[Founders Who Want to Learn About the Marketing of Sharing on Social Channels]
If a founder feels marketing and content development is critical for startup success, what does your team need to be good at?
I read advice from marketing people about how to do marketing online. In a startup, I think a lot of this advice isn't relevant, because it assumes that founders have a product and a market fit, and that all they have to do is:
1. Have a message
2. Pay for distribution of this message.
In my opinion, this is useless. This assumes that you have a long history of owned media and a long history of product development.
As an early stage founder, you do not have these things. I would bet on it.
In early product development, your product development and your community development are interconnected.
Your product evolves and your community grows, if you are able to feed that community with content that enables them to give you feedback on your mission, your product and your goals.
Marketing, in this case, has a very different methodology than "paid advertising" or "content distribution."
Marketing in this case is more like sharing and linking to people, building a network. It is best done in social media channels, which are inherently bi-directional, interactive, and identity-focused.
In my opinion, the two things you should be helping your team achieve in this "marketing-as-a-sharing" activity are:
1. Finding ambassadors for your cause, and people who support your mission
2. Audience members who find your content compelling and can work as carriers of your content into other social channels
I keep this generally as two things, so that it's easier to group these ideas into general categories of action:
1. Talking to people and sharing with them ideas and their own stories and yours
2. Creating compelling content
If you can do these two things in social media, you can achieve:
1. Demographic, personality, and behavioral data about your community / customers
2. An increasingly expanding customer and audience base that builds these data in a network effect.
So, how do you do it?
Here are just three tips that will help you:
1. Learn to interview your audience, and write about them and link to them in your channels
2. Learn to take photos of your community and customers and post those pics on your social channels and link to them
3. Learn to look through data and figure out where and who is consuming that data so that you are able to push more content to those people, or find blank spots and blue ocean areas to develop more content.
Here is one example we did recently.
In LinkedIn, we posted updates about our experience with Techstars Startup Week in Taipei, and we tagged all the wonderful founders and people we met. We made sure to tag Alyssa Chen as one of the speakers.
That post is here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6609976124141338624
This sharing did two things. It showed our respect and our belief in the strength of their founder community and the Taiwan community, and it also helped share our audience (and our audience's views of the market) with them so that they could learn more about us.
This same activity can happen in your own channels. Over time, it leads to reputation building and information sharing. It also grows the whole pie for everyone.
After all, being a founder is about being part of a community of people who help each other, share with each other and support each other through almost anything.
I will continue these tips in next week's post by using specific examples of how this can be done, so stay tuned.
For now, keep following us on Facebook, join us on LinkedIn, and check out our accelerator content on our web page.
Our Accelerator blog page: https:appworks.tw/blog
Our LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/appworks-ventures
We will be launching the application period for AI and Blockchain founders in our next Accelerator class very soon. Make sure to check it out. https://appworks.tw/accelerator
Doug Crets
Communications Master, AppWorks
Photo Credit: Perry Grone on Unsplash
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