When entering a realm that is home to both mythical creatures and unfavorable odds, it certainly helps to have an adventurer’s mindset. We are, of course, talking about the dynamic but daunting world of startups; a perfect setting for your own hero story. However, before setting out into the fray, you’ll need a sidekick, and social media is almost certainly the perfect accomplice.
The number of unicorns—or startups worth over $1 billion—continues to rise year on year, with over 1,200 enterprises now able to claim the mighty title globally. Each has certainly found an opportunity to tip the scales in their favor, given that around 90% of startups ultimately fail in their earliest quests, returning to normality empty-handed.
Even when not aspiring to reach unicorn status, at the very least, one hopes to achieve the fantastical capacity to fly over the competition. After all, you’re ready to disrupt your industry and captivate a fast-growing audience. But in a world that is saturated with noise and requires jostling for attention, how can you ensure that your startup gets its destined opportunity to be seen?
Social Media As a Tool to Help Startups Unveil Their Superpowers
Many startups lack the financial resources to launch expensive marketing campaigns or take on established competitors head-to-head. Instead, savvy breakthrough startups leverage social media’s unique potential to build their reach quickly and intrepidly forge a loyal customer following.
In this environment, you can rely on the type of innovative thinking from which your core concept first sprung and shake things up without depending on a bottomless budget. Whether laying the foundation for future funding or broadly getting the word out on your one-of-a-kind offering, social media is a fantastic resource for drawing eyes to your startup. Simply put, there is no larger amphitheater for brand-building.
To put this into perspective, from 2021 to 2022, the number of people using social media worldwide grew by more than 10% to 4.62 billion users. Clearly, bidding for their attention is a marketing no-brainer. However, by 2024, social media ad spend alone is expected to surpass the 300-billion-dollar mark, so competition is fierce, and being smart about your engagement-boosting game plan will be essential.
A Social Media Strategy to Help Your Startup Soar Past the Competition
Ruled by algorithms and short attention spans, the social media sphere can also be challenging to traverse. The danger lies in getting lost in the endless sea of content and losing that critical audience connection. However, when a strong social media strategy is in place, those at the helm of bold ventures can work real magic in kick-starting brand loyalty and expanding their audiences into unchartered territory.
Yes, despite substantial competition, countless small businesses manage to identify the edge they need and navigate their way toward success with social media. So, what are the secret-sauce ingredients required to plot such a course? Read on as we delve into the ins and outs of social media strategizing for startups.
It’s Time to Get Serious About Storytelling
While the cornerstone of any startup is inevitably the idea at its heart, its success can be just as dependent on storytelling as it is on product quality or caliber of customer experience.
This may seem counterintuitive to some, but as Nick Morgan, the author of How to Tell Great Business Stories, explained to Inc. Magazine, “in a world where people have a lot of choices, the story may be the deciding factor.” Or, perhaps more poignantly, as marketing guru Seth Godin puts it, “marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but the stories you tell.”
Ultimately, while the game-changing service offered by your startup might be functionally compelling, it is the narrative that you build around it that will ultimately trigger both investors and customers to connect emotionally. The most powerful brand stories resonate on a personal level, stirring enduring loyalty and compelling those who engage into action.
You may choose to tell a story about the journey of your startup, the product itself, or even your customers themselves. The tale—and brand persona that sprouts from it—may be designed to entertain, educate, inform, or inspire. However, no matter the storytelling trajectory you take, ensure that it remains woven with the values of your target audience so that they’ll be able to see themselves reflected within it.
Showcase a Consistent Brand Presence
Beyond relatable storytelling, a recognizable voice is a powerful asset when it comes to earning and retaining the trust of an audience on social media. As you begin to map out your social media content strategy—incorporating things like tutorial videos, blog posts, infographics, case studies, interviews, and more—consider how to unite each post type so that viewers will know instantly who it came from and why they’ll definitely want to stop scrolling.
Establishing your own set of content guidelines can be especially valuable for boosting brand awareness on social media; particularly given the sheer volume and frequency of posts required to gain traction on some of the faster-paced platforms. Alongside post style and tone consistency, get ahead by considering how you’ll respond to inquiries, complaints, and even the occasional rancorous troll.
Know What Makes Your Customers Tick
The founders of most startups can picture the types of people whose lives they think their offering will change for the better. However, it is an absolute must to hone this Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP, using real-world data rather than leaving its accuracy to chance.
Just as deep-dive customer research can aid the process of perfecting a product, it can also support a far stronger social media strategy. When you understand your audience, you can be confident of where to meet them virtually, what will grab their attention, and even when they’re most likely to be online.
Of course, the broader the audience with which you connect, the more growth potential you’ll unlock. This makes it important not only to develop a single Ideal Customer Profile, but to segment your audience in order to better identify the spectrum of content that will ultimately cover all of your bases.
Choose the Right Social Media Channels
We’ve touched on the reality that social media marketing calls for a substantial time investment that is tactical enough to be effective. In this sense, the bottom line is that any startup either mistargeting its marketing or spreading itself too thin is unlikely to make much progress.
