Slides for a marketing workshop(s) for startups at Nestholma accelerator programs.

1. Finding and getting customers
Startup Marketing
Nestholma Venture Accelerator

2. Think about it
What is marketing?
Confidential3

3. Marketing is a battle of
perceptions, not products.
Once a person's mind is
made up, it can't be changed.
Al Ries and Jack Trout

4. Really?
Sometimes, but the product
needs fulfill the perception

5. Marketing started, because sales
departments needed others to
conduct consumer research,
prepare brochures and other
promotions, and find leads
Philip Kotler

6. Marketing is Dead!
Strategy is dead, the big idea is
dead, management is dead and
marketing, as we know, is also dead
Kevin Roberts
Ex-Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide

7. Stop all the hard selling
and interruptive
advertising and start
treating the customer as
if she was your mother.
Scott Stratten

8. Marketing is not the art of
finding clever ways to dispose
of what you make.
It is the art of creating genuine
customer value.
Philip Kotler

9. Marketing 3.0 is all
about improving the
lives of consumers
Philip Kotler

10. It’s all about
the value
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11. Product
Provides the value
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12. Revenue model
Captures the value
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13. Marketing
Communicates the
value and
engages customers
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14. Main point is always
the value you provide
not what is your product

15. Canvas gives you the basis for good marketing
1. What is the problem and for whom?
2. What is the value for your customers?
3. What is the solution you can provide?
4. What are the channels you deliver the
product or reach customers?
5. How do you capture the value (money etc.)?
6. How much money can you spend?
7. How do you measure the effectiveness of
your marketing?
8. How are you different?
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16. Weinberg & Mares: Traction
19 Traction Channels
1. Viral Marketing
2. Public Relations (PR)
3. Unconventional PR
4. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
5. Social and Display Ads
6. Offline Ads
7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
8. Content Marketing
9. Email Marketing
10. Engineering as Marketing
11. Target Market Blogs
12. Business Development (BD)
13. Sales
14. Affiliate Programs
15. Existing Platforms
16. Trade Shows
17. Offline Events
18. Speaking Engagements
19. Community Building
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1. What is possible
3. What’s working
2. What’s probable

17. You don’t
want to be
this guy
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18. Outbound
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Inbound

19. Outbound
• Mass emails
• Cold calling
• Mass advertising
• Online and offline
• Reach masses immediately,
but also non-customers
• Marketer-centric
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Inbound
• Search engine optimization
• Useful content (blogging etc.)
• Social conversations
• Mostly online
• Build the audience and find
relevant leads
• Customer-centric
Small companies concentrate on inbound,
but both will be needed

20. Find customers with inbound, add outbound for scaling
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Product/
market-fit
Search Execute t
Inbound

21. Confidential22

22. Use content to engage
your customers
How can you get them to move through
the funnel and become (paying)
customers?
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23. Provide valuable info
for your customers
Your content marketing needs to feel
like a service to your customers
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24. Awareness Consideration Decision
Buyer’s journey
Problem Solution Product
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Concentrate on

25. Awareness Consideration Decision
Buyer’s journey, content examples
Problem
• Educational content
• Editorial content
• Expert content
• Research reports
• eBooks
• Whitepapers
Solution
• Expert guides
• Video
• Webcast
• Podcast
• Comparison
Whitepapers
Product
• Live demo
• Case studies
• Testimonials
• Vendor comparison
• Product comparison
• Trial download
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26. CASE: Marketo
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I was promised a cheat sheet
(great for building Awareness
and helping in Consideration)
Instead I got an executive summary
that might be useful in Decision phase
Result: Total failure

27. CASE: Engaging your leads (zellwk.com)
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• Simple and quick to read
newsletter
• Specific topic with clear title
(highly targeted audience)
• Call-to-action (CTA)
• Highly targeted (they
read the post)
• Get email list of the
potential customers
• Engage and learn about the
needs: makes it easier to
write the book and
concentrate on the right
things
Newsletter about a new post
1.
Blog post ends with
2.
Conversation: my problem?
3.

28. Case: Driving your customers nuts (booking.com)
• I visited London
twice in 2015
• The last visit was
over six months ago
• Relevance and
value for me?
• Vanity marketing!
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29. Confidential35

30. Vanity marketing
Makes you feel good,
but no value is created or
delivered
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31. Get found
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32. Best way to get a good
position in search results?
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33. Create good
content!
The “tricks” make sense only after that
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34. Confidential40
60% of
the clicks
Long-tail keyword
Paid search results
(Google Adwords)
Organic search results
(Google Adwords)

35. SEO
Search Engine Optimization
• process of improving website to
attracts more visitors from
search engines.
• Search engines rank sites and
pages based on popularity,
quality and authority of the
websites (+ about 200 other
things).
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60% of
the clicks
Long-tail keyword

36. What really matters in search ranking?
• Content on the site
• Links pointing to the site
• RankBrain: AI that tries to
understand the meaning of
behind the search query
searchenginewatch.com, 24.3.2016
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37. One good estimate on
various factors
searchengineland.com/seotable
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38. Find the
keywords
that matter
• What keywords your
(potential) customers use?
• How frequently they use
those keywords?
• How relevant the keywords
are to your business?
• What is the competition for
those keywords?
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39. SEO keywords: look at the long-tail
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Competition
Search frequency
Single word searches
shoes
Descriptive searches
cheap shoes online free shipping worldwide
2-3 word searches
shoes online

40. SEO
best
practices
• Aim for keywords that have high search
volume and low competition
• Search engines try to match the intent, not
just the exact keywords
• Don’t stuff the page with unnecessary
keywords: it decreases the quality of the
content
• Optimize each page around the primary
keyword (titles, URL, body, image ALT-text)
• Link to other relevant sites and get good
quality inbound links
• Pay attention to usability and also make
the site mobile-friendly
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41. Confidential48
What is missing?
Good value
proposition

42. Confidential49
Call-to-Action buttons drive conversions
Clearly tells what
happens when you
click. And it’s free!
But maybe
too many for
one page!

