DIGITAL MARKETING FOR STARTUPS

Marketing has evolved at a quick rate. Some marketers believe that marketing has changed more in the last two years than in the previous 50 years.

Digital marketing, like any other kind of marketing, is a method to engage with and impact your potential customers. The difference is that you do it online via various digital marketing channels such as video content, social media posts, content marketing, web and social media adverts, and search engine marketing.

Why is digital marketing essential for startups?

Digital marketing is generally far less expensive than traditional marketing. While print and television commercials might cost thousands of dollars, online advertisements can cost as little as a few hundred dollars.

A blog can also reach thousands of visitors at the expense of writing posts and maintaining a server. Startups may use digital marketing to contact new clients and build relationships at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing.

Through technology and at a lower cost, digital marketing has the potential to transform products and processes. This skill gives them an advantage over other marketing channels, and it is precisely what a business requires to expand and sustain itself in this highly competitive market.

 

Here are some of the main reasons why digital marketing is critical for startup growth:

 

Create Brand Awareness

Brand recognition is a primary digital marketing focus, mainly social media marketing. Even if you do not generate money due to a marketing campaign, you can confidently enhance brand awareness.

Some online users may not be instant clients, but as brand recognition grows, they may consider your brand the next time they buy something or use a service that your company provides.

Cost-effective

Digital marketing has low-cost. This makes it an ideal marketing tool for startups and small firms that may lack a vast pool of resources or significant capital investments.

When compared to traditional marketing, digital marketing is often less expensive and yields more effective outcomes.

Increases Online Conversions

Digital marketing makes it simple to determine whether or not your marketing techniques are effective. This is accomplished by analyzing incoming traffic as well as your conversion rate.

This information is readily available for any internet business, critical to increasing conversions.

ROI is tracked.

In contrast to traditional marketing, digital marketing allows you to track your return on investment quickly.

Instead of waiting for the campaign you set up to end before reviewing it, digital marketing will enable you to check it as it runs, enabling you to make changes to improve your returns. If a digital marketing campaign is underperforming, you might halt it entirely to avoid further losses.

Digital Marketing strategies

Having a brilliant, one-of-a-kind idea, a team, and cash is not enough to help your startup grow and become steady and successful. To succeed, you need more clients, sales, and profits, which Digital marketing can help your startup!

Nowadays, almost all startups use digital marketing to promote their products. However, not all of the tools at the disposal of digital marketers are equally effective. Some digital marketing methods are a resounding success, while others fall short. Many well-funded startups have failed within five years because of not investing in the proper digital marketing techniques.

Some of the Digital marketing strategies you should invest in for the growth of your startup are:

1. Focus on blogs and content marketing to earn audience organically

Your prospective consumers require material to help them through the purchasing process. According to the DemandGen Report, 47 percent of buyers viewed three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. You may help by creating a content calendar for continuously producing new content on your blog.

However, you should know that blogging entails more than just writing pieces. You must write blog entries to address the concerns of your readers. It would help if you also guest post blogs on other sector websites to reach a more extensive audience and have more inbound links for your website, which will help you increase your SEO.

2. Personalize Emails.

 Email marketing is still a popular marketing channel as marketers do not have to worry about the algorithm change as in social media marketing or search engine marketing. Email marketing has evolved with time. Simple cold emails don’t work anymore.

Startups should personalize emails for their subscribers and give them information about their products. Personalization of emails increases the open rate by 26%.

3. Use Social media

Social media is the biggest channel for brand awareness. Your prospective clients use social media regularly to communicate with their friends and brands. When you consider that more than half of the globe now utilizes social media, it’s clear that it’s a platform you can’t afford to ignore.

However, there are numerous social media platforms. Among them are:

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and more. As a startup firm, you should concentrate on a few of them. These are the few sites where your potential customers hang out regularly.

 

The following are some best practices for social media that you should follow:

 

· Create content regularly to stay in contact with your audience.

