Before you invest too much time and money in your idea, you'll want to research the market to ensure there is a need for your idea and that you can make money off of it. You will also want to evaluate the competition so you know that you can differentiate your product or service from them.

While some dismiss market research because people don't always know what they want, it's important to talk to some prospective customers to get their insights into what they need to make their life or jobs easier or more efficient. Even if you don't size the market (although you will need to do this if you want to raise outside money) or test the concept with focus groups, these discussions will provide valuable insights that give you a better understanding of your audience which is absolutely critical.

They may not understand your idea in its early stages but listening to your customers-to-be could give you additional thoughts for improvements or refinements that could make the difference between success and failure. Instead of presenting your concept and getting input, have a coversation to see how your prospects solve that problem today.

It's rare that your concept won't have indirect competitors even if you don't see any direct ones at this early stage. If there really is no competition, then it could very well mean you have no market too. That's why these discussions and informal research are absolutely critical. You want to make sure there is a market before you invest substantial amounts of time and money.

But don't take this competitive research too far as you need to forge your own path and make your product or service significantly different that their product. If you follow the competition then you will surely fail. Very few people are going to switch to your solution if you are only 2x better. In many cases, they may not even switch if you're 10x better.

Once you take this valuable input from prospective customers into account and define a product or service that has a clear market and is more compelling than the competition, then you'll need to make sure the messages that you deliver communicate not only the value but how you are different. 

We'll talk a lot more about messaging in this startup stage (you can read some previous posts on this topic) but the next post in this series will be some thoughts on selecting a name so stay tuned. In the meantime, if you there are any problems or issues you face getting started, leave them in the comments and I'll try to address them. 

Before I get into some of the marketing strategies and tactics that you need to look into, I thought it would make a lot of sense to actually define the different stages that a startup goes through in its lifecycle. This process could last months but will likely take years.  

I'll focus on the marketing aspects of each stage in this post as there are obviously product development, financing, sales, support and many other aspects as well to each stage but those are for another blog. 

Idea

It all begins with an idea for a product, service or company but this really is only the beginning. Before you invest too much time and money, you'll want to do some market research, informal is fine, to ensure there is a decent sized market for your idea and also evaluate the competition so you know that you can differentiate your product or service from them. This is also the stage where you need to make some hard choices around naming, branding and messaging for your company so that you can set it up properly from the start.

Launch

While the idea is being developed into a product, its time to put the foundation in place for your company from a marketing perspective. At some point you need to get the word out about this revolutionary product. But it's not just a matter of building a website and they will come. You need to launch the company using a variety of tactics from PR to social media to get thought leadership and word of mouth going. You'll also need to have the sales tools ready to answer why anyone needs your product and why is it better. 

Validation

At this point, you need to focus and land your first customers. It's absolutely critical that you get this validation from the market and to learn more about what you product needs and how it can be improved. Partners can help a lot in this area from rounding out the solution to bringing credibility with customers. Leverage this validation through PR and other marketing activities as it's a crucial proof point for other prospects. 

Growth

But rarely will that first customer set you up for life, so now it's time to build on this success and grow the customer base for your product or service. You need to scale by repeating that first sale tens or hundreds of times depending on the size of each deal. This is where the marketing activities need to scale by doing more of what you've been doing with a focus on lead generation and helping sales drive those prospects through the sales funnel.

Transition

Once your startup reaches a certain size, in terms of customers, employees, or revenue, then it's time to transition to the next phase of your company. This could be anything from selling the company to building it even larger and ultimately taking it public. The main point here is that you are no longer a startup and need to put in place the infrastructure and team to take it to the next level.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to do a series of Getting Started posts that explore these stages but more importantly look at the marketing startegies and tactics in more detail. In the meantime, let me know if these stages and tactics map to your experiences or issues you're facing now with your startup.

When I wrote this post last year, I said I wanted to blog more regularly in 2010. While I'm still not writing as often as I would like on this blog, I did manage to have 30 posts this year which is a 50% increase compared to 2010. Next year, I hope to post even more often and definitely want to write more in my Getting Started series which was one of my top posts for the year.

For now, I'll sign off 2011 by wishing all my friends and readers a safe and happy holiday and all the best in 2012.

New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott

This book is now in it's third edition and it's no wonder as it's used in university and colleges to teach the new principles that marketers need to know in an online world driven by social media. It talks about how companies need to become publishers to reach buyers directly using blogs, social media, online video and other tactics. A great read full of lessons every marketer needs to know.

Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith

It's a classic. While this book focuses on services, there are literally hundreds of lessons a marketer can learn to help them sell their services AND products better. The format makes this a quick read and lots of practical tips can be easily applied the next day. To this day, I haven't seen a better template for writing elevator pitches and positioning statements. Beckwith's other books are also worth adding to your marketers book shelf.

