Basics of Digital Marketing for Startups

Digital marketing is the most affordable marketing tactic which a bootstrapped, as well as a well-funded startup, can use to reach their target audience for their brand.

The successful marketing of your product or services digitally depend completely on how smart and innovative your digital campaign is? Even in digital marketing, you must not enter blindly

into it as it will waste all your time, money and manpower. You can learn from other people’s mistakes and select those marketing strategies which have given them best results.

Your marketing strategy is a deciding factor in making or breaking your company. And, when you are a new and small startup, it is in the best interest of your company to invest more on digital marketing wisely as it is the only option available to build your brand on a low budget.

You must remain updated with the latest marketing strategy to get the high level of lead generation.

Every startup wants to grow as a successful entity by burning less amount of money with maximum output and these are some of the tactics which you can use to market your product digitally:

1. Concentrate on Your Target Customers: – Your primary motive from starting phase of your digital marketing is to find your target audience and then keep the focus on marketing only to these people. The startups who have just started or are in the first year of its operation, they can find their target audience by finding the lookalike customer as well as the customer of your competitor.

You can find the lookalike customer by using Facebook which is having the feature of helping in finding such customer.

You have to narrow down your market according to your product segment because if you don’t focus on that aspect then it will also reach to the larger irrelevant audience which will completely jeopardize your marketing campaign.

You must focus your marketing on the basis of segregating your target customer according to age, region, gender, etc. for better outcomes.

1. Customer Engagement: – Any brand can only succeed when you provide something to the people by fulfilling their need which they are looking for.

And, even if your product is something different from what people require, you can only know it by having a conversation with your intended customers who can help you make some change in your product to make it product-market fit.

This can only be possible when you engage with your audience on social media platform by answering their queries and discussing your product’s shortcomings for further improving it. This will also help in building a base of loyal customers.

Such type of engagement will help your start-up in getting genuine advice for your start-up’s better future. You can organize weekly question and answer sessions using Facebook live and can also use Reddit, Quora, etc.

1. E-mail Marketing: – E-mail marketing is now becoming one of the best digital marketing weapons which will not only help your start-up to promote your brand but will also help in generating lead to make business for your brand.

Another aspect of e-mail marketing is dividing your e-mail recipients into various categories by dividing them on the basis of demographics, purchase history and location.

Such segregation will help you in creating more relevant content for your target audience by making it more appealing and which will ultimately help in increasing your click through rate.

1. Attractive Content: – Content has always been the king in generating brand awareness and attracting potential customers for any company whether it is a startup or a well-established company. But, it has been overlooked by many start-ups in the past which has caused damage in losing their market share.

Content marketing is the most effective way of conveying brand’s message clearly and if you fail on that front, then it will hamper your whole digital marketing strategy.

You must critically think about the message as you cannot experiment here but build your content’s message on industry research with authentic findings.

The content should be more focused on benefits than on the new features you are providing. This can be easily done by hiring good content writers who will make sure that your content should be compelling enough that people like and share.

There are several affordable ways of content creation and even a small investment into content will reap good benefits in building the brand of your startups in long run.

In content marketing, you have so many options like videos, infographics, blog posts and many other ways to create and share content.

1. Get Your Company Registered on Various Online Business Platforms: – There are various business portals available online where thousands of business entities are registered. The intended customers visit such portals to search for their required products available from different companies at a single place.

Customers also put their queries if they don’t find the product they require. In such cases, they are informed later on by these portals when the product becomes available.

Such portals also help the registered companies on their platform to connect with their intended audience and make the business out of it. These platforms are like online yellow pages but with the better user experience of the customer.

1. Make Landing Page Compelling: – The landing page of any startup is one of the crucial factors in generating the lead about your product and then ultimately making the business out of it by selling your products.

Your landing page must be good enough to compel your visitors to get converted into your customers.

One must go for A/B tests to find which type of the landing page is better for your website and thus keep on improving in areas of headlines, text, color scheme, etc.

1. Study your Competitor’s Digital Marketing Strategy: – Any big or small startup can learn a number of business ideas by studying their market strategies and keeping a close look on every marketing move they make.

If you’re smart enough to understand your competitor’s marketing move, then you can easily mould your own marketing strategy to get better results.

Various MNC’s like Coca-Cola, Unilever, etc. have been using this move for centuries who whenever enter into the new market, they study the marketing tactics and products of the regional players and then mould their marketing tactics as well as their products to suit and cater to the needs of local people.

1. Use Paid Online Ads Judiciously: – Nowadays, most of the social media platforms and search engines have the feature of showing paid ads on their platform which any start-up can easily afford as most of these paid ads starts with a minimum budget of $10. You can also further increase the budget according to your requirement to gain much better reach among your target audience.

Such online paid ads are paying a very better ROI for big as well as small brands. It doesn’t cost that much amount of money which traditional marketing campaigns used to cost.

You must have a better strategy to invest money on the right platform at which the maximum number of your target audience remains active. Such online ads have various options for the promotion like pay per click (PPC), etc.

Conclusion

The way technology is changing on a daily basis, the digital marketing strategies also change with time. It is a very common misconception among the start-ups that one must focus only on launching the product first without even getting well prepared with its branding and digital marketing strategy.

But, digital marketing is more important to make the business out of it by targeting the right audience.

The common notion among startups of giving less importance to create content through blogs, videos and building brand awareness around the product must change.

This is a very wrong approach to market the product because if you are not being able to attract and motivate potential customer through your digital marketing campaigns, then you will fail as a startup. So, your primary focus must be on devising strategies for better branding and digital marketing.

By Subham Kumar

Source: www.iamwire.com