In the business world, there is nothing more exciting than bringing your own startup to life and creating a startup. In order for you to achieve success, you must be prepared to face the digital world and generate a sustainable digital marketing strategy.
If you’re not prepared for this, your startup will probably fail in the face of this sprawling, dominant world. There is a huge competition to gain the attention of your prospective customers by promoting your business. Thousands of emails, advertisements and publications fill the day to day of your leads.
Digital marketing is essential to ensure the success of your business, so we share with you these 23 Digital Marketing tips for startups.
We want your startup to grow. That’s why we want to show you these tips that you can apply to it. Clearly, marketing requires funds and investments in order to have significant returns. We know that it is a bit difficult for startups to get the economic means to allocate to marketing. So what should we do? Well, this is not a problem. Nowadays there are many platforms and ways to do digital marketing that are effective and affordable.
One of the most common and effective ways is to start by using the various social media platforms. They are easy to manage, to carry out successful promotional campaigns and to maintain or create engagement and direct communication with your audience.
Another of the preferred strategies today, and perfect for startups and ventures, is Inbound Marketing or using a Growth Hacking process.
Let’s start with the tips:
#1 Start Off Right
The world of digital marketing is very big and it is very likely that you will feel overwhelmed and confused with the number of channels and mediums that exist. So it is important that you know your product well, your potential customers (buyer persona), and define a marketing strategy for your startup. If after doing this analysis, you are still confused, you can hire a Digital Marketing agency to do a study and marketing planning suitable for your business.
#2 Achieve an online presence
Achieving an online presence has become more complicated and important than before. In order to promote your brand, you need a modern and sophisticated website that can give the business greater visibility. We need more than just an informative website, a multifunctional website. Having a blog is essential, it will help you position yourself and carry out your inbound marketing strategy. You should also open a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and probably an Instagram account.
Many companies choose to turn their website into a mobile app. Even though this is not essential, having the mobile or responsive version of your website to be viewed on different devices is essential.
You must create a very well-designed website, with relevant images and very accurate so that the user finds what they are looking for very quickly. This is essential within your digital marketing strategy. You must concentrate on the structure and content and it must be optimized for SEO, keyword research is indispensable. SEO is very effective and provides benefits over time. Maximize your website’s visibility and increase the number of organic visitors.
#SEO
The initials SEO stand for Search Engine Optimization and as I mentioned earlier, it is fundamental in the world of digital marketing today. There are professionals specialized in this technique who will help optimize your strategy and grow your business. You must make sure that all the pages of your website work correctly, create the appropriate descriptions and titles for each one as well as the tags and titles of the images. There are several programs such as Yoast SEO or Semrush that will help you do it yourself.
#4 PPC Marketing Based on Personalization
This technique is one of the preferred by marketers. It allows you to design a personalized strategy based on your users’ preferences. You can create retargeting or traffic capture campaigns based on the identity of your buyer personas. This way you can promote your startup to people who are possibly more interested or with common interests.
#5 Responsive version of your website
As we mentioned earlier, the majority of traffic, today, comes from mobile (cellular) traffic. So you must take good care of how your website looks on different types of mobile or tablets, in this way you will be able to convert more visitors from the PPC campaigns you make. Users should be able to navigate seamlessly through all pages.
#6 Build and determine your brand’s voice and image
You must build your brand image and brand voice. That is, define the type of content you are going to publish and the way to do it. Are you a brand close to your audience? Do you speak formally or informally? What are your brand colors? Do you have templates to achieve uniformity?
Your brand’s voice and image should be present in all your communications: in emails, brochures, landing pages and content on social networks.
This is essential.
#7 Educate your consumers, not just promote your page
Social media and communications should not be used solely to promote your product or brand. They are a communication channel, so you have to promote conversation, listen to your customer, know what they want to see on your networks and offer them valuable content. This will make your brand much more attractive. People don’t like you to sell to them all the time. They like to have the power of decision and the power of information, so you must accompany them in their buyer journey.
#8 Interact with your visitors
In Digital Marketing, visitors have many communication channels to ask questions, discuss concerns, or make a complaint. Make them feel important and part of your brand. Create contests, like, reply to comments or direct messages. This, without a doubt, will make your brand more human and boost your credibility.
#9 Use Multiple Social Media Platforms
What will your social media strategy be? The number of posts you need to make on each channel… For this, we recommend a social media automation strategy so that you have enough presence to generate reach and engagement. You must know and study the behavior of your audience to post at the appropriate times and frequency of each social network. In our Social Manager module you have endless possibilities to manage all your social networks from one place.
#10 Content is king
You must have a content marketing strategy. What topics are you going to talk about? What am I going to say about my brand? What is my USP, how am I going to communicate it? Content is the king of digital marketing and especially content marketing. You should always share interesting, valuable content that contributes something to the community. That makes people stop and take note.
Don’t talk about your business, features, or benefits within your blog content. Content is the reason or answer to what people search for on Google.
If the content isn’t clear and well-crafted, your startup will struggle to succeed. Create creative and innovative content. The idea is that your content is shared by users to multiply the reach.
The content is composed of blog posts, videos, downloadables, e-books, among others.
Although we don’t want to sell the first time, it is important to have a strategy and campaign to increase KPIs and sales.