According to the latest data from Statista, Facebook is by far the most popular social media platform among marketers, followed by Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and finally TikTok. However, you may find that your niche audience’s online habits make bucking these trends worthwhile.
With a good understanding of your customer base, you can triage these efforts by weighing up which social media platforms to prioritize. So consider where your demographic is most active, which platforms offer the tools and format that will best allow you to engage with potential customers, and where best to focus your efforts and resources for a greater return on investment.
Start a Big Conversation With Your Audience
Social media marketing offers a singular advantage over just about every form of conventional advertising. The reason why it is something of a secret weapon is that when you launch your campaigns on all the right platforms, you aren’t just sending your message out into the void. Instead, you’re opening a door for two-way conversations that can evolve into powerful relationships between brand and audience.
So, how powerful can a single interaction be? Well, research from Sprout Social reveals that 78% of consumers are willing to buy from a company after having a positive experience with them on social media. Better yet, while each friendly dialog instills a sense of customer satisfaction, it can also be harnessed to reinforce brand persona, gather audience feedback, and steer perception in real time as your startup finds its footing.
Take a Whistle-Stop Tour of Your Competition
While most startups strive to bring a product to market that changes the landscape of their field forever, it can still be a challenge to step out of the shadows of the industry giants who have historically held the status quo. Simultaneously, other burgeoning brands may be exploring similar avenues, setting a stage for clashes on the road ahead. Knowing who the other movers and shakers are within your arena is key to outperforming them, both on and off of social media.
Shining a spotlight on social media specifically, analyzing market trends—including the strategies of rivals and aligned allies alike—can reveal a great deal about the strengths and weaknesses of your brand’s current messaging.
By monitoring social media activity across the different platforms on an ongoing basis, you will be able to identify the kinds of content and communication that yield strong positive reactions from your intended audience as well as forewarnings of missteps and potential gaps that you’ll be able to tactically fill.
Build the Right Stack for Smoother Sailing
It can feel like a big ask to roll out substantial and unending social media campaigns while also juggling the many other facets of getting a startup off the ground. Happily, alongside triaging the social media platforms that you’ll conquer and how best to direct your content-creating focus, you can also utilize an array of resources to help speed things along.
In marketing lingo, the collection of resources used to coordinate a brand’s social media presence is known as its stack. This describes the platforms themselves—which may facilitate dual-posting like Facebook and Instagram—as well as automated third-party tools that can be used to prepare, schedule, and dispatch rolling social media content.
While a human presence is essential for maintaining that communication-rooted trust that we mentioned earlier, the right software can make it easy to shrink the workload required to keep your social media presence popping. Depending on the needs of your startup, the right social media marketing tools can be used to keep your team on the same page, set up smart alerts with a single interface, or pre-schedule content drops days or even weeks in advance.
Delve Into the Data and Drive Results
Each social media platform provides its own set of insights, allowing you to track the performance of your various posts and overarching campaigns. In turn, you can also use analytics from your startup’s website and landing pages to monitor how well your social media-generated traffic transforms into further engagement, leads, and sales.
The metrics that you identify as being useful are known as your Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs for short. Taking the time to define which data sets are valuable and aligned with your long-term marketing goals will make it easier to know when you’re doing everything right, when you need to change tack, or when you’ve stumbled onto a level-up opportunity.
On social media itself, you may choose to use things like follower numbers, post views, profile views, shares, likes, and brand mentions as your top KPIs, all the while differentiating between organic reach versus paid reach. Casting the net wider, you can monitor how much traffic comes your way from social media, the bounce rates of those visitors, resulting email subscriptions, and most importantly, your conversion rates.
The way that visitors interact with your startup’s web pages after arriving from social media will let you know whether you’re drawing the right kind of people across, and therefore, how well your social media presence lines up with your brand offering. The software utilized in your stack may also consolidate KPIs in one place, making it easier to gain a birds-eye perspective of the health of your current social media strategy.
Keep Your Eyes On the Prize
Cultivating a flourishing social media following is a major accomplishment for any startup, but it’s important to remember that conversions remain key. In this regard, the principles of iteration—a process that sees startups draw from usage data and feedback to continuously improve and expand their offering—will serve you fantastically well.
Of course, not every aspect of your social media effort will be solely about driving sales. You’ll also be working to raise brand awareness and establish yourself as an emerging authority, taking the lead as your industry changes for the better. As revenue grows, a strong online community will also add extra shine to the package you present to investors as you climb the ladder of startup investment stages.
Ultimately, you can view your first tiptoes into the various parallel social media universes as forming a parallel minimum viable product (MVP) that will be polished and perfected as your audience grows. By flexing your storytelling muscles, connecting with an audience that you know well, focusing your efforts effectively, and leveraging data to your advantage, you will be better equipped to turn popularity into profits. And who knows—perhaps you’ll unleash your inner unicorn yet.
