3 Marketing Strategies for Pre-Seed Startups

According to Statista, 42% of startups fail due to a lack of market need, while this might seem unrelated, marketing is more than advertising or promotion, it is also about studying and researching the market you are selling to. 

This research results in preparing and having a marketing strategy that fits your market, with the potential to scale your startup to the seed stage. Save time and energy on research by reading these 3 marketing strategies for pre-seed startups.

• Use a Content Marketing Strategy

According to Mailchimp, content marketing is a strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience, by creating relevant content, such as articles, books, podcasts, videos, social media posts, newsletters, and more. It is a type of marketing that involves creating and sharing online material.

While content marketing is wide, as a founder or a marketing lead for a pre-seed startup, focusing on certain areas of content marketing depending on your product or service is crucial, for example, an e-commerce startup will focus more on social media and search engine content such as blog posts than on podcasts. 

Popular brands like Duolingo (with its iconic “duo” character on TikTok), Spotify, Opera Mini, RedBull, and more make use of content marketing and this has generated impactful results for both their social media pages and their business. Taking Duolingo as a case study, after hiring its Senior Global Social Media Manager; Zaria Parvez, grew the company’s social media to 8.2 million followers by just creating content around Duolingo’s green owl mascot; Duo.

Another reason for the success of Duolingo’s content marketing strategy is its originality and casual approach. When scrolling through TikTok, it’s often difficult to tell that you’re watching content from a company that helps people learn foreign languages. Duolingo’s videos have a very casual, almost homemade feel as if they were created by a group of friends just making funny TikToks together with a mascot. This casual, relatable style helps viewers resonate with the videos and find them genuinely interesting, making them more likely to engage with the Duolingo brand.

Social media content is not the only important aspect of content marketing for pre-seed startups, another one founders should consider is search engine marketing.

– Search engine marketing

According to Wikipedia, this is a form of marketing that involves internet marketing by promoting the visibility of websites on search engine results pages(SERPs) through paid or organic methods, while SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is broad, a crucial category of it is search engine optimization (SEO).

Just like SEM, SEO ensures your startup website appears on the first page or the first result of Google’s results page (or any other search engine) without having to spend an extra budget on ads (most times). 

Every minute, there are over 5.9 million Google searches performed by individuals around the world, according to Semrush. Different people search for various things on Google, using search terms always referred to as “Keywords”. If your startup is an online fashion shopping brand for women in the United States, you would want your website to be visited by the 1,000 people daily who search for “best women’s fashion online shopping” and this can be mostly likely if your website shows up on the first page or first result. 

There are a lot of things you need to do to optimize your website for Google’s search engine. To make it easier, you can book a consultation with TechGyant (thetechgyant@gmail.com), and increase your website’s visibility. 

• Aggressive Founder-Led Marketing

To many tech founders, this is an amazing marketing approach. It involves the startup founder actively participating in the company’s marketing process. This approach has helped in scaling many startups and helping them reach a wider audience.

A better way to explain founder-led marketing is by considering the founder of a startup as the ambassador for the company. A good example of this is Caleb Maru, the founder of Tech Safari, a newsletter that reports on and writes tech stories across Africa. Caleb is actively involved in the marketing process, frequently featuring his startup in his LinkedIn posts and ensuring he posts daily. He has turned his personal LinkedIn account into an additional marketing channel for his startup, using it to engage with his audience and promote the company.

– How to do Founder-Led Marketing the Right Way; As a Founder

As a founder, leading and also marketing your startup is one of the fastest ways to scale, as you are creating more marketing channels and not leaving everything to the marketing team, aside from posting on your social platforms about your startup, there are even more ways to market and talk about your startup as a founder;

• Building in Public (BIP) Strategy

This can be anything but most especially, updating your audience or users, how the “behind-the-scenes” of scaling a pre-seed startup feels like, sharing the goals, the ups, downs, wins, losses, and everything a traditional startup would not share with their customers, and this does not work only for startups in pre-seed stage, it works for startups in any stage, even the ideation stage!

A great example of a founder making use of BIP is David Masoperh, who is currently building Pebla, a fintech company for Rwanda, David actively engages his LinkedIn audience every week and gives them an update on what stage Pebla is at, and how it feels to be building a fintech startup. Here is an example of one of his BIP posts.

This has worked immensely for David and Pebla and has allowed him to build Pebla’s waiting list to over 9K subscribers. 

• Have Clear Marketing Goals

Another strategy startups should consider is ensuring their marketing goals are clearly defined. Without well-defined marketing goals, the data and analytics from marketing efforts will be difficult to interpret, as it would be challenging to track the results when the desired outcome is unclear. Clearly articulating the marketing goals, whether it’s increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, or generating leads, provides a framework for measuring the success of marketing initiatives and optimizing them accordingly.

Before starting a marketing campaign, have a clear goal of what the campaign is meant for. Is it for publicity, to drive sales, or to get social media engagements? This will allow you to put your marketing budgets into the right marketing channels.

– How to Set Effective Marketing Goals

The most important advice on setting your marketing goals is to have a realistic target, depending on your startup’s capacity, marketing budget, and many more. Setting small goals, and hitting them is better than setting big and “unrealistic” goals and failing to achieve them. Your realistic goals can be as small as increasing your website traffic by 5% every month, this propels you to have increased your website traffic by 60% by the end of the year.

Another way to set effective marketing goals is to commit these goals to a deadline, notice how the goal above says “increase website traffic by 5% every month” and not “increase website traffic by 5%”. Setting and committing your realistic and small goals to a deadline also enables you to practice the act of goal setting and stay focused and motivated to complete them.

While these three are not the only marketing strategies, they are some of the most important ones that you would want to implement in your startup marketing process. Marketing is broad, apart from these, you still need to research, be patient, iterate your product, listen to your users, have a better USP (Unique Selling Point), and many more.