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The startup scene is glamorous and exciting in many ways, but it’s also a lot of hard work, and the cold hard fact is that a lot of startups fail. You may have a great product or service that you really believe in, that could solve problems and make things better – but that’s not enough to succeed, is it? If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? In marketing terms, the answer is no.
Startups need to become known, to reach target audiences, and that’s where marketing comes in, especially digital marketing. You essentially can’t make money without engaging in marketing. If you’re an early-stage business, every dollar counts, so you want to make sure you get marketing right.
Fortunately, we live in a digital age, and it’s never been easier to carefully target and reach the right people, at the right time, with the products and services that are right for them. Research by Adobe indicates that 76% of marketers think marketing has changed more in the past two years than in the past 50, and 66% percent of all marketers think companies won’t succeed unless they have a digital marketing approach.
This is great news for startups: it isn’t that long ago that reaching audiences involved TV & radio advertising, big budgets, and virtually no ability to target, whereas lucky you reap the benefits of pay-per-click advertising, A/B testing, and all sorts of exciting tools to make digital marketing work for you, to better understand and engage your customers, and to measure, monitor and improve upon your startup marketing efforts to drive your success.
Here are some of our top strategies for startups looking to rock digital marketing.
1) Mobile First Web Design
In 2022, more than 54% of global website traffic comes from mobile devices. The percentage of consumers accessing websites on smartphones and tablets will increase in 2023. You can make digital marketing strategies for startups successful in the future only by adopting a mobile-first approach.
Instead of making the website look good on computers and mobile devices, you need to ensure that the website delivers an optimal user experience on the smallest screens. You must revamp the website to make it look, feel, and function like a mobile app. The redesigned website will keep visitors engaged by offering streamlined content and enhanced download speed.
2) Google My Business
Your digital marketing strategies for startups must make it easier for customers to find your business. Many entrepreneurs these days leverage the free tool provided by Google to optimize their profiles on Google Search and Maps. In addition to sharing important business information with customers, you can leverage Google My Business to interact with customers by requesting them to post reviews.
However, you must consider and compare some of the popular alternatives to Google My Business while implementing digital marketing strategies. Some of these websites allow you to publish business information, while others provide options to add customer reviews and product reviews. You can boost your startup’s online presence by creating profiles on multiple platforms.
3) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
In addition to delivering an outstanding user experience, the mobile-first design will boost your website’s visibility and ranking on popular search engines. But you must implement a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to generate and convert more leads consistently. While optimizing the website for search engines, you need to keep in mind the latest search engine guidelines as well as the emerging SEO trends.
Also, your digital marketing strategy must boost the website’s search visibility by implementing both on-page and off-page SEO techniques. For instance, you must implement on-page SEO techniques to optimize a web page’s content, title tag, URL, and images. At the same time, you must boost the web page’s relevance, popularity, credibility, and authority by implementing off-page SEO techniques.
4) Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
You can hire an SEO Consultant to implement SEO strategies and boost your website’s organic or unpaid traffic. But for your digital marketing strategies for startups to be effective, it’s crucial to complement SEO with search engine marketing (SEM). Unlike SEO, SEM focuses on diverting more search traffic to the website through paid advertising. By involving an SEO professional in your team, you can ensure that both SEO and SEM efforts work hand in hand to drive maximum results.
Startups, in particular, can face budget constraints when it comes to implementing an elaborate SEM strategy. However, with the expertise of an SEO professional or professional SEO services, you can curtail SEM costs by adopting best practices such as creating ads for specific keywords, aligning ads with landing pages, and opting for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising instead of pay-per-view (PPV). These best practices, when implemented by an SEO professional, will help you beat the competition and achieve fast results without straining your advertising budget.
5) Content Marketing
Startups can generate and convert leads by creating, distributing, and promoting a variety of content. While implementing digital marketing strategies for startups, you must focus on the creation, distribution, and promotion of a variety of content – blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, and ebooks.
At the same time, you must explore ways to influence the purchase decision of customers by persuading them to consume the content. Your strategy can engage and influence leads only by sending personalized and targeted content. Also, you must match the content according to the customer’s current position in the buyer’s journey to solve problems or answer questions.
6) Social Media Marketing
An average internet user spends more than two hours daily on social networking platforms. However, most internet users spend more time on Facebook than on other social networks. The massive popularity of social networks makes them one of the most powerful digital marketing channels. Your digital marketing strategies for startups must keep in place a robust social media marketing plan.
The social media marketing plan must be tailored according to your startup’s digital marketing goals by choosing the right social networks, creating relevant social media content, and keeping the brand voice consistent across platforms. For instance, your strategy must focus on creating a variety of social media content – posts, stories, photos, and videos – regularly. At the same time, the strategy must create a content calendar to ensure that the content is posted across social networks in an organized and consistent way.
