One of the biggest challenges for marketing a startup is trying to reach the target audience in a cost effective, scalable way. It seems daunting and generally we start with defining the target audience and all the general things that one would go through for a marketing campaign, but the reality is that for most companies there are direct and indirect competitors, it might simply be more efficient, at least in the short term to simply focus on your competitors first, just capitalise on all their blood sweat and tears first.
So, how do we do this. Lets start with each of the main platforms we’d most commonly encounter for marketing –
Before we dig into each channel, first things first, get a list of both direct and indirect competitors. for each of the platforms below you want to get the relevant URL/Account or profile to monitor or analyse.
- Instagram – if your competitor has an account, they are going to have followers, so, thats a prime pool of potential customers for you to engage with. you need to be moderate in the way you engage with them since you don’t want to be called out for spam, but there’s nothing stopping you from trying to engage with these potential customers… and their own followers! The instagram account you see on this site was grown using this approach.
- Linkedin – linkedin companies tend to have followers as well, and most employees will be associated with the linkedin company account, so you can use this as a way of engaging with employees of the company, once you connect with them, their followers/contacts are open to you, again providing you with a chance to engage with 2nd degree contacts. You’ll also be able to see the companies that those individuals have previously worked at and repeat with a new pool of companies.
- Google – you can use an SEO tool to breakdown the various pages of your competitors website to get an idea of what kind of keywords they optimise for, and just use that as a starting point to optimise your own site.
- Affiliates – find the affiliate URL generally provided by the affiliate network and figure out the structure of the URL, and stick that into google, any affiliate who hasn’t cloaked their links will show up with the affiliate URL and so now you have a list of potential affiliates to reach out
These are just a few tactics, but as you can see leaning against your competitors efforts can save you a lot of time and effort.