Table of Contents
Congratulations, youâve studied the market, worked on your product, managed to push forward a minimum viable product, in turn, caught the eyes of an investor, and finally launched your startup. As a founder you know that all of these steps are just the beginning but every single one of them is as crucial as the next to have a solid foundation.
But as a startup founder, youâre operating under constant stress, and with a limited budget, should you focus on logistics, data, product development, partnerships, growing your team, or marketing? The list is endless and so from our experience weâre gonna tell you that how your product functions and how your customers react to it and how your marketing team is able to analyze and capture this data is arguably the most important step of them all.
When most people think of marketing they think of tv commercials, just get the hottest couple, or the funniest influencer, make him the face of your campaign and voila, it’s a recipe that seldom fails but as a start-up, youâve put in your lifeâs savings, got angel fund from your family and friends and spent nights thinking about giving the perfect pitch, letâs face it, you donât have the resources to fail ( as Eminem would put it this opportunity comes once in a lifetime) and when you go back a decade earlier youâll notice that some of todayâs biggest tech giants emerged during the recession of 2008 such as Uber and Slack and for those very specific reason startups adopted the concept of growth hacking in the first place so they could survive without a budget but thatâs a whole other story, you can read about it here.
Not saying this to brag, but thereâs to marketing more than a rhyming headline so here are our recommendations for startups in Egypt if you choose to have your marketing in-house:
1. Know your market:
This one is easy, youâve probably done the work already. Begin by a competitive analysis to figure out the dos and the donâts and the design look and then figure out the target audience because your tone of voice depends on it as well as your technical ads targeting. Then move on to how youâre going to offer your value proposition because unless youâre selling flying hoverboards, you probably already have 2 competitors in your local market and so you need to outshine them.
2. Define your KPIs:
So this part varies depending on the nature of your business, for example in a recent interview that we conducted with one of Egyptâs biggest ride-hailing companies, they mentioned that their main KPI evolved from app downloads to first rides over time because it didnât make sense if they got users to download the app but didnât actually use it, they even called it a vanity metric, we donât think it is so weâll just call it a micro-conversion.
You see, if you want an easy list that has all the KPIs you can track, then here is a list for it, itâs 100% not wrong but what we mean is, there will always be a specific KPI to your startup that depends on the service you offer and that KPIs can be based on custom or standard events if youâre using Facebook ads for example. But whatâs more important here is your ability to track and analyze this data between your marketing team and tech team and use it to refine your product and build on it.
3. Choosing the right channel:
Weâre just gonna get this out of the way, but if youâre reading this in Egypt then you know thereâs no way around it, Facebook is probably your first, most important or only channel.
But weâll look at the bigger picture as intellectuals of the 21st century. Not because your competitors are doing it, you should too, whether locally or abroad. Defining a content strategy goes a long way and it doesnât make sense to post the same post across all channels just for the sake of it.
For example Facebook is best if youâre trying to get app downloads and link clicks to your website (a trial and error process and may not be the case for your business). Twitter is best if youâre sharing news and sucks if youâre selling something. Youtube is great if you have a really big budget for production but useless if youâre going to run an ad on a 5 sec GIF. We recently wrote about marketing in Egypt and why it needs changing, we encourage you to check it out.
This is a summary of how startups should choose their marketing channels:
- Decide on a platform after careful research, settle on it for at least 2 months with a good budget.
- Make sure every step of the way is trackable.
- If you believe youâre doing it wrong, get help, if not move on to the next channel.
- Try Google search ads, email marketing (itâs relatively cheap and sometimes even for free depending on the package you choose) and blogging.
- You scale as you go not the other way around.