Community

Search engine optimisation

Paid social

Word of Mouth

Emailing, DMing, phoning or messaging potential leads. Every founder has the power to drive awareness and sales through outbound marketing. Here's some ideas and techniques to experiment with.

Creating, publishing and optimising articles that your customers are searching for on Google and other search engines. Then driving them from these articles into your product or service.

Paying to have your articles and landing pages appear at the top of search engine results. These are Search Ads, often known as SEM and Paid Search.

Promoting your product or service through social posts and social replies across the major social networks. This includes paying to create ads of your most popular social posts.

Paying to boost your most popular social posts and ads on social networks.

Sponsoring influencers across YouTube, Podcasts, social channels and emails so that they share or amplify your message with their followers

Go where your customers are. Posting and replying in digital communities like Facebook groups and Subreddits, adding value to the conversations and building your authority. When the time is right sharing your product's benefits to drive awareness and sign ups. Alternatively, creating and managing your own community that focuses on the pain your product solves, before selling members on your product.

Building an email list to regularly, directly reach potential and existing users, build a relationship with them, engage them, and encourage them to become a paying customer. Email can be a type of content marketing, but can also be used to drive traffic to content marketing.

Building backlinks (links to your landing page) from other websites. They will send you traffic, and a good backlink profile will improve your search rankings for your own content too.

Using an agency, freelancer or personally reaching out to relevant publications with notable news or insights that they might want to share.

Creating valuable content of all forms to create awareness for your business, and drive sales. Could be: a podcast, YouTube video, long-form article (which may be SEOd, see above), quiz, infographic, live stream. Often creates as a lead magnet where the user has to give up an email address in return for access.

Things you can do in the real world, including attending events, to drive awareness and sign ups.

Build tools, directories, microsites and similar projects that can help your audience before driving them into your core product experience.

Encouraging existing users to promote your service. This isn't incentivised with money or credits, but is encouraged in the product.

Incentivising existing users, industry thought leaders, and influential people and brands to promote your service. They're rewarded with credits or financially if someone sign ups based on their recommendation.

CRO means conversion rate optimisation. It can be used across most marketing channels and is focused on techniques to improve performance. Examples: conversion of landing pages, open rates of emails, click-through rates on ads or on call-to-actions on content marketing.