Building newsletters to promote your products
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.
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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 👇
Related guides
Like what you’ve read so far in your founder guides? We’ve got more to come
Upcoming guides...
Marketing
- Content marketing distribution machine: a full guide for founders
- Founder guides: create an affiliate program
- A founder guide to programmatic SEO
Co-founders & Hiring
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- Outsource effectively
- How to split up equity
- Finding a co-founder
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- How to find relevant beta users
- Prioritize features effectively
- How to price your product
- Building a roadmap
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Ana Bibikova - @NotechAna
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.
Anthony Castrio - @AnthonyCastrio
Anthony is a Software Engineer, Fractional CTO, and the founder of Indie Worldwide, a virtual incubator and social club for bootstrapped founders.