GTM Strategies for Initial-Stage Startups

Many early-stage startups struggle with marketing, especially when they need to revisit their branding status and sales strategy to enter new markets. Common questions and concerns include:

• How do we attract customers?
• How do we conduct user interviews?
• How much money should we spend on branding and marketing?
• How much time and resources should we allocate to marketing?
• How do we create content?
• How much content should we create and how can we promote them?
• Among various options like advertising, organic growth, CRM, media marketing, social media, community engagement, and etc, what channel or tactic should we focus on?

Through this article you will learn 1) the basic structure of marketing and 2) actionable tactics you can use right away. These methods are effective for initial market entry and can be adapted according to your business model or KPIs.

Key of Marketing

The most important aspect of marketing starts with detecting what the customer’s problem is. To do so, you need to articulate who your target users are and what problems they have. This fundamental process of defining your customers and their pain points are crucial. Skipping this step might leave you overwhelmed by a flood of information later on, not knowing what would be your next steps. Once you’ve defined your customers and their problems, you can build the plans to solve their problems through content creation and distribution via the most suitable channels and media.

Delivering the solutions(content) to the target audience(customers) via appropriate channels and media is the key of marketing. Once you establish this key structure, only things left for you to do is well managing your resources like your team’s human resources, time, and money.

Defining your customers and planning contents

Now that you have learned the most important essence of marketing, you can define the current status of your own startup, depending on whether your startup know its customers or not. Here’s a checklist to define your status and find out what to do accordingly:

• Type A: You clearly know your target audience and their problems. (You can define your audiences and problems through certain keywords)
  • Map out types of content and problems your target audiences would engage with.
• Type B: You don’t clearly know who your target audiences are, and their problems. (You cannot clearly identify them with certain keywords)

  • In this case, your main goal is to figure out the primary keywords(problems) that your target customers would be interested in, and find out the solutions for them.

  • First, list the channels and media where your target users are actively engaging in. You can list up and categorize them.

    

  • Second, collect the keywords mentioned by users on those key channels. After listing up, you can measure the search volumes of each keywords using tools like Google Keyword Planner.

    

    • ist up all the keywords that you will possibly use in your own contents and categorize them into several clusters, according to certain standards that you defined. For example, you can categorize your keywords according to their MSVs(Monthly Search Volumes). Keywords with higher volumes- MSV of over 10,000- might be too broad to start with, so you might consider using long-tail keywords that have MSVs from about 100 to 1,000 to create and publish contents that resonates with your target audiences’ search intents.

      • Example of categorizing keywords:
        • Design- t-shirt design, sticker design, graphic design
        • Document types- proposal, PPT, templates
      

    • When you are done doing keyword research, you can identify your primary keyword to set a marketing hypothesis.

      • Example of a hypothesis:
        • Keywords related to ‘design’ are highly relevant to our brand, so website visit rates (visits/impressions) would be higher.

    • Then, based on your primary keyword, you can categorize the content that you will create into several types.

      • Example of content categorization:
        • Content type 1: Contents that directly teach how to design
        • Content type 2: Contents that share design templates
        • Content type 3: Contents that share a list of tips (for example, 10 tips for beginning designers)

  • At this point, you have defined the core problems and content types. Next, you can now decide where (i.e., channels/media) to distribute them.

