

What is a value proposition?

In its simplest terms, a Value Proposition is a positioning statement that explains what benefit you provide for who and how you do it uniquely well. It describes your target buyer, the problem you solve, and why you’re distinctly better than the alternatives.

Posted in Inspiration, Lead Conversion | 8 responses

The Most Common Marketing Mistakes Made By Startups

As a startup founder, you have to wear many different hats within your organisation. Most times the teams are still very small so everyone needs to wear different hats in to get the company of the ground.

Startups face a number of unique challenges when it comes to marketing. With restricted budgets, limited resources, and a desperate need to get their name visible to the public, it puts entrepreneurs in a tight spot. Nine times out of ten, marketing is not even the founder’s speciality! And that’s why we tend to see the majority of startups making the same avoidable mistakes.

After working with startup founding teams for the last couple of years, we found the evidence is clear: You can have the best product or service in the world but if you don’t have a solid go-to-market plan, your business will fail. (assuming, of course, your startup is fixing a real problem).

In addition to laying out the vision, establishing a growth strategy, and building and supporting their team – in most cases they’re also doing (or managing) all of the marketing efforts. Nine times out of ten, marketing is not the founder’s specialty. As the founder of your company, knowing when and how to invest in marketing your business may just be the key ingredient to success.

Posted in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Inspiration, Lead Conversion, Social Media Marketing | 5 responses

12 Growth Experts Share Their Best Lead Generation Tips

The world is full of millions or make that even billions, of potential customers for your product and services. But how do you find and reach your target audience, without spending (or wasting) too much time, money and resources? And how can you help ensure that the people who visit your website or social media profiles are really interested in what you have to offer?

Two weeks we wrote an article with “9 Lead Generation Ideas to Boost Sales Now”, this week we put those questions to sales and marketing experts. These people do this day in and day out for their own startups and for their customers. So we asked them to share their top suggestions on how to find and connect with qualified sales leads.

The question we asked them all was:

If you are starting out with your company, just launching your product into the world or even wanting to generate sales for your (freelance) work, how do you generate good qualified leads.
Potential customers have not yet heard of your company, how do you attract those leads? Can you describe to us what is your ultimate growth technique and how can we implement that for our own companies?

Posted in Inspiration, Lead Conversion | 6 responses

9 Lead Generation Ideas to Boost Sales Now

Are you having a hard time coming up with lead generation ideas? We know as marketers you spend a very big chunk of your time and resources planning campaigns and creating content. All while keeping the end goal in mind of generating new leads that hopefully will eventually turn into paying customers.

We know that a steady stream of leads is an essential part of making sure your business stays in business. However, sometimes it’s tough to know which lead generation tactics are going to boost your sales and which are going to flop. Coming up with effective ways to attract and convert qualified leads is easier said than done.

That’s why we thought to give you a little bit of inspiration to help you get going. In this article, we will share 9 clever lead generation ideas to you can implement immediately to boost your conversions.

Posted in Content Marketing, Inspiration, Lead Conversion, Social Media Marketing | 7 responses

5 Strategies We Used to Get Over 150 Customer Conversations

Customer feedback is so important because it provides marketers and business owners with insights that they can use to improve their business, products and/or overall customer experience. Off course this is very useful at a later stage of your company when your product is actually ready and on the market, but even in the beginning it is crucial to start talking to people. After all, you don’t want to end up building a product nobody wants.

But how do you talk to your customers when you don’t have any yet? This is the first challenge most startups face and it’s exactly what we faced five months ago. As of today, we’ve had close to 150 conversations with people who are looking forward to starting using Inbound Rocket, either over email, in person or over (Skype) calls. Today we want to give you some insights into how you can get started with validating your business idea, so without further ado, here are 5 strategies we used to get over 150 customer interviews.

Posted in Open, Inspiration | 8 responses

7 Industry Experts On How To Build A Crazy High Converting Landing Page For Your Startup

We all understand the ongoing struggles startups have to increase user signups on their websites. When looking at the big boys and girls out there, it might look so easy! But don’t forget they by now have lots of resources and already have a big coverage, resulting in a big advantage when it comes to converting landing page visitors to sign up for their product.