Differentiate or Die by Jack Trout with Steve Rifkin

The subtitle for this book says it all, "Survival in Our Era of Killer Competition". What marketer doesn't need to learn about that to help their company. The second edition has updated case studies that show you how to differentiate your product or services and dominate your market. There are a number of other great books by Trout, like Positioning which is  written with Jack Ries, but I wanted to highlight one that fewer people have on their bookshelf already.

Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger

It's hard to believe that this book was released over 10 years ago. You definitely won't believe it after you read the book as it talks a lot about how markets are conversations because they are made up of people. Sounds a lot like what we talk about when we refer to social media but the insights of these authors were shared before Facebook, Twitter and the other tools we take for granted today even existed. I definitely want to read this again and look at how it fits with all that has changed.

I hope this list helps both marketers looking for reading material over the holidays or if you have a marketer on your list and need to get them one more little gift. I very specifically wanted to choose books that are still relevant but not initially published in the past couple of years. For more current books, you may also want to check out the books I've reviewed on this blog.

[Images courtesy of the author's website. All book title links go to Amazon.com but order from your preferred site or your local bookstore.]

Published shortly after his death, I recently read the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. The book is very well-written, with deep insights into the man that are not sugar coated so it only presents the good ones. It's one of the best biographies I have ever read and I strongly recommend it to others both in technology and other fields.

However, for this post I didn't want to do one of my regular book reviews as you can find many reviews on the web already. But as I read this book, I did think about what we could learn from Jobs from a marketing perspective and how he used marketing to create one of the world's most valuable companies.

While the lessons are clearly numerous and everyone will have different takeaways depending on their role or industy, I wanted to keep it simple, as Jobs would have liked it, and select what I think are the three top marketing lessons from Steve Jobs.

Focus

Focus was one of Jobs' obsessions and one of the main reasons that Apple is so successful today. It was said in the book that they would start with a list of priorities in a given year but Jobs would quickly cut that down to 1 or 2 things that the company was going to focus on. The thinking behind this was to make fewer products but do them really well. A mission we can all agree was accomplished.

While it may seem like Apple has a lot of products today, if you look harder you realize that they only added more products as they got successful and that there is only ever one big, new thing they launch each year, while the others are iterations. Think iMac to iPod to iPhone and then iPad. These were not all done at the same time but sequentially. And even within these product lines, there are a few different models, not 100s with many more variations like you see with other companies.

Apple started with a focus on personal computers and then moved onto consumer electronics but the focus has always been there and even today as the world's most valuable tech company they are not in 100s of markets. Focus is a lesson that I think all companies can learn and do better.

Simple

There is no doubt that Jobs had a keen eye for design but it was more the fact that he and his team made everything simpler that is the key here. It's not that Apple designs try to be minimalist that make them great, but the fact that anything from a button to a feature that is not absolutely required is eliminated.

The result of removing features is that people are always asking for more which leads to the next iteration of the product but even then anything is added incrementally and sometimes older features are removed along the way.

It's clearly harder to eliminate things than add and Jobs was a master at constantly pushing to do things better with less. In the end, I would argue that rather than invent new products what Jobs and Apple did was to revolutionize multiple industries by simplifying them.

Simplifying everything is what made the products more usable and you rarely see that strength with tech companies today. In fact, because everything just works is Apple's competitive advantage which goes to show that how you differentiate may not be about adding more features, which is another lesson that many companies need to learn.

Brand

It's clear that tech companies don't know how to build a brand. Apple is, without a doubt in my mind, the exception and the best technology brand, and quite likely any market, today. So there are many lessons, in this one area alone that marketers can learn from Jobs about branding.

But for me, the core lesson that we can learn from Jobs is that a brand is not the logo or a tag line but every interaction with the customer. That's why Jobs believed it was crucial to own the entire experience, from devices to OS to apps to content to buying and storage. That's why whenever you use an Apple device, go to one of their stores to buy something, or download the latest music online, it feels the same and is very much... Apple.

When Jobs returned to run Apple, they re-launched the company with a new Mac but probably more importantly with the Think Different campaign. While many select Apple's 1984 ad as the best of all time, it is this Think Different campaign that really is the epitome of the brand and positioned it for the future.

One blog post cannot do justice to the legacy of Steve Jobs. One book can't either, but I strongly recommend that you read the book by Walter Isaacson to get a better picture of Jobs. As I read the book, I couldn't help to think about how startups and every company can learn so much from him. He had his faults and made some mistakes, everyone does, but the world would not be the same without him.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs.  

While this may seem obvious to some, take a look around and see how many emails, web pages, blog posts, ads, etc. don't tell the reader what to do next. This simple element is so often missing and it will make the difference between a successful marketing campaign and a failure. Studies show that tweaking this element properly can make the difference between a good and a great campaign. 