    • Try researching different channels. While It is effective to distribute on the channels that you have scrapped during keyword/content research, you can also redo or expand your channel research and select the ones best fit the content. You might also adjust the content accordingly, to match the channel characteristics. To collect basic information about each channels, you can either search for ‘{{channel name}} + {{demographic/popular content/MAU,DAU}}’, or directly explore the channels and define their audience characteristics and content features. You can categorize the channels based on given information such as MAU or DAU, and you can note additional characteristics of the channels to define better marketing actions.
      • Example: X channel
        • Channel characteristic: there are many users that are deeply interested in certain areas. They subscribe to each other by ‘following’.
        • Content characteristic: there are text limitations and news updates are very quick.
        • Possible action plans: direct operation by regular posting, following actions, opening ad an account
    • If you want to quickly validate and get some lessons for your hypothesis, you can choose between following 3 ways- advertising, community tapping, and influencer marketing:
      • Advertising: you can set the budget based on CAC(Customer Acquisition Cost) to achieve the desired numbers of your customer acquisition. The appropriate budget differs from cases to cases, based on your company’s situation, available budget, and KPIs. You might start with a small sample size, check the results, and adjust the goals based on those results(CAC). As your KPI moves down the funnel towards purchase or retention, CAC increases and the machine learning period gets longer. Therefore, you might consider setting KPI from the top funnel metrics such as impressions, clicks, or page views. To analyze keyword performance from advertisement results, you can divide your content into at least three types, to identify which content and keywords performed the best.
      • Community tapping: you can create content on the most-frequently mentioned topics in certain communities and distribute it regularly to check engagement. Ensure that the community aligns with your target customers and produce content that resonates with community’s overall tone and manner, rather than posting overt advertising content.
      • Influencer marketing: you can consider influencers as a medium, taking into account the content characteristics and follower reactions. When engaging with influencers, you should take into consideration why their channel matches your company, and describe the content you want to create, how it benefits their channel, and what is the most important KPI of the campaign. When choosing influencers from YouTube, accounts with 5% of likes over followers rate, and over 100% of views over followers are considered highly-engaging channels. Make sure to include a clause in the contract to maintain the content for a certain period of time. In most cases, you can estimate if or not you would be able to achieve the target KPI based on a rough CTR of 1%.
    • If you want strategies for long-term engagement, channels and methods that you should consider include SEO, newsletters and social medias, and influencer marketing:
      • SEO(Search Engine Optimization): You can publish article content using your target keywords- which would be the solutions to your customers’ problems)- for long-term results. To collect performance results for content analysis, you are recommended to focus on quantity on initial stages. You might also consider using AI tools to create initial contents and develop it for publication.
      • Newsletter and Social Media: You can select channels to spread content from your website, and create a brand account. You can revisit your content and develop it to more appropriate form for different social media or newsletters and distribute them. For social channels, it is efficient to set your initial KPI as ‘followers’, to ensure exposures.
      • Influencer marketing: Along with short-term contracts, you can engage with influencers who align well with your brand in a long-term, and publish content regularly, to build and enhance brand awareness.
    • When creating contents, you can use different AI tools, such as Adobe Firefly, to create images or other contents if you are done defining the keywords. On the initial stage, prioritize rapid production over aesthetics. It is fine to use basic tools like PPTs, but you should never forget to focus on content that prompts the desired action from the target audience. When producing a high quantity of content, try to control variables (cost, content quantity, uploading frequency) to categorize and analyze your content later on.

Monthly Action Plan Recommendation

If you want a more visible action plan that you can implement immediately, here’s a recommended 1-month marketing plan for initial stage startups:

• Week 1: Define problems and extract keywords through researching target channels and content.
• Week 2: Publish one content on a daily basis to five communities, and send five DM everyday to influencers, without advertising fees.
• Week 3:
  • Identify the channels and keywords(content) with the fastest and the most responses from your weekly data.
  • Repeat the community posting and influencer contacting actions.
  • Publish content for SEO: integrate user-responsive content into your website, app, and social media to boost organic traffic.
• Week 4:
  • (Optional) Execute ads with the content performance data derived from 3 weeks of activities. However, refrain from executing ads before clearly defining your customers’ problems.
  • Analyze the data and iterate content publication. Your analysis should be based on the key metrics and KPIs, which will measure the success of your strategy and content. Some possible goal KPIs would include:
    • CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
    • LTV (Lifetime Value)
    • Churn Rate
    • NPS (Net Promoter Score)
    • Revenue Growth

By continuously iterating and improving your content strategy for initial stage marketing and successful GTM, you would be able to clearly define your customers and create contents that will make them engage with your brand. By following these actionable steps, your startup can effectively enter new markets and achieve sustained growth.