But all of these startups had to start somewhere. They all started out just like you and me, with just a simple landing page trying to convert visitors into believing their vision of whatever it was they were building.

In the past week, we’ve had the wonderful opportunity to talk to some of our heroes in the marketing and startup markets. Hopefully, you’ll be able to learn as much from them as we’ve learned here at Inbound Rocket.

The basis for our conversation was the blog post “How to make great landing pages (with crazy high conversions)” and the simple question I had around this process.

If you are just starting out with your company, nobody ever heard of you or your product yet, your product might not even be finished yet, how do you convince people on your landing page to sign up? Things like social proof to make a stronger case for whatever it is you are building are non-existent yet for example. So what are the key treats for you as a founder to include on your startups landing page?

It might not be the most hard-hitting question that we could ask them, but we believe it is a vital question nonetheless. As you know a landing page is not about adding more and more information to hit that visitor with, it needs to be clean and clear within seconds. So maybe the question could be rephrased to “If nobody has ever heard of you or your startup yet, how would your landing page look like to convince users to signup..”

This is who they are, ranging from Marc Köhlbrugge (Betalist) to Oli Gardner (Unbounce) and all the brilliant minds in between. Oh and this is what they answered..

Posted in Inspiration, Lead Conversion | 19 responses

9 of the Best “Coming Soon” & Under Construction WordPress Themes and Plugins

So you figured out who your ideal customers are, you started talking with them, and you started to validate your assumptions. What can we do next? It’s time to let the world start knowing that you are out there. It’s time to start launching your website and try convincing people about what you are building is worth their time and money. The easiest way is to use a coming soon WordPress theme.

Having a coming soon page is really beneficial, you can easily collect email addresses and start building your online presence even before launching your entire site. These email addresses can be used to get even more validation for the problem you are trying to solve (more on how we use that process later on in a different post). Next to that these email addresses can be used to keep your visitors informed about the big moment you are ready to launch.

On our landing page, we use this same strategy to attract email subscribers. We have a landing page up and running and off course by now we have a blog attached to it, which helps us with generating traffic and more email subscribers. Some would say to get a bigger email list you should even offer some kind of freebie, but we are not really there yet since we are just starting out remember? Off course if you have the possibility you could always offer a freebie, or work with referrals to have those early subscribers get early access to the product you are building.

In today’s post, we will share 9 of the best WordPress Themes out there, for creating a coming soon page. We will present them in a random order so it all depends a bit on your own preference which one you should give a try.

Posted in Inspiration, WordPress | no responses

Why Use WordPress For Building Your (Inbound) Marketing Platform?

With the rise of Inbound Marketing and Email Marketing, your company website is quickly becoming an essential part of doing your business online. WordPress might have started as a blogging platform when it got first released, but it’s become much, much more. Over the years, it’s evolved into an easy-to-use and popular content management system that allows business owners to market their products and services online.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing is vital to the success of a business online. It used to be that companies could market their products through outbound marketing tactics like advertising and buying email lists. With 86% of the people skipping TV ads and 44% of direct mail never being opened, these methods are now viewed as non-authentic. Outbound Marketing is, therefore, unlikely to attract large numbers of customers or help you increase your conversion rates.

Instead, the most successful companies rely on inbound marketing and focus on creating content to attract users. Companies who use WordPress are better equipped to promote their products and products and services through the usage of blog posts, landing pages and email marketing. By using WordPress, you can make your website the platform for all your marketing efforts by taking advantage of the large community, well-designed themes and the valuable plugins.
Read more…

Posted in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Inspiration, Social Media Marketing | no responses

How To Write An Effective And Unique Value Proposition

What is a value proposition?

12 Growth Experts Share Their Best Lead Generation Tips

5 Strategies We Used to Get Over 150 Customer Conversations

7 Industry Experts On How To Build A Crazy High Converting Landing Page For Your Startup

9 of the Best “Coming Soon” & Under Construction WordPress Themes and Plugins

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