In the world of business, marketing is king, and the iconic doll brand Barbie’s recent success showcases this perfectly. Leveraging its iconic brand image, extensive product line, and carefully planned “pink publicity” campaigns to attract its diverse target audience, Barbie embodied the power of strategic marketing with its US$90 million movie revenue during its opening weekend.

For startups or emerging brands, marketing matters more than ever to ensure that they stand out and succeed in their respective markets. But with their limited resources and different sets of priorities, emerging brands tend to need a different starting point in their marketing efforts compared to their more established peers.

Thus, here are some lessons I’ve learned from my time driving marketing strategies in different stages of startups, from those still in their infancy to those that have matured over the years.

Early stage: growing your brand name by tapping into brand partnerships

New brands typically focus on raising brand awareness as their starting point to generate leads. However, a lack of proper planning can lead to expensive and ineffective marketing efforts that waste an already limited budget.

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This is where partnerships can come in. In 2020, 55 per cent of brands enjoyed increased revenue from partnerships, with 29 per cent of D2C decision-makers projecting at least a 20 per cent growth in their revenue for the previous year. Partnerships can be a cost-effective way to grow your brand as you can tap into each other’s resources for your cross-promotional needs.

However, many businesses fail at their collaborations for various reasons, such as failing to communicate or maintain the alignment of goals. Therefore, it is crucial for startups to find brands that share their goals and target demographic before designing a marketing plan addressing these factors.

When I led foodpanda’s marketing in its early stage, I was tasked with increasing the brand’s sales with a limited budget. Taking inspiration from Tripadvisor’s and MICHELIN’s eye-catching window stickers, my team and I planned and executed a branding campaign where we increased the visibility of the foodpanda brand logo through other businesses’ storefronts, riders’ jackets and bags, and DBS Bank-owned ATMs in Singapore.

This strategy was a great example of free advertising at a low cost. That, coupled with other digital marketing strategies we were running at that point in time, resulted in an average of 15 per cent to 25 per cent increase in order count every month.

Other examples of co-branding partnerships you can tap into include affiliation programs and content partnerships. Brands can also run joint product marketing campaigns where they collaborate to develop a product that showcases the uniqueness of each brand. Some popular joint product marketing campaigns include the collaboration between Apple and Nike (Apple Watch Nike) and McDonald’s, and Hello Kitty.

Growth stage: Increasing your customer base through marketing analytics

When new brands have now gained enough traction, the marketing strategy should shift from brand awareness to customer acquisition. To increase your customer base, businesses should first thoroughly understand their audience and strategize accordingly.

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However, to improve the effectiveness of your marketing strategy and the allocation of your businesses’ resources, marketers should prioritize analyzing data obtained from the results of previous campaigns. From there, you can see what has worked in the past and experiment with what may work in the future, taking the opportunity to improve your future campaigns. Analytics also help further personalize your marketing efforts, which 97 per cent of marketers said results in increased business outcomes.

My Chope team and I successfully turned a Korean-drama-inspired brand video viral with more than 1.2 million views in two months. The app also saw an increase in downloads by more than 25 per cent MoM, four times the average, truly showcasing the effectiveness of viral marketing.

Viral marketing isn’t a shortcut to instant results, of course, and it wasn’t by chance that we managed to achieve these wins. Behind many viral videos are countless tedious hours spent researching available data and channeling these data-driven insights into various experiments and failures.

After all, behind many successful high-quality campaigns lie an equally high quantity of operations to learn from; for quality cannot be drawn from inspiration alone. Thanks to the insight we have gained from data analytics, my team and I more than doubled the projected growth in reservations in 2016 and doubled it again in 2017 compared to the prior year.

Mature stage: staying in the competition with User Generated Content (UGC)

At this point of growth, brands should focus on trying to remain competitive in the market while making full use of the available resources. User Generated Content (UGC) is an excellent asset that brands can and should leverage and utilize effectively.

98 per cent of users read online reviews for businesses, showing their increasing reliance on the internet and/or social media platforms as their source of trusted information. Due to this, UGC are valued for their authenticity as they originate from customers instead of the brand.

During my time at Tripadvisor, traveler pictures and reviews were my team’s and my main source of assets for campaigns. The platform allows visitors to discover places when they travel and encourages them to leave reviews at any point of their trip.

The reviews that we collected were used to drive industry-leading campaigns like Travelers’ Choice Awards and Year in Travel 2021 that market to audiences across the whole travel ecosystem. By launching campaigns like this, we are able to remain top of mind and maintain market dominance while reaching new potential customers.

Finding the strategy that works for you

As a marketing enthusiast, I’ve had an exciting journey learning from industry giants such as foodpanda, Chope, and Tripadvisor, and I hope the lessons I’ve learned will be valuable for businesses out th… (truncated)