Tag: Social media

Five Ways to Leverage Marketing for Your Next Funding Round

Posted on by Tal Harel

As a startup with limited resources, you possess two strong assets to seek potential investors and secure funding: social media and public relations. And here’s the exciting part – you can wield this power without breaking the bank.

Let’s delve into the five marketing steps that will maximize the potential of these tools to help you secure funding:

Locate Your Buying Personas on Social Media

Begin by immersing yourself in the digital footprints of your potential investor personas: partners, associates, directors – where do they engage? Who do they follow? What hashtags do they use and follow? What resonates with them? This insightful reconnaissance will pave the way for a targeted engagement strategy that aligns with your startup’s narrative.

Forge a Distinct Brand Presence from the Get-Go

Paint a vivid picture showcasing your startup’s essence – as investors want to see it. Tell the story you want investors to hear: your innovation, products, well-laid-out roadmaps, new advancements, successful pilots, and satisfied customers (see here for the ABC of branding for startups).

Highlight collaborations, even if they seem routine (such as AWS and Nvidia Inception). For investors they validate your product’s credentials. Show your leadership’s expertise through speaking engagements such as webinars, panels, and events. Write posts that build on each other and reflect a coherent story.

Ensure you are seen where your investors are looking: are they following a certain opinion leader? Interact with this leader. Are they in specific LinkedIn groups? Join these groups.

Elevate Your Company’s Social Media Ranking – Organically

You can do a lot of organic activity to increase your followers and ensure investors see you. Start by leveraging key Company profiles, mainly the CEO, CTO, and VP of Business Development: use their profiles to amplify your posts, sharing them in their network and in the groups frequented by your investors.

Connect these profiles with your investor personas and others like them, and then invite them to follow your company page. Once they do, the social media algorithms will amplify your exposure to others like them, creating a positive loop and expanding your presence within the investment community.

Harness the Power of Press Releases

Write press releases for noteworthy or even moderately significant developments. As mentioned above, collaborative press releases with partners can enhance your reputation and underscore your unique selling proposition. You may not think much about joining an Nvidia Inception Program, but trust us. This kind of news registers with an investor partner reviewing a company.

Remember, embarking on a WIRED-worthy PR blitz isn’t the goal at this stage so hiring an expensive PR agency isn’t essential.

Instead, you want to utilize social media to amplify your press release, reaching investors who have been on your radar thanks to the groundwork you’ve meticulously laid out (through steps 1 and 2).

Promote Your Press Release on Social Media

Create well-crafted posts about your press release and amplify it with (modest) paid boosts targeting the investment community. Remember, use paid media only once you have laid the groundwork with steps 1 and 2,

Building relationships with reporters and editors can yield good results if you have the bandwidth. From our experience, online publishers seek good content, so if you offer them a compelling story and some great images, you’ll publish your press release. You can then share those stories on social media so your potential investors can see you’re making the news.

The advice we just dolled out is based on our experience helping customers achieve Round A. The actions we took first helped attract attraction on the part of investors, and second – and importantly – helped nudge hesitant investors towards a positive outcome for the startup.

The steps we outlined above don’t require expensive PR companies and spending a fortune on paid advertising. They do however require work. If you lack internal marketing resources or need to beef up your bootstrapped marketing force, contact us to see how we can help you achieve your investment goals.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes!

 

Social Media Hacks to Attract Top Talent – Part 2

Posted on by Tal Harel

In the last post, we instructed you on how to start viewing your employees as your customers, and then how to build a strong employer brand identity on social media. Now what?

Rewrite your Website/LinkedIn Job Posts 

Your typical job post starts with a description of the company. Usually, it’s a cut-and-paste paragraph along the lines of, “a leader in this and this field is looking for a software engineer…”

Boring…

Then follows a description of what the Company is looking for and its requirements. These too, are cut-and-paste mundane descriptions that are not so friendly.

So, remember how we taught you to look at your employees as your customers? If you want to attract new customers, you don’t write this way, right?

To catch that DevOps engineer who’s got tons of job offers, you need to sell your company to them. To achieve this, we created a unique methodology, and tried and tested it on our customers.

Basically, we write the job description as if we are selling a product. The product is the job and your company and the buyer is your employee. So, this is how it goes:

First, we begin by asking you who you are. We then tell you why you are unique, like, “Are you a car enthusiast? Do you like taking things apart? Then this job is the job for you!” (we actually used this line for a customer).

Second, we tell you why our position would be suitable for you.

Only then do we tell them about the Company and job.

And after that we tell what’s good about working with us: are we an equal opportunity employer? Do we encourage hybrid working? Do we support education? Do we support working moms and dads?

Want to see examples? Press here and here.

Research the right Hashtags 

Once you complete writing the job position you need to do thorough research on hashtags that your potential employee uses.

This is a crucial and often overlooked step. Are you looking for a #SalesExectuive, @BusinessAnalyst, with experience at a #HighTech company? Only with these hashtags will the right eyeballs see your expensive job ads.

Now that you have amazing job descriptions, in the next post we’ll share some great hacks for growing followers on social media, so more potential employees will see your company page and job positions.

