So, you have begun a small business or a startup.
Well, you are on the right track.
Now all you’ve got to do is come up with top-notch marketing campaigns to ensure your business thrives.
You see, due to the pandemic, several establishments have closed down, and other reputed businesses are finding the going tough. That is why digital marketing is essential for startups. An effective digital marketing strategy in today’s action-packed market can drive significant growth for a business.
And you need to do this soon to establish your brand’s name and enhance its sustainability.
To that end, in this article, we have compiled some of the best digital marketing practices that can help you create a lasting online presence.
Why digital marketing is important for startups?
Did you know that designing advertisements can cost you a small fortune? The primary benefit of including digital marketing in your marketing campaigns is that it is cost-effective. Furthermore, unlike traditional marketing methods, where you require manpower and additional resources, digital marketing offers you incredible opportunities at a lot less. A simple blog or social media post can extend your visibility to thousands of people.
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Here are the top reasons why you should have a digital marketing strategy:
- Digital marketing is cost-effective
- It helps you gain a competitive advantage in the market
- It helps achieve a higher Return of Investment on your marketing campaigns
- It results in increased sales
- Digital marketing tools allow you to track the performance of your campaigns right from lead generation to sales
- Digital marketing helps develop strong relationships with existing and potential clients
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Best digital marketing practices for startups
1. Research your audience and create a buyer persona
The buyer persona is the first step in developing a marketing strategy for a startup business. What is a buyer persona? It tells you about your clientele or your target audience. Depending on your small business’s products or services, you will have to hunt your customers.
A buyer persona includes the name, age, job, income group, location, the solutions they may need from your business, their mode of research online, social media presence, and favorite products or services used frequently.
Having these details up your sleeve enables you to concentrate on marketing techniques that will provide you with the intended results. Using a buyer’s persona has helped businesses flourish and make profits because they are most likely to succeed in targeting customers.
2. Create an SEO marketing strategy
What is SEO? Search engine optimization is a set of internet marketing techniques that help your website to improve its rankings. It is an irony that few entrepreneurs believed that SEO was a dying cause.
They have been proved wrong because search engine giants like Google use algorithms to provide you results based on how active your digital marketing campaigns were. Hence, having a powerful SEO marketing strategy can help drive substantial growth.
SEO deals with Off-page SEO and On-page SEO. You have techniques infused with keyword research, website design, article marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and so on. Each of these has a significant role to play in the ranking of your website on search engines.
You may also want to upload your business details on local listings. This will help your small business become well-known in your area. Furthermore, you can request clients and customers to rate and review your products or services.
3. Personalized Email Marketing
It goes without saying that for any business, you must make use of personalized email marketing. Sending emails to your subscribers or potential clients is one thing, and having them open and read your emails, is altogether a different story.
Luckily, the ROI of sending emails is profitable. It pays dividends in sending emails to your target audience at the right time of day. For example, emails sent on Mondays to Thursdays have a higher chance of getting read and impacting the reader.
Email marketing can be a time-consuming task. Hence, you will want to use a reliable email service provider offering you automated emails. Once you have targeted your audience, you can send them emails automatically.
4. Social media marketing
Social media is a phenomenal marketing method that has the capability of either making or breaking your brand. It comes as no surprise that politicians, businesses, and entrepreneurs gain the upper hand with intelligent social media marketing techniques.
There are over 3.4 billion social media users in the world currently and these numbers are bound to get higher. Creating a positive brand image on social media should be a priority for businesses today. Every post, image, or video can help maximize your audience and increase sales. Also you can use Facebook Touch which advanced Facebook Apps that has many distinct features which helps you increase your engagement and sales.
The idea is to create quality content regularly on social media sites to establish a strong bond with your audience. Sharing details of your business, products, and services can do a world of good for your startup. Besides engaging clients, social media campaigns also help drive traffic to the company’s website so you can scale your product offerings.
5. Prioritize user experience
Prioritizing your user experience should be a priority for every business owner. When users are unhappy with the buying experience, they are less likely to return to your website. This means investing in an effective UI and UX design to cater to your audience’s needs.
Another effective technique to help users navigate your product offerings with ease is to offer customer support. Organizations like Apple and Dell are known for their reliable customer support. A few ways to communicate effectively with your clients are through live chat, phone call, email, social media, or a chatbot service. You can also provide a list of FAQs to solve any queries consumers may have regarding your products and services.
You can find and enroll in online digital marketing classes to learn more about this process and how you can apply it effectively.
6. Regularly measure the success or failure of your marketing campaigns
It is important to keep track of the success or failure of your marketing campaigns. As an entrepreneur, you need to ensure that your digital marketing campaigns and the time and effort you spend are not going to waste. Reviewing your campaigns allows you to make necessary modifications to your marketing strategies.
The important metrics to consider are conversion rates, reach, and visibility. You must ensure that a marketing strategy for a startup business is yielding the results, creating a positive brand name, promoting your products/services to the right audience, and is driving profits.
While the target audience and marketing goals can be different for different startups, there are a ton of tools like Google Analytics or Hashtagify to track your performance so you can make data-oriented decisions.
Effective marketing strategy for startup business
Digital marketing has made scalability and sustainability easier to achieve than it used to be. As an entrepreneur, it would be in your interest to employ the best digital marketing practices to drive business growth. However, tasting success through online marketing techniques requires patience. But you have the data right in front of your eyes to devise your strategies effectively.
Eventually, things will eventually fall in the line provided you begin with the right frame of mind, implement the right digital marketing techniques, and leverage knowledge and competency in innovative technologies to scale your business.
Rajamanickam Rajan is the director at Skein Technologies, a leading IT solution company in India. He has 10+ years of experience in developing application using IBM Worklight hybrid, native applications for IOS and Android systems.