Year of the Startup Archives - Blue Soda Promo Blog

Startup Showcase: An Easy Product Promotion Strategy

No one likes a show off. You know, the know-it-all, braggadocios, blowhard who boasts about his startup’s meteoric rise and the latest feature article in Mashable. You don’t have to be THAT guy. But you do have to talk up your product.

One of the best ways and easiest strategies for marketing your product is to sign up for a startup showcase, tradeshow or conferences. In this blog post we’ll go give tips on where, how and what to show off when you’re trying to market your new product or service.

Why Do Those Darn Promotional Products Work So Well?

Tej ShahYear of the Startup

Folks treat promotional products like that drunken Uncle at holiday dinners no one wants to invite, but everyone enjoys. They’re pigeon-hold as a necessary evil—some gaudy SWAG that businesses HAVE TO GIVEAWAY, but no one really wants to be bothered with. Case in point: the forgotten pen, the holey T-shirt, the awkward-fitting baseball cap.

How a Great Product and Functional Swag Transformed The Starter League

Tej ShahYear of the Startup1 Comment

Neal Sales-Griffin is atypical in his archetypal success. He’s in his 20s, doesn’t have a million-dollar pedigree and hails from the south side of Chicago not Silicon Valley. Yet, if investors created the prototype for an entrepreneur, Neal would be the mold.

Neal and his co-founder, Mike McGee, have the winning formula for their startup, The Starter League. Founded in 2011, The Starter League, formerly called Code Academy, is already a multi-million dollar success story. The Starter League teaches ordinary Joes and Janes how to accomplish their tech development dreams; teaching them to build web applications and other products. The Chicago-based startup also teaches them to ship those products to the world.

Commitment and Consistency: One-Two Punch of Marketing

Tej ShahYear of the Startup

This month it’s been all about influence. We’ve been talking about all the ways you can use influence marketing to distinguish your startup from the millions of other businesses that are created each year. As Jason Sadler told us, influence should be the secret weapon in your marketing arsenal. One of the most potent and palatable marketing tools you can use to grow your business. In the previous weeks we’ve touched upon:

Now we’re wrapping up our influence series with the granddaddy of them all—the one-two bunch of commitment and consistency.

Commanding Authority to Boost Marketing Efforts

Tej ShahYear of the Startup

If Warren Buffet called you with a stock tip would you listen? If Martha Stewart e-mailed you with the perfect turkey recipe would you open it? If Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Hsieh offered you advice on how to improve your company’s customer service would you hear him out?

Buffet, Stewart and Hsieh have all cornered the market on probably the single most powerful, yet rarely achieved influence tactics that exists in any marketing realm. They’re seen as authorities in the marketplace. And as we’ll see in this blog post, authority, now more than ever, is worth its weight in marketing gold.

The Like Button: The Holy Grail of Internet Marketing

Tej ShahYear of the Startup

Last week we introduced quick ways to build buzz around your product. We also talked about influence. It’s a trendy phrase to some, but influence is to Internet Marketing what air is to humans—fatally necessary. As in, if you don’t use internet marketing to influence the public, customers and the media about your product, your lovely company may wilt away on its beautiful vine.

In his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Arizona psychology professor Robert Cialdini identified six principles of influence. Last week we discussed social proof. Here are the other five:

Reciprocity
Commitment
Liking
Authority
Scarcity

The Art of Influence: How to Build a Buzz Around Your Product

Tej ShahYear of the Startup

I really loved Jason Sadler’s contribution to our YOTSU blog. Even if you’ve read it, it’s worth a second look, especially his answer to Question 3. We asked the promotional startup king what makes a promotional campaign a success and he introduced a term that every startup team should memorize: influence.

Influence: A Defining Marketing Trait

Sadler astutely pointed out that you can have the best product in the world, but if no one knows about it; more importantly, if no one is TALKING about it, then it might as well not exist. No seriously, if no one is talking about your product it really doesn’t exist. A campaign’s goal is not just about, “people buying a product,” Sadler wrote, “but people talking about a product.”

Talking Startups with Jason Sadler – T-Shirts, Social Media and Promotion

Tej ShahYear of the Startup

How to Make a Small Thing Big: Growth in a Start-up

Tej ShahYear of the Startup

Can you believe we are already a month into our Year of the Startup series? We heard insightful inside info from the kindling of startups Guy Kawasaki and rules of communication from PR queen Gini Dietrich. A pretty good kick start to 2013. With a foundation like that you’re well on your way to launch your idea, product or service. But this month it’s all about growth. How does a kernel become a bag of popcorn, a seed into an orchard, or a one-stoplight town to a metropolis? How do you go from $1 to $100, from $10 to $10,000, from $1 million to $1 billion?