Digital Marketing- the Startup way!
Startup – A word that fascinates every individual regardless of the age bar. The thought of owning your startup brings the chill down your spine. Everyone dreams of their own startup right from a college pass out to the one willing to give-up his high paying job to follow his dreams. It is that fairytale life everyone wants to live. The right idea at a right time pitched to the right investor; an every starup dream !
What makes the business grow is not just the right idea but its proper execution. While, in the current scenario sky is the limit for your target customer and if you do it all right, you could be the next startup sensation. Digital Marketing is one major strategy, if used right can do wonders to your startup. Let’s understand how startups can use digital marketing to its highest effectiveness and gain an edge over its competitors:
A right Digital Marketing Agency!
Setting up a strategic partnership with right Digital Marketing agency is the most important aspect. Hiring right is half way to achieving your goal. It is advisable for a startup to look for a mid size agency with whom they can share an equal relationship. While, big giants will make them feel small, getting a freelancer on board just to save a dime will eventually turn costlier as it will compromise both quality and time. An equal partner will give your startup the right stability and idea sharing which is of an utmost importance for your startup to grow.
Most of the start-ups are bootstrapped or funded by friends and family. With limited budget that their pocket can afford, here are few strategy to rope in a right partner for meeting your digital marketing needs:
Play the social game right
It depends completely on the product you have and the target audience you wish to attract. Using the right mix of available social channels, like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and etc. one can capture good market. Not one size fits all – a single strategy or a social channel may not produce same results for startups with varied products and markets.
An experiment over the time stamps with mix and match of different strategy to find the right mix for yours is the most basic one a startup can use. Remember, not all the social marketing is aimed towards getting likes or views, sales or profit. Building a campaign for Brand awareness / visibility shares an equal importance alongside achieving top line for business growth. A giveaway game planned and marketed right can bring customer loyalty to the brand.According to a survey by forbes.com, over 2.62 Billion people are over social media in 2018, the number is expected to grow over 3 Billion by next year
If you ignore SEO, your clients might ignore you
Often, startups invest a lot of time and resources into the look and feel of their website/Apps. Building the best looking website and pages with awesome services and thinking that customers will visit the website on their own is one major mistake that can cost you venture failure.
There are thousands of website in your industry and everyone spending big on SEO just to make sure the best keywords have their visibility on top, this will make your website standalone in the Niche of Darkness. Search Engine Optimization will not only build your audience that will visit your website but also build a latent trust.
When your customers search for their requirement using a certain keyword, if your website appears on top or at least on the first few pages, it gives them an impression that your company is a reputed one they can rely on for meeting their needs. Very few customers tend to scroll beyond fourth page to meet their needs.
Search Engine Optimization is like inbound sales technique, spending into which should be taken as an investment and not expense. It is must for every startup; one can use best SEO practices that will help in better keyword ranking. Hiring a good SEO company can get your over various challenges that a startup can come across for their business development.
Influencer Marketing and Affiliation
With the advent of Snapchat and Instagram stories, influencer marketing is catching up really fast. Over 80% startups and small established ventures had used or will be looking forward to use this method at least once in 2018. What makes Influencer marketing the best choice for startups?
Affiliate marketing is well related to influencer marketing as its closest relative. Here, you can recruit affiliates to your brand and let them market for you. Affiliates are paid either through the sales generation model or a flat fee payment model as per their ability and the startups pocket to afford them.
Here, tracking sales is quite tricky. Google Analytics can be used as a tool to track custom generated links or coupon codes.
Pay Per Click Marketing
Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing like Google AdWords is an inbound sales tool which will bring your interested clients to your website. This method is expensive but no less than ready sales technique. The ROI is very high as compared to other methods and you only need to pay when the customer clicks on the advertisement. This will also provide you data and marketing insights that will help you tweak your strategy and meet your sales goal. PPC campaign tends to be a money mongering bet; it is always advisable to hire an expert or else you might end up wiping your entire budget.
Content Marketing
Business to Customer or Business to Business, content marketing plays a good marketing role for both of them. According to shanebarker.com more than 90% of B2C businesses believe that content marketing is extremely important and they are committed to generate good quality content in order to lure their customers. With the advent of voice search, importance of better quality content will catch up to sustain in the market. Your customer will be able to connect with your content only if it solves their problem. Always look for content that will provide audience engagement which will eventually build trust and provide better conversion rate. Some major benefits of content marketing are
Email Marketing
Email marketing is quite an old technique used to generating sales. This one is no less than gold when it comes to getting the sales right. As per shanebarker, a whopping 122% ROI through email marketing is what keeps it still alive in the market despite being an oldie with the best market experience. This might not yield results for all startups but the ones with a good data lead that is focused towards a particular target audience can achieve good success. The ones able to unleash the true potential of this method will sail their startup ship through the problems to success.
While dreaming for owning your startup that has a great market and investor support, it is equally difficult to get your plans right and push the pedal with right gears to achieve the best speed for your startup. An important tip here is there might be a few companies providing 360 Degree Marketing Service, it is essential to hire such companies in order to achieve a better output as against divided marketing which in the end will result in blame game for not being able to achieve desired results as promised. There is no best digital marketing practice than the one that gives you the desired results.