#11 Have Real Followers
Nowadays it is very easy to buy followers, fans or likes on different social networks. This is not recommended. The ideal is to achieve organic followers who are sufficiently interested in your brand and with whom you manage to have the most interactions and thus achieve high engagement. Engagement is more important than designers. If they are organic, you will be able to capture their attention to try to convert them and generate sales.
If you have pure fake followers, your content won’t really be seen by anyone. So it’s very important to generate real followers to increase your reach.
Marketing doesn’t have to be perceived by your users as marketing. Your posts and posts don’t always have to be focused on your product or brand. As we have said ad nauseam, interact with your audience, create Q&A sessions, do live sessions with Facebook Live or Youtube Live, Periscope, Instagram, etc. This is a good technique to generate engagement.
#12 Focus on your target audience
At first, you can get too excited and try to reach everyone. As exciting as this sounds, it’s not good practice. It’s important to focus on reaching your target audience. Get your message across to people who are likely to be interested in it.
You should segment the market according to your niche and exclude all people who do not have defined related interests, demographics, gender, age, and so on. If your message reaches a much larger and irrelevant audience, you will most likely not achieve your goal.
#13 Make small test investments.
Experience different options such as Facbook Ads or Google Adsense. You can create $10 daily campaigns and reach thousands of people. There are many tutorials and guides that will help you create an effective campaign. Check out Vilma Nuñez’s page, she has many courses and tutorials on the subject.
#14 Make improvements and optimize your landing pages to generate more conversions.
What do you want visitors to do when they enter one of your landing pages? You should think and ask yourself these questions when creating or optimizing the pages created. Use Lead Generation plugins to convert as many leads as possible. This is where Marketing Automation comes in.
It is very important to take into account the UX or User Experience within your website.
#15 Marketing Automation
This section is very long so I recommend you read this post if you are just starting out on the subject. All your sales funnels can be automated. Automating processes will allow you to have your website working for you 24 hours a day. Generating leads, sharing interesting content according to the moment in which this lead is. Create automated email campaigns, tweets, notifications, and more to get the right person sold to the right person at the right time. There are a large number of platforms to do Automated Marketing, you can check ours, which allows you to carry out your marketing activities from one place.
#16 Hire staff with Digital Marketing knowledge
You can hire an external digital marketing service or create your own marketing team or staff. As a startup, we recommend hiring people who are used to working within startups or small companies that do not have large marketing departments. Since people who come with agency experience will probably have been in specific departments and are not used to handling all areas of digital marketing.
It is very important that they have knowledge of analytics or at least the ability to analyze and learn. Google Analytics is a very good tool to measure the efforts made on your website.
#17 Work on Branding
Having a strong branding strategy is key for startups. If there is an important tip for startups or ventures, it is branding!
As we have mentioned, you must work very well on your communication strategy and the personality and identity of your brand. You must have a storytelling plan for your business to achieve an emotional connection with your customers. This will help you stand out from your competitors.
If you have this in place, copying for your messages, SEM campaigns, and communications will be much easier.
This is a job that is done day by day and not all in one fell swoop. It has to be implemented across channels and aspects of your business.
#18 Focus on Marketing Your Product
The initial version of the product is all about providing customers with a great experience. Nowadays, you must also maximize the benefits derived from the use of your products to your customers. What is your customer going to gain from your product? Show him what he is going to achieve and obtain, generate sensations.
#19 Work on your Landing Pages
Let’s dig a little deeper into landing pages. The main goal is to generate leads. They are especially important within digital marketing and must be optimized to achieve high levels of conversion. Good thing there is such a thing as A/B testing! Make different versions and leave the one that converts best. Test with colors, call-to-action locations, and page layout. Give them the time they need! Many startups don’t take landing pages into account.
#20 Invest in the best and most suitable tools
Even if you are a startup, you must have funds or resources to hire platforms or tools to be able to carry out the relevant marketing strategies. Choosing the best tools based on value for money is a very important decision within your startup. There are specific tools for social media, marketing automation, email marketing, analytics, and more. We recommend you try the free licensesand demos before making this decision.
#21 Work on marketing your company as the best company to work for
Try to position yourself or market yourself as the best place to work. Hiring the right staff can be very difficult even when there are many talented people available. Having a blog for your employees always helps, as does social media.
As long as people see their friends having a good time at work, in a good work environment, they will want to work at your company.
#22 Consider creating your strategy according to your needs
This is very, very important. First of all, you must establish the goals and objectives of your company; But you must also know and evaluate your limitations. You should know what makes you better or different from your competition. What is your value proposition? Once you have all this defined, you must involve your entire team and transmit the vision and mission of the company. In this way you will be able to grow and solve any problem or event that arises.
Separate your goals in two. Short-term objectives and Long-term objectives. Your startup can’t grow without thinking about a long-term goal. By establishing them you will be able to make better decisions, prevent mistakes or make the relevant changes in time.
#23 Be dedicated and faithful to your Digital Marketing strategy
Digital Marketing takes time and effort to be successful. If you are dedicated and committed to your startup, you will be able to achieve the objectives and results you expect.
Too much information?
Putting all these tips into practice can be difficult. It is very important that you take into account the tools, software and platforms to carry out your strategy. Remember, you don’t need to have an exaggerated budget to carry it out. It’s a matter of finding the right tools for your startup.
At Inbound Manager Pro we make Inbound Marketing and Automated Marketing available to everyone. If you have any questions, we can help you get started and face today’s digital transformation. Grow your business!