So where do you start? For a call-to-action to be successful, you need to make sure it links to a compelling offer. That's why it's important for you to look through your most recent campaigns and see which offers did the best in terms of conversions and create more calls-to-action for them. Or, you may need to develop a new offer for a new campaign.  

You'll also want to have multiple offers that map to the different stages of the sales funnel so that you can continue to have calls-to-action through subsequent follow-up and lead nurture activities that directs those prospects to new content that will continue to move them along the sales funnel. 

Once you have these offers lined up then you need to add calls-to-action in as many places as possible, as it's difficult to have too many calls-to-action. Some obvious pllace are on your website, on your blog or in blog posts, in presentations, in emails and as part of ads, direct mail and other offline activities. You should also include calls-to action in the content itself, in videos, in your email signatures, and using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

It is this last one, social media, where you do need to limit the number of calls-to-action as many will stop following you if that's all you do is promote in your social media stream. But don't go to the other extreme either and not use it for calls-to-action either.

All of this work around creating offers and placing the calls-to-action will be for naught if your calls-to-action are not compelling enough so your prospects will click on the link or button and convert. There are a few key aspects to a compelling call-to-action including:

• Make it clear in terms of what the visitor needs to do and what the offer is if they do it.
• Make sure it stands out whereever it's placed and that people don't need to scroll on the web page or in the email to get to it. If people don't see it, then it won't be clicked on. 
• Make sure the call-to-action is relevant to the page, where they are in the sales funnel and that the offer is the right content for that call-to-action. Remember the key is to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.

If you follow this process, then you will be well on your way to some compelling calls-to-action that convert but after you've gone this far you will want to continue to optimize the call-to-action and the landing page. That's why it's equally important to measure the effectiveness of the call to action including the click-through-rate (CTR) and click-to-submission. With these results you can experiment with and keep testing different offers, landing pages and different aspects of the call-to-action including text, colors, images, etc.

The call-to-action is a pivotal part of any marketing campaign. While your objective may be different for the call-to-action, in this post we focused on using them for lead generation, the need to have them never changes. If you don't have them, then you might as well skip doing the campaign in the first place and not waste the time and resources.  

This got me to thinking about what to tell him and where to point him for more resources. But I quickly realized that most books and blogs about marketing assume you have already started your company and want to take it to the next level. Even this blog, which is about helping start-ups do marketing better, assumes that the company has already been in existence for a short period of time. I'm going to fix this with some new blog posts on getting started.

So what would you do if you were given a blank canvass on which to build a marketing plan? If you had to list the very first marketing tasks to do, where would you start? Obviously, he needed to develop an overall marketing strategy but he is just starting out so there is limited to no budget or resources. Therefore, I wanted to give him a few marketing tactics to focus on out of the gate.

The first thing, quite clearly, was that he needed a name and to secure that name for his website and other social media properties. Getting a URL that's available is probably the hardest part today in selecting a name for your company. Most are taken but it's absolutely critical that you pick a name where you can get the URL as your website will very likely be the cornerstone of your business.

Too many shortcuts are taken here and founders choose a name that is misspelled so they can get the URL or have to settle for some variation on the URL that is long or difficult to remember when looking for the site. You need to get found easily so the name and URL are absolutely critical first steps.

In this case, he actually had already selected a name and developed a logo so it wasn't a totally clean slate... but almost. I did suggest, if there was the money, to invest in branding and design as the more professional you look the better it will be for your business.

We talked some more about building a website and creating some collateral, in particular a Powerpoint presentation, that he could deliver to prospects. These elements are required as you begin selling to prospects. But the first thing I said he should do after the name was to develop key messages for the company before he undertook any other activities.

I explained how crucial it was to create a simple message which differentiates your product to the target audience and is used consistently. I sent him a template for how to develop an elevator pitch, value proposition and boilerplate that can be used consistently on his website and in all his sales tools. Communicating the value your offer to customers is key which is why taking the time to develop messages is one of the key first steps in getting started.

Best of luck to my friend and all of those starting new companies. I'll continue to blog more on the topic of getting started to help you along the journey. For those that have companies which are already launched, what are the first steps you took from a marketing perspective? What would you do differently?  

As reported by ZDNet, a recent study by Demandbase and Focus.com showed that corporate websites were the top online lead source and second overall to personal connections and referrals. But even more telling is that corporate websites were 7x more effective than social media. Here's the breakdown of top lead sources:

• 41% - Personal connections and referrals
• 23% - Corporate website
• 14% - Email
• 7% - Advertising (banners and search engine marketing)
• 3% - Social Media (including video)
• 12% - Other

Some may be surprised by these results but it shows that social media is not always the best tactic and for B2B lead generation other tools are better. So despite the buzz around Twitter, Facebook and Google+, you need to look at all the tactics and carefully select the right ones to meet your marketing goals and objectives. 

