4 BEST DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY FOR YOUR STARTUP BUSINESS

Knowing the best digital marketing strategy to blow up your business makes entrepreneurship sweeter and less frustrating.

Today’s business owners embrace digital marketing, and startups aren’t left out.

In this post, I’ll focus more on startup businesses because most startup entrepreneurs usually find themselves at their wits’ end trying to familiarize themselves with the marketing environment.

Several reports have concluded that about 90% of startups fail, which is not surprising as startups usually struggle to succeed.

According to CBInsights, poor marketing is the primary reason for a low success rate for startups. 

This further proves that employing the best digital marketing strategy in your products and services promotion, advertisement, and distribution processes will save your startup from failing and bring massive growth.

Also, marketing gets you in front of your target audience and allows your business to grow in reach and sales. And digital marketing is the best marketing option for any business in this century; it more than quadruples your growth chances.

However, marketing, especially digital marketing, can go wrong quickly, especially if the digital marketing strategy you are using isn’t compatible with your business model. 

Nevertheless, you can get your startup to be included in the 10% of startups that don’t experience failure.

At the initial stage of any business, strategic decisions and plans are executed to grow the business. The goal of every startup is to grow, and this can only happen by being deliberate and conscious of the methods you have made to grow your business.

One of the strategic decisions you need to make is the type of digital marketing strategy to promote your business. Deciding on this can be a