What marketing activities should a startup focus on PRE product/market fit?

Instead of creating awareness and purchasing traffic, here's a better idea: Take your marketing budget and withdraw the cash in $1 bills. Then start a bonfire with it. You'll have WAY more fun and at least you'll get a good story out of it. There are two types of marketing: Brand marketing - Creates awareness. Think of Coca Cola and car ads. Direct response marketing - Creates sales. If the sales can't be measured, they didn't happen. Brand marketing is what many of us are most familiar with (we get hit with this all the time). But this isn't a viable strategy for an early-stage startup. Startups don't have the luxury of large budgets and healthy cash flow. Every dollar counts. So you'll want to stick to direct response marketing and make sure that your marketing produces a positive ROI. If not, you're burning your runway. But you'll still want to hold off on the marketing until AFTER you've found product-market fit. Remember, marketing is just selling at scale. And if you haven't found  product-market fit, you won't know who you're selling to or what you're  selling. So there's no point in scaling anything. Now, there are times you'll want to spend a little money on marketing to TEST an idea of yours. This is usually done with an MVP. A popular tactic for startups is to build an MVP landing page, pay for relevant traffic, and test conversion rates. You can even run a quick split test to see which benefit gets the best response so you'll know which direction to take your product. This is really the only instance where you'll want to use marketing before you find product-market fit. Instead, focus your marketing dollars (and time) on research. Schedule coffee meetings with prospects so that you can understand every detail of their problem. And run quick split tests on landing pages to test value propositions on traffic from AdWords, Facebook ads, or Twitter. To recap: Before you find product-market fit, use marketing dollars to test key assumptions. Spend the rest of your time researching the problem by talking to customers. After product-market fit, test different channels and scale what works. But stick to direct response tactics (email, webinars, growth hacking, AdWords, Facebook Ads/Pages, an optimized blog, SEO, etc). Save the brand marketing and "awareness" campaigns until you're no longer a startup.

First, stop driving spending money on driving people to your business if you are continuing to look for a product/market fit. Sure, you might spend a couple of bucks to get early user feedback on your idea with things like Adwords, but without product/market fit anything more than is a complete waste. Instead of buying random visitors, have you thought about doing some market research? We run a research tool called the Minimum Viable Concept Test (http://mvctest.com) which is focused on helping startups refine their positioning, develop deeper customer understanding, and model market potential based on customer response. What you're looking to do is something we help startups with all the time. We have tested over 50 startups in the past few months and are used by CircleUp, the leading crowdfunding company, and The Brandery, a top U.S. accelerator.

You can consider using a platform like http://angelbacker.co to help you build a base of initial users and/or champions to get the feedback you need to figure out your product market fit. If your Angelbacker campaign gets traction, then you know at least the problem is a worthy one, and just a matter of market product fit from there. Thats probably a better idea than spending money on getting uncertain users who you don't really know will give you the feedback or product market you really need.

Lemme give you actionable things you can actually implement in your business and some of it might not cost you anything. Just think of these points from your business point of view and start applying them. 1. Go hangout where your customers are and not only your customers but start tapping the areas where experts of your industry hangs out. I work in music industry I go out to a lot of local events where small bands perform. After event I just compliment them for their performance and hand them my card. No hard selling but just making them aware that I'm there as well. Keep doing this and people will eventually start noticing. 2. Start a blog and put in quality content. Engage in you industry and write about your experiences. Talk to your industry leaders, interview them and put it up on your blog. Don't take regular boring interviews, spice it up and that will make you stand apart. As we are in music industry we cover local events and write reviews about them with 15-20 photos and videos. After every post our traffic spikes like crazy. Try doing something like this in your niche. 3. Make facebook and twitter profiles and start engaging with people. Initial 15 days might be hard because nobody will see your content or engage with it. But if you keep on doing it right you will eventually attract the right people. Try sending your twitter traffic to your facebook page and vice-versa. For this you need to understand what type of content you have to post on both facebook and twitter. Moreover you need to know how to promote your content on twitter by using proper hashtags (Read this - https://snooptank.quora.com/Most-overlooked-Strategies-of-Using-Twitter-Like-A-Pro) and by tweeting to the right people. There is lot more to it which you'll understand once you get into the pit. 4. Don't forget SEO. Optimize your blog content properly from photos to videos to text, basically everything. Put in the right keywords and also diversify your keyword range according to the topic of the article, don't just stuff keywords even if the topic is out of context. 5. Now comes the paid marketing. If you are managing your facebook page properly, able to get good engagement  then you can try running facebook ads as well, they will increase your activity. Also don't forget to collect data about these facebook ads in your google analytics  if your landing page would be different from facebook page. Google how to do that if you don't know already. I guess if you do this much it will be more than enough to get your required feedback from the users. Don't wait now, get on with it.

We have a start-up and I lead marketing efforts so would like to share what worked for us: 1. Started with understanding complete market dynamics of out industry. Like everything under sun- macro economic factors, key drivers, deterrents, market size, growth rates, key players, existing models, government policies, technological innovations, financing options, global trends and whatever else is relevant to your start-up. This puts you in a position where you are confident and you know what you are doing 2. Talk Talk Talk!! Talk to customers, competitors,  dealers, experts, vendors and anyone who is is remotely connected to your industry. Don't hesitate. Before you talk, think about what you are trying to achieve and have a set of most important questions ready so that you don't miss out on important information. But people are just not going to come to you so that you can talk to them; you will have to find them so direct you marketing budget towards traveling and reaching out to these people via conferences etc. Don't forget to document each and every conversation that you have. 3. If you can analyse the data by yourself , good for you else hire someone to do it- you can use services of websites like elance/http://freelancer.com. Spend good time to figure out what are the customer need, segements and which segment will you go after and how- your offering. You have to be clear in your head about why anyone would buy from you. 4. Next step closer to conventional marketing: Website, email, adwords and conferences/seminars/exhibitions, join the associations relevant to your company- less cost and helps you reach out more effectively to you target segments 5. Branding and advertising - high level stuff

There's no right or wrong approach to this, but my advice would be to invest a small budget into a variety of different paid channels to understand your cost per acquisition and see what channels can scale profitably. There are lots of different options in this post (http://www.ventureharbour.com/ultimate-startup-marketing-strategy/). On top of that, the growth hacking angle is an interesting one worth looking into. Perhaps there are some strategies you can implement that will enable the product to grow organically without too much ongoing budget needing to be invested?

The most beneficial customer feedback we found when building AbridgeMe was through early adopter websites like Beta List and Erli Bird. These types of users see many products and were able to provide solid actionable feedback. You can see how well thought out the feedback we received was here on Erli Bird: http://erlibird.com/go/abridgeme

Market research to make sure you've nailed the product/market fit. Your definition of "marketing" in your question is only one aspect of marketing -- the promotional piece.

Focus instead on 2 things. First build partnerships with a few customers who need what it is you are going to create - keep it small and manipulable.  Now integrate them into your product/app/thing process. Second - actually build something Then when you go to tell the world about what you do - when they ask what it is, you can hand them one.  When they ask who cares - you give them the names and contact info for a handful of cool companies/people. Tangible beats ideas in this world hands down.