Hopefully, less surprising, was that your corporate website still is one of the most important sales tools that you can build and is crucial to your lead generation efforts. I believe some have moved on and focused their efforts on social media rather than their website which as you can see does not make sense if you goal is lead generation. You need to continue to invest in your website and build targeted messages and landing pages for each audience in order to engage prospects and move them along the sales funnel. 

Now it could be argued that social media drove the traffic to the corporate website and isn't getting proper credit for generating the lead. This wouldn't surprise me in the least as I do believe social media is a good tool for sharing information and taking prospects back to your website for even more compelling content is a great approach.

The important point here is that relying only on social media, especially if your goal is to generate leads, will clearly lead to failure on the marketing front. You need to pick the right tactics for the job. It is only by integrating multiple tactics that your marketing strategy will deliver results.

In the book, Ann and C.C. start by presenting the case for why content is important but they don't dwell on that as most reading this book, I would assume, are already convinced of it's importance. The first part of the book is the best part as they provide a framework for content marketing with the 11 content rules which include Speak Human; Share or Solve, Don't Shill; and Play to Your Strengths, among others.

The rules I found particularly important and insightful in this section, although Ann and C.C. say they are all equally important, were Insight Inspires Originality and Reimagine; Don't Recycle.

With Insight Inspires Originality, they talk about how a good content strategy starts with the story and how the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where and why) taught in journalism school will help you focus on your customers and their needs. In my opinion, this is a great way to look at it and more importantly they argue that you need to start with the why: why are you creating the content you're creating, which is basically the goals of your content strategy.

In Reimagine; Don't Recycle, they talk about how you create 10 pieces of content out of 1 piece which is obviously crucial to a start-up with limited resources. To do this, you need to think of each piece that you create as part of a larger whole or if you start with a longer white paper or eBook think about how you can break it up into smaller chunks. Where you start doesn't matter, but creating content is an ongoing process and you need to take a broader view of the content you create. Building a publishing schedule, or editorial calendar, as Ann and C.C. outline in the book, is the key to making this happen.

It's no secret that many of the books out there talk about marketing from a B2C perspective. There are obvious exceptions and this book is one of them as they do dedicate some space to talk about how B2B is different for content marketing. I think this approach is great, and I was glad to see it, as I've always maintained you can use B2C concepts for your B2B marketing but you just need to tweak them for that audience. They explain how to do that for content.

The second and third sections in the book are about how to create the different content types and case studies. I'm sure there is value to content marketing beginners in the How-To Section but for me the Success Stories were awesome. In that section, you got to see how companies from the U.S. Army to Cool Beans and Hubspot to Boeing approach content marketing with great examples and even better Ideas You Can Steal. There is no doubt you'll grab 1 or 2, or even 10, new things you can try in your content marketing from these examples. 

There is definitely a movement in the marketing world that strongly believe content is absolutely critical to your marketing success, including yours truly. It was great to see a book dedicated to this topic written by 2 authors who are experts and that can teach you both fundamentals and inspire. It's also worth noting that the book is very well-written and with a sense of humor so it's an easy read that you'll enjoy while you learn. I strongly recommend it for anyone about to start using content marketing or those that have done it for years. You'll learn, be inspired and ignite your marketing.  

[Image courtesy of the Content Rules Book website]

Producing compelling content on a regular basis is the key ingredient that you need to nurture leads and mapping the content to the sales funnel will help you know what to create and when to move your prospects along.

For example, you don't want to send detailed technical specs to the prospect nor do you want to send an introductory eBook when you are in the call-to-close phase. Equally important is that you don't want to send all of your content to the prospects at the same time. Delivering the right content at the right stage is abolutely cricital to nurturing leads.

There are many variations of the sales funnel and the one illustrated here is just a sample to illustrate how you can map content to the sales funnel. Your sales funnel may be different as the most important part of any sales funnel is that the stages are agreed upon by sales and marketing in your company. This sales funnel can be used as a template to map the content you are creating against the stages in your funnel.

Generally speaking, you will want to send more educational content at the earlier stages of the funnel and not send the more detailed product information until the much later stages. I've placed social media, like blogging, Twitter and Facebook, at the top of the funnel as they are also key content vehicles for getting found but social networking could be used throughout.

In some cases, it's the scope of the content that would dictate where it is placed. For example, I mapped webinars and white papers at the prospect stage as they are also good for getting found and can help you determine the more qualified leads through a registration process. However, if the webinar and white papers are more detailed and technical then they could just as easily be used at the qualified lead or opportunities stage.

You may not produce all of the content outlined here and certain pieces of content may be at different or multiple stages. I don't believe that this mapping can and should be set in stone. What is important is that you have different pieces of content at each stage and that you continue to deliver new and compelling content regularly to nurture the leads through the funnel.