A Digital Marketing Guide for Every Startup

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Starting your own business seems a great idea until you come to know the cons and some serious stuff you need to do to run it properly.

There is no business model which is a guideline to follow, instead, every start up has it’s own rules, functions and strategies to start and run.

But when you start discuss the marketing side, you will see most companies suffer in it.

Ever thought about marketing strategy for your Startup?

Most of the new startups makes blunder by over estimating their marketing skills which gives their business a reason to suffer later on.

So have you ever thought to discuss about your marketing strategy thoroughly?

How seriously have you sat down with your team mates, colleagues, experienced personnels and with other people to plan your digital marketing strategy?

Do you know that 54 percent of online buyers read online reviews before purchase?. (Marketing Tech Blog) and companies don’t take Marketing and Digital Marketing Seriously…

If you’re a startup or a budding entrepreneur who is working on a startup idea, then you need to pay attention to what I’m about to tell you about marketing. I know that the most of the startup founders have the priorities regarding developing the MVP or rolling out an update or finding the investors, which is why this article is important for them. They get caught up in that area that they never give a thought to the marketing side of the business.

Digital Marketing for Startups

I’m not talking about thousands of dollars of online advertising or expensive magazine ads or TV commercials; in fact, I want you to think about digital marketing. It’s up to you that whether you spend $1 or $1000, it’s your choice. The reason why understanding the process of digital marketing is important for you is that you may find a whole new marketing genre in it. You’d discover that how you use utilize the internet and social media and other platforms at our disposal to build awareness about your startup.

Let’s go deep down and try to understand that how you can use digital marketing to grow your startup.

Steps Every Startup Should Follow In their Digital Marketing Success

Okay i understand and knows that not every company runs on the same fundamentals or paramteres you have, but following steps will definitely give you an idea on how to do it in the right way.

Define Your Audience

If you’re a startup, you must know who your target audience is to reach out and offer them your product. Many startup ideas come from the problems, and those startups try to solve those specific problems. Hence, they get attention when masses adopt the product to solve that problem. So it’s extremely important to understand who needs your product and why your product is better than any other already available solution on the market.

There are few of the questions which needs to be answered in this segment.

Who is your customer?
Why he is going to be your customer?
Why your audience is more attracted towards your competitors? [Check my SEMRush review to find out]

Prepare your Offer and USP

This segments co-relates with the above questions which i have asked. Once you have figured out your audience, it’s time to create an exceptional offer and deal for your customers by exactly emphasising on your USP (Unique Selling Proposition).

Most of the brands don’t know what they specialise in, who are their competitors and what your customer exactly needs. Focus on this please!

“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” – Godfather. Kindly, give your customer that offer.

Shortlist your promotional channels on Digital marketing :

Not every marketing channel is made for you, in fact if you are spending money on every channel without even realising and analysing stats, you are just wasting money.

Below is the list of some digital marketing channels you should consider focusing on :

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Content Marketing
Influencer Marketing
Campaign Marketing
E-commerce Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Display Advertising.

Choose Social Media Platforms

It’s easy to pick up the social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, but you have to understand where your potential audience could be. It’s not that simple as it may look. You can’t build your community on two dozen social media platform. Choose two or three (max.) social media platforms and put out native content that describe your product as well as help solve the related problems.

Write a Blog

Social media platforms aren’t enough – you have to put out in-depth written content on the web. It could be tutorials, case studies, how-to articles, or any other form of blog posts; the purpose is to engage the audience and provide the solution. The written content could be a great asset when it starts to solve problems of the prospective audience, and the content has the brand integration in it which brings eyeballs to the company’s product. Buffer is a great example; they publish high-quality content on their blogs and often integrate their tools in it.

Use Video Content

Video content is extremely helpful for growing a business. No one can deny the power of YouTube, anyway. You might have heard about vlogging. You can do business vlogging like GaryVee, who shares snippets of his daily business life. Gary’s vlog is more of a video documentation. He doesn’t do anything special for the vlog, in fact, he has a team who captures the moments, talks, meetings, and commutes on a daily basis and they put on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

There are many more people who document their work and hustle and share on YouTube. Similarly, when we talk about video content, we shouldn’t ignore live streaming. It’s a whole different genre, except everything happens live and goes uncut and unedited to the viewers. Many businesses use live video for engagement and interaction with the fans and audience. If you want to scale your startup, then don’t ignore the video content.