7) Email Marketing
While implementing digital marketing strategies for startups, many marketers these days ignore email marketing. Your digital marketing strategies can engage and influence customers in 2023 by sending personalized and targeted emails.
Your strategy must focus on creating an email list by persuading website visitors to share their email ids using techniques like sign-in forms and lead magnets. Also, you must create informative and interesting emails that keep the recipients engaged and convey the desired message. You can easily make the recipient take the desired action – visit your website, subscribe to the newsletter, or buy your product – by including powerful call-to-actions (CTAs) in the email.
8) Influencer Marketing
The massive popularity of social networks creates opportunities for startups to promote their product or services through an influencer. Your digital marketing strategies for startups must explore ways to promote products/services through product mentions and endorsements from influencers. While launching this style of a digital marketing campaign, you can focus on individuals who are considered experts in their niche and/or have a dedicated social media following.
But the outcome of this digital marketing strategy will purely depend on your choice of social influencer. You can find the right social influencer for particular demography using online platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat. Likewise, you can use specialized tools to identify and shortlist relevant social influencers for your niche and monitor their activities.
9) Video Marketing
While planning content marketing campaigns, you must focus on creating both text-based and visual content. But you must remember that video content is more effective than text and image content in engaging customers and making them absorb the desired messages. Also, you can influence the purchase decision of customers directly by posting explainer videos.
Your startup can get a higher ROI in 2023 by launching video marketing campaigns. The video marketing campaigns will focus extensively on showcasing and promoting your products/services through a variety of videos. Your digital marketing strategies for startups must focus on the creation and distribution of different types of videos – product demonstrations, explainers, customer testimonials, company culture, and behind the scene.
However, each type of video must be tailored according to your marketing goals and target audience. You must use the video as a powerful tool to strengthen the sales funnel by choosing the appropriate length, tone, and style. Also, you must implement a video SEO strategy to keep the video popular and achieve marketing goals in the long run.
10) Referral Marketing
You can leverage referral marketing to acquire new customers through word-of-mouth of existing customers. Your digital marketing strategies for startups must run a referral program that incentivizes existing customers to tell and recommend your products or services to their families, friends, and coworkers.
The referral program will incentivize existing customers by offering a variety of rewards – discounts, cashback, gift coupons, and referral bonuses. The rewards and freebies will encourage customers to refer and recommend your startup in their circle. However, you must use analytics or visualizations in Google Sheets or Excel to set up referral programs across websites, mobile apps, and social networks.
11) Retargeting Ads
While making digital marketing strategies for startups, you must focus extensively on engaging and retaining website visitors. Also, your strategies must make the visitors return to your website and perform the desired action by displaying retargeting ads. Your startup can display retargeting ads to convert window shoppers into customers.
Popular search engines and social networks display retargeting ads to your website visitors based on the pages visited by them. The relevant ads will remind the customer about your product or service while they visit other websites. Also, retargeting ads often increase conversion rates by seducing customers to revisit your website.
12) Viral Marketing
Unlike other digital marketing strategies, viral marketing requires your startups to spread information about a product or service on the internet through consumers. Social networking platforms create opportunities for you to launch viral marketing campaigns successfully without escalating advertisement costs.
But startups often find it challenging to make consumers spread organic and word-of-mouth information about a product/service. You have to come up with out-of-box ideas to create content that more and more consumers will share on social networking platforms. Also, you must include the appropriate message or CTA in the trending content to persuade viewers to visit your website and take the desired action.
13) Customer Service
Many startups these days outperform large companies by delivering outstanding customer service. At the same time, there are many instances when awful customer service damaged the reputation and credibility of startups in hours. You can promote customer loyalty and beat the competition simultaneously by leveraging customer service as a new-age marketing channel.
While implementing digital marketing strategies for startups, you must focus on keeping in place a multichannel customer service program. The program will enable every customer to solve problems and avail assistance using her choice of the customer service channel. Also, you can enable customers to solve problems on their own by adding blogs, FAQ pages, AI Chatbots, and knowledge bases to your website.
Wrap Up
Your startup can achieve and sustain growth in 2023 only by implementing a slew of digital marketing strategies. But you must remember that digital marketing trends change at regular intervals. Hence, your strategies for startups must focus on monitoring and boosting the performance of individual campaigns continuously. You must not evaluate the performance of every digital marketing campaign using the same metrics or KPIs.
For instance, you cannot use the same set of metrics to measure the impact of SEO and social media marketing activities accurately. Your digital marketing strategies for startups must clearly define the metrics for measuring the performance of individual marketing campaigns. The monitoring will help you to make the digital marketing strategies more impactful by adopting emerging trends and implementing necessary changes proactively.
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