· It would be best to use visuals such as images and videos to improve engagement.

· Interact with your audience by replying quickly and resharing.

· Share content with your audience that is related to the industry.

· Spend money on paid commercials to reach a larger audience.

· People follow the influencers on these social media, reaching out to the influencer whose audience base is similar to your target audience to promote your product can bring a boom in your sales and increase brand awareness.

4. Focus on SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is crucial as it increases organic traffic for your startup, which means you will have more inbound leads.

SEO also helps build trust for your company among the visitors as with the help of SEO; your website would rank higher on search results and users trust pages, which rank higher on google.

5. Tracking Results

Startups need to track results. Using software like google analytics, google search console, analytic tools by Facebook, etc., startups can track which areas of marketing are performing well and which areas need essential. This would ensure that the money invested in marketing is used most effectively.

How should a startup use marketing for validation?

If you have an idea for a startup, as a founder, you will have questions in your mind like,

 Does the market need your product or not?

 Should I work on this idea or not?

What if the idea fails?

You can answer these questions by conducting validation marketing.

Validation marketing is the process of validating a new startup idea, product concept, or minimal viable product to determine whether or not we should proceed with this idea or product.

After producing the product, validation marketing helps discover if the idea is sound and the best advertising channels for our target demographic.

To remove minor difficulties, we must first recognize that validation marketing is a validation process that plays a vital role in the success of a product or startup after its original launch.

Understanding your target market or audience and conducting thorough market research is crucial but insufficient.

The path from idea inception to product launch and subsequently to product-market fit is long, and validation marketing can help to shorten it.

Suppose, as a startup founder; you want to test the Minimum Viable Productor MVP of product p of your startup s. For doing this, you can :

· Create a name for the company’s minimal viable product and describe the essential branding aspects.

· Do create a click-through landing page that gives users early access to the minimal viable product.

· Create an email drip campaign informing all visitors that the product is not yet ready and alerted before the launch.

· Use Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Quora Ads, Google Ads, or any other paid acquisition channel to drive traffic to our landing page.

· Analyze the findings and keep an eye on the results.

· Based on the campaign results, startups can determine whether spending the next 6-8 months on product p is a good idea. Tools like CRM could help a lot.

 Validation marketing also helps determine the right target market and audience for your startup.

 

Marketing strategies at different stages of a startup

 

Before Funding

If your startup is unfunded, content marketing is the best marketing tool. It would be best to focus on providing value to your customer and educating them about your product. Blogs are the primary form of content that can increase trust and help in developing brand awareness. It would help if you also focused on the SEO of your website.

If your website ranks higher on Google, then your website would have more increased organic traffic; this would also mean that you will have more inbound leads. Thus, focusing on SEO and content marketing alone helps startups increase their revenue as customers trust google and always buy or use something from the website, which ranks on the first page, particularly on the first five positions.

The increased revenue would lead to the next stage of a startup; as a founder, you will be raising money for your startup to expand.

After Funding

After successfully raising money, you should invest money in marketing so that you can scale your business to the next level. In this stage, you should invest in a marketing plan as per your target audience. You should develop a customer persona for your startup and research the best marketing channel for your promotion, whether social media or SEM or SEO or others.

Suppose your startup is made for the young generation aged 16 to 24. Then the best marketing channel could be Social Media. This age group constitutes a crazy user base on the social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and others.

You can run paid advertisements on these platforms about your products. Also, these age groups follow celebrities or influencers on these platforms. You know that brand recognition is crucial for a startup as a founder. You can reach out to these influencers to promote your startup, or you can make a celebrity your brand ambassador. These moves would have a significant impact on the branding of your startup. 

Digital marketing is difficult as competition is enormous, but it can benefit the startups when done correctly by identifying the correct target audience and their needs. We at FinEndorse help startups increase their revenue with the power of SEO and content marketing. For more details on how we helped our client to get more inbound leads by increasing the website traffic check out our portfolio page