Weekend Startup Marketing Reading

There’s a ton of great posts on startup marketing that I come across every week. Here’s my selection of the best with some color commentary from me.

Startup Marketing: How to Earn Customers Without Paying for Them – this is a video of a talk by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz that is full of chunky marketing goodness. About halfway through he touches on the problem of attribution which I think is a HUGE one for marketers, particularly those that are heavily invested in content marketing. How do you track a funnel and measure what’s working when you have integrated content resources working together in a programmatic way? If a person sees a Tweet, watches your video, reads your blog and then clicks on a a search result to make a purchase, how do you attribute that lead? There is also a great discussion around organic search rank and how social plays into that as well as a great Q&A session at the end. The video is long but in my opinion, well worth the investment of an hour of your time.

How Perfect Pricing Got me 1500 Sales in 2 Days and Perfect Pricing Part Deux are two great posts from A Smart Bear dealing with a couple of experiments in pricing (ebooks in both examples but the lessons I believe are relevant beyond that market). The first post walks through the author did pricing research, decided on tiered pricing and the results that showed his higher priced product performed better. I am not sure this is really a price anchoring experiment in the way the author suggests but for me it spurred a lot of good thinking about segmentation and pricing. The second post is a great follow-on from another author who took a different approach and charged a much higher price for his ebook. His strategy, rather than tiered pricing, was to focus on a single segment that was willing to pay a higher price because they understood the value of his offering. If you sell on the internet and are thinking about price points, these 2 articles are great reading.

Over at the CMI Institute blog there was a super post this week called 6 Start Me Up Tips for Novice Content Marketers – In my opinion the highlight of this post is the “Message Matrix for Product Launch” example. On the surface this looks a bit oriented toward big companies (we startup marketers don’t usually don’t do things like style guidelines given our teams are so small) but the examples of how you would document messages by elements and key audiences is spot on.

Have a great weekend.