Social Media Hacks to Attract Top Talent – Part I

Posted on by Tal Harel

Finding and keeping employees is a challenge, and it’s especially tough for startups that don’t have big budgets for high salaries and expensive employer branding campaigns.

Social media can help. Here are some methods we perfected with our startup customers to help them attract and retain top talent.

Before we start, it’s important to understand that in today’s job market you should view your employees as customers. This requires a real change, but it will make your hiring work more effective.

Start with creating a strong employer brand identity

Distill what makes you unique as an employer. Ask your current workers: is it the flexible hours and work-life balance? Is it your work culture? The interesting technology? Promotion Prospects? Your values? The salary?

Write this in bullets – this is your unique selling proposition (USPs), and together with your company’s vision and mission statement, you now have your brand identity. Every personnel in HR and all managers should know it and speak it.

Create a narrative on Social Media as a great workplace

Use your brand identity to post regularly on social media, creating posts that convey who you are as an employer according to the brand identity you created. Social media is essential because that’s where potential recruits check your out – even before your website.

What kind of posts should you create? “Employee of the week”, a welcome post for a new employee, a banner of your vision, a new project or customer, a product/project milestone, and a photo of the employees who took part.

Pictures of office parties are good, but showcasing your company’s offerings, business achievements, and employees at work is much better: a software engineer will want to see your company’s value beyond balloons and cupcakes.

Which social media platform do your employees use? The rule of thumb:

  • Israeli employees aged 30 and up are on Facebook
  • Israeli employees aged 30 and below are on Instagram
  • Everyone is on LinkedIn – if they’re looking for a job – so you should be there too.
  • Regardless of their age, Israelis aren’t big on Twitter
  • TikTok is growing fast, but not quite in the realm of Israeli employer branding. You can skip it for now

How often should you upload posts? 1-2 a week is good. Don’t aim too high. Remember, traction is key. Once you start, it’s vital to continue uploading posts in order to create awareness on social media and to get the platform algorithms to notice you.

When you’re creating good content on an ongoing basis, and you get engagement, the algorithms of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook will take note, and show your content to similar eyeballs, so you’ll get more engagements.

Create Engagement

You want your posts to receive likes, shares, and reads. How do you do that?

Start by getting your employees to like and share your posts. Create a WhatsApp group and update them with new posts.

Then add company managers as LinkedIn page Administrators, and get them to invite connections to follow. YOu can do the same with Facebook, only here it’s Likes. This is a great hack. Use it.

Building an employer brand presence on social media is a start. Now you need to optimize your job posts so they reach the right audience, catch their attention and convince them to apply. Read about this in our next blog post.

How Employees Can Help Build a StartUp’s LinkedIn Presence

Posted on by Tal Harel

LinkedIn celebrated its 18th birthday last month. With nearly 740 million users, LinkedIn has grown into one of the largest platforms for creating business connections and finding investors. This is particularly important for startups who use LinkedIn as a primary tool to find the funding they need to beat the 1/10 statistic for success.

Your company’s LinkedIn page holds unique value to your investors and, therefore to you. Sure, your website will be one of the locations potential investors will go to get a feel for your company. Companies also implement tools such as presentations and product brochures, which give a more in-depth description of your offering.

However, your company’s LinkedIn Page gives viewers insight into your development over time. Your history, your pace of growth, and as an extrapolation, the stability and growth potential of your company. Increasing your credibility, as well as public awareness to your LinkedIn page is important to catch the attention of investors, and convince them that you are worthy.

So what can you do to elevate your startup on LinkedIn?

Start by using the biggest asset you have at your disposal – your employees. Startups are known to be highly selective when choosing team members to join their endeavor. Budgets are tight, and the stakes are high, so employees must be at the top of their game. One of the many benefits of hiring quality employees is the professional network that they are connected to.

The first step is to ensure that your entire staff is connected to your company page. Meaning, their most recent job is at your company. This allows potential investors to see your management style and HR choices in a way that a simple bio on the company’s website won’t give them. Remember, your workers are your most significant assets.

Once your employees have listed your company as their place of work, encourage them to invite their contacts to follow the company’s LinkedIn page. This is an excellent way to boost your page’s ranking and visibility. LinkedIn allows up to 100 invites per month, and once you reach your first 100 followers organically, you have built real traction for your company page.

Since workers typically do not have time to send out invites, in the intimate setting of a startup we could often ask the employees to share their credentials to do the inviting on their behalf. This depends of course on their willingness to share those credentials. If they don’t cooperate – don’t nudge. It is their personal property, after all. Start with the founders and build it from there.

Once you have opened the conversation between the company and your employees, you can utilize this every time you upload new posts on your company page. Click on the ‘Notify employees’ button when you make your post, and the employees will receive a notification encouraging them to react. And they can always share.

The new LinkedIn algorithm places weight on personal connections, as it measures your credibility with that audience. The higher the engagement level of your followers – the higher your rating. So that early role your employees can play is an important one for your visibility and success. A startup is only as good as its team- and together you can do great things.

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