Launched a Web Startup, Now What?

So you’ve launched your own startup and you’re hoping to see an immediate stream of traffic and interest. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way in most cases, launching a product or service is just the beginning of a long and grueling marketing period.

Getting noticed amongst the hundreds if not thousands of other startups can be hard work. There’s no clean-cut method but there are steps you can take to give yourself a fighting chance, without breaking the bank.

Thanks to great services such as Twitter and Facebook, it’s possible to expose your business to potentially hundreds of millions, for free. Twitter has become the foundation for startups to gain recognition and popularity, with the many success stories such as Etsy – who launched in 2005, joined Twitter in 2007 and now boasts over 1.2 million followers – it’s a proven method to get the word out.

If you’re going to promote by means of social media, make sure you’re proactive in doing so. There’s a plethora of business-like accounts on Twitter who regularly plug their services and products but don’t take the time to reply to feedback given by people. Monitor conversation about your brand, that way you can be in control and take advantage of the invaluable things being said about it.

There’s no right or wrong way to use your Twitter account but if it’s a business account, it goes without saying that you wouldn’t be sharing pictures of the rump steak you’re having for dinner. A good way of being noticed is to have special offers via Twitter if possible, a great example of this was LCN – a domain registrar like any other who had just joined Twitter, they had 10 weeks of offers to celebrate their 10^th birthday, word got out and they received almost 1000 new followers just from a simple promotional campaign.

So, social media is one thing but what about having your product/service featured in another blog?  Making contact with potential PR opportunities can be difficult but there are some things you can do to help your chances.

Capitalizing on PR Opportunities
Firstly, you need to look at your niche and look at the various blogs covering the same or similar topics. We’ll take running a new iPhone App Development company as an example, you wouldn’t go ahead and contact the big names such as TUAW and MacWorld etc. because chances are, their inboxes are filled with similar emails every day. It’d be more productive to contact smaller blogs to get covered, that way the likelihood of succeeding is increased.

Also, when emailing a blog requesting to be covered, try to avoid starting with ‘Dear Sir/Madam’, make the effort to find out the editor of the blog, or the appropriate name to address, you want to give the right impression from the outset. The whole idea of PR is to form meaningful relationships; if you’re going to generically address the contact then chances are your email could hit the trash before it’s been read.

So you’re actively promoting your service/product through social media and making customer relations along with seeking new PR opportunities, you’re pretty much set for an initial marketing burst, but that certainly isn’t the end of it. If it was that easy, everyone would be doing it. You need to create a marketing plan with in-depth information about how you’re going to go about spreading the word, each time you start a new campaign make sure you monitor it so you can see the results and make necessary adjustments to any plans based on the success or lack of success of a certain method.

Thanks to StartupSoft & LynchPop for images.