43. Start of the conversion process
Don’t forget the
Call-to-Action (CTA)
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44. Confidential51

45. Build an
audienceConfidential52

46. Blog
key to
audience
building
• Focus on educational content that has practical
value – you need to earn the right to talk about your
product
• Descriptive and catchy headline (under 70 chars)
• Write with a specific reader group in mind. Use their
language (important also for SEO).
• Introduction tells the key point. Your readers may
only read this! Remember the inverted pyramid of
writing
• Good picture is a must. No generic stock images.
• Link to outside sources
• Make it easy to share (Click-to-tweet etc.)
• Have a Call-to-Action (CTA)
• Engage the readers to give feedback and discuss
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47. Choose the right social
media channels
and appropriate style for you
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48. Tips for using Twitter
(mostly useful for other channels too)
• Choose your audience, style and topics
• 20% marketing, 80% useful info
• Follow the key influencers
• Don’t just broadcast: follow and discuss
• Use images and video (but avoid stock art)
• Don’t forget Call-to-Action (CTA)!
• Post regularly, but not too much (add value)
• Use hashtags (sparingly)
• Check out tools (Hootsuite, Buffer, Tweetdeck)
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49. Case: Nestholma Twitter (company profile)
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Highlight your
key value in
bio text
Say
something
with your
header image
Use
images
•Topics based on the
current accelerator
program theme
•Tweets about
what’s happening
in programs and re-
tweets on industry
news
•2-10 own tweets
per day

50. Confidential58

51. A few thing to think about
when marketing indie games
• Give sneak peaks into the development as early as possible
• Make a website or separate landing page that only is about your game with
matching graphics and feel
• Be active in social media: talk about the game and the progress (not your inside
jokes or party pictures)
• Write a development blog: also good in attracting more than just your core
audience
• Make lots of trailers
• Using crowdsourcing (crowdfunding, content etc.) to engage users
• Contact journalists. Think about what is the news item they could write about:
most likely not that you are releasing a game
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52. Let’s look at your sites
Who wants help?
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53. Amplify 1:1
connections
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54. Email
best
practices
• Define a clear audience and goal for
your email. Avoid mass-emails
• Understandable subject line that
doesn’t feel spammy (<50 chars)
• Short text with clear focus on a topic
• Have a Call-to-Action (CTA)
• Personalize content
• Make it easy to share the content
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55. Getting started with
your own marketing
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56. What’s needed in a
marketing plan?
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57. Marketing planning
for small companies
in eight steps
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58. Choose a specific
customer segment
from your canvas
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59. Choose a persona
Who’s the customer
you’re talking to?
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60. Define keywords
What a customer may write to
search engine to find you?
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61. Define success
When is it a business for you?
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62. Define success metrics
Actionable metrics:
what metrics will tell you if
you’re on the right track?
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63. Estimate conversion rate
How many, for ex., leads need
to convert to paying customers?
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64. Set the budget
How much can you afford to
spend? Remember your
conversion rate estimate!
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65. Choose the channels
Where can you reach your
target audience?
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66. Growth hacking
New marketing

67. Growth hackers asks “How do I get
customers for my product?” and
answers with A/B tests, landing
pages, viral factor, email
deliverability, and Open Graph.
Andrew Chen

68. Airbnb made it really easy to post
the listing on craigslist.com
Accessed instantly millions of
potential customers
Note. Craigslist had no public API
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69. Mailbox application
download wait list showed
users how many others were
in front of them
In six weeks, million users
signed up
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70. Neil Patel’s
marketing
summit site
effectively
engages users
to share the site
by promising
giveaways
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71. Dropbox made a referral
program with incentives
100k to 4M users in under
two years
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72. Hotmail put a tagline in each message sent
through the service.
After five weeks they had 2M users
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Get your free email at Hotmail.com

73. Linkedin gave users an
option to create public
profiles.
Went from 2M users to
200M
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74. Facebook, for example,
enabled users to put FB
widgets on other sites
Comments, activity,
recommendations, feed, etc.
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75. Twitter learned that users that
follow 5-10 others, are more
likely to come back.
They re-engineered the whole
site to get users to follow
when they sign up
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76. Youtube has made it really
easy to share Youtube
videos and embed them on
other sites
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77. Aimclear wrote a blog post
about GM leaving Facebook
They targeted journalist with
Facebook ads about the post
Lots of press with $18
BTW. Great approach: write something
that journalists are interested in to get
company’s own story out, as well
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78. Scalable startup test:
Bumps or
Engines?

79. Contact
Topi Järvinen
+358 40 754 3131
topi.jarvinen@nestholma.com
http://www.nestholma.com