Ep. #4, Creating a Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy

Guests: Andrea Echstenkamper

In this episode of The Pitch Room, I had the opportunity to sit down with LaunchDarkly’s Andrea Echstenkamper to discuss multichannel marketing and platforms for thought leadership.

In today’s digital world, many different marketing channels make it tough for early stage startups to choose the right channel. Inspired by the book Traction, Andrea shares a 3-step framework to help prioritize marketing channels:

• How WELL the channel works
• How QUICKLY the channel can be tested
• How much the channel COSTS

A couple of channels are recommended for early stage startups:

Behavioral Retargeting

Retargeting is a powerful branding and conversion optimization tool. Google AdWords lets marketers pay for clicks, rather than impressions allowing companies to only pay when a visitor is reengaged. Many startups do not have the bandwidth to build out a full email-nurturing plan, and this is a great strategy to receive early interest further down the funnel.

Social and Display Ads

A low budget Twitter or LinkedIn campaign can result in high ROI because companies can get feedback quickly on messaging and measure the strength of its offering. A small tweet boost or Facebook campaign provides valuable information about a startup’s audience. In LinkedIn, marketers can test a hypothesis by targeting users by job title. In Twitter, marketers can target by keyword or Twitter count followers to see where the opportunities are for SEO and partner marketing. These mini experiments will show marketers what works without a huge marketing spend.

Email Marketing

Email marketing helps businesses stay connected with current and potential customers. It is also a great platform to be more personal with your audience. Personalizing an email body has been shown to generate greater transaction rates. Airbnb attributes much of its early success to emailing directly to Craigslist users that listed their homes.

Community Events

Meet-ups or community events allow companies to engage with users face-to-face and develop a community around their product. Events often result in valuable feedback for engineering and marketing departments. Spending time on developing and engaging your network is recommended.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a great tactic to engage with customers and arm them with expert knowledge that will help during their buying process. Developing content that can span multiple channels easily will save time and helps with consistent messaging across all your channels.