Newsletter marketing will help you reach your customers wherever they are. Your pain as a founder is to locate all those “would-be” customers and to bring your product in front of their eyes.
The world is full of your customers. They are everywhere, and they are constantly looking for your product.
Or a product like yours.
Or they don’t look for a product specifically but rather for any solution that would solve their problem.
Some, however, are not even aware that they have a problem but they still can become your customers with time.
Your pain as a founder is to locate all those “would-be” customers and to bring your product in front of their eyes.
To do that you can:
Become a center for your “would-be customers” attention and attract them with a content they are looking for (this option also includes outbound markeing efforts like cold email outreach).
Piggyback on someone else’s effort, go directly from zero to hero and reach a big audience from day one.
The first tactic requires time and effort. The second one requires much less effort, almost no time but almost always some money (the only acception to this is when you find yourself a right partner to grow your startup and get access to their audience and resources).
One of the ways to bring your product in front of your would-be customers' eyes that combine both of these approaches is to use newsletter marketing.
2 types of newsletter marketing
You have to understand that in addition to demanding different sets of resources, different types of newsletter marketing helps to solve different problems and is useful for different stages of customer “journey” through your sales funnel.
Getting featured is great for :
— Creating brand Awareness
— Causing a purchasing decision when a “would-be customer” is already aware of the problem, wants to solve it and is actively looking for a solution.
Building your own newsletter from scratch is great for:
— Awareness stage, if your targeted audience needs to be educated on the problem they have (which happens quite often if you’re offering a really disruptive solution)
— Interest stage, when a would be customer is researching the field trying to figure out what brand to go with to solve their problem
— Decision stage, especially for B2B startups, when a customer (the one you’re targeting and the one who would be using your product) is getting ready to pitch your solution to a budget holder (CEO or Financial Executive).
Should you build your own newsletter or get featured in someone else's?
— First of all, you can do both!
— Second, your choice will depend on your user journey: how exactly your particular customers make purchasing decisions and what channels do they use on every stage (if you’re interested in this subject read here more on Building a go-to-market strategy based on user journey).
— Third, your choice will depend on your budget and timing, as well as the goals you’re planning to achieve by using these tactics (educate customers or make them aware of your brand, build a community around your product or get more sign ups in short-term perspective).
Here are the step-by-step guides on how to use both tactics 👇
Kavya is a marketing expert, UX/UI designer and product analyst that also co-founded a service that allows users to create beautifully-designed resumes in Markdown — Resumey.pro. Kavya and her co-founder fully bootstrapped the product and is growing it to a $1M revenue product. The map of paying users for the service already includes 60% of the world.
You can follow Kavya on Twitter @kavyaj93 and LinkedIn
Hua is a talented professional designer and an art director working on her own startup Typogram — a logo design tool for startup founders and absolute beginners that helps to create unique logos with a very distinct brand personality. Hua also issues a newsletter FontDiscovery that covers all font-related topics for non-designers.
You can follow Hua on Twitter @HuaTweets
Like what you’ve read so far in your founder guides? We’ve got more to come
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Content marketing distribution machine: a full guide for founders
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Have an idea for the next Wizen Guide or interested in contributing in the next founder guides? Give us a shout at [email protected], we’d love to hear from you.
Ana is an Author, Marketing Strategist and a Mentor in the Founder Institute. Ana has 18y of experience in building businesses, growing them to $4M annual revenue.