As per ImpactBnd.com,

75 Million people in the U.S. watch online videos everyday.
Merely mentioning the word ‘video’ in an email subject line, the click-through rate increased by 13%.
Nearly 50% of all video is watched on a mobile device.
By 2019, internet video traffic will account for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic
Videos up to 2 minutes long get the most engagement.

Build an Email List

Building an email list is very important in today’s world where the internet is changing the way we interact and do business. You can’t rely on the social media accounts to stay connected with your customers or prospective audience. Once the social media network changes the algorithm, everything you do on the network gets affected from it.

Building an email list gives you an opportunity to build a closer and genuine relationship with the fans and customers. You could reach out to them anytime you want and send them a message in their inbox. Use tools like Mailchimp or Aweber.

Advertise Online

Advertising is an essential part of the digital marketing. A lot of people have a misconception about digital marketing; they think that digital marketing means to advertise online. In reality, online advertising is a part of the digital marketing. In simple words, digital marketing consists of various strategies to find, attract, and convert the prospects into paying customers, and online advertising is one of them. The interesting part is that now social media networks are playing a big role in online advertising. You could advertise on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, and other networks too. It depends on the type of niche you’re in and what kind of people you’re looking to reach out.

Reach out to Organic Traffic :

SEO is one of the hottest topics for bloggers, online marketers, and search engine optimization experts or you may call search engine optimizers as per Google. According to a study at Search Engine Watch, a typical website may receive up to 64% of traffic from search engines.

Inter-Link Your Offline Marketing Strategies with Online Strategies :

It’s a great idea to link your offline marketing strategies with online, as potential customer tends to see your ad multiple times before taking the final decision, so it’s always a best idea to link it, not only it will increase your ROI, but it will help you with your overall business strategy and branding purposes.

Without a doubt, smart marketers, companies and agencies tend to link them both for wider benefits.

Offer Free Trials or Samples

Have second questions? Looking to target new people? Want to Quickly Grab new customers? This works better even then advertisement, because it involves real user experience with your product or service by your potential customers. Addict your customers by giving them a sample or a free trial of your product or service and win them for life.

Create event based deals

Just like with every other business, event’s are good chance to win more sales and your customer’s trust. 1000’s of brands plan in advance for their Christmas, New Year, Black Friday & Eid sales. If you are closely working with these event’s there is a good chance to increase your sales by offering them incentives, deals or even collaboration with 3rd parties to offer joint deals.

There are many ways you can work out on event based deals such as,

Buy 2 get 1 free.
50% Off for the next 3 hours.
Get free ticket to cinemas when you buy anything from us.
Or anything more.. sky is your limit.

Maintain Your Existing Customers

Do you know retaining your old customers is cheaper than creating new customers? Studies have proven that the probability of converting an existing customer is 60 – 70%, whereas the likelihood of converting a new prospect is only 5 – 20%.

However what’s the best way to maintain your existing customers?

As far as advertising purposes is concerned, best way to do is to start re-marketing and focus on your newsletter. Other ways is to do is to keep cold calling your existing customers with deals and incentives and giving them titles such as Founder Member etc.

Ask your customers to speak about you, maybe create stories or case studies :

As per a research, 54 percent of online buyers read online reviews before purchase. (Marketing Tech Blog). Customers tend to read about you, know about your business and want to imagine how your product or service is going to benefit them, before they actually consider buying it, so it’s always a good idea.

Another case study : More than half (Fifty Four Percent) of online buyers says that they had read online reviews prior to hitting the buy button, while 39 percent of consumers who made purchases in-store did so, according to a study from customer ratings and review firm Bazaarvoice Inc. (Internet Retailer)

Even people who buy offline, still do their homework before coming to your shop, so it’s great to write case studies, testimonials and stories about how your customers benefited.

For example, although i don’t sell much digital marketing services via my blog, buy my Google Adwords Case Study, helped me bring ample of customers and potential leads which i even converted for SEO purposes.

Additional Resources

Additional Sites related to the topic.

The Bottom Line on Digital Marketing for Startups

A startup, whether it’s an MVP or a full-fledged company, must consider trying out various digital marketing strategies to see which works best for them. Digital marketing arena is evolving day by day, and it’s creating business opportunities on a whole new level.

So if you’re a startup, I’d highly recommend understanding the concept of digital marketing; try out different tools and tactics to find out the results.

You can promote your Facebook Page’s post in $5 or run a pre-roll ad on YouTube to see the impact. Digital marketing is all about trying different forms of online avenues and figuring out which one is the best for your business.

What else would you recommend to you a startup that needs to start digital marketing?

A Digital Marketing Guide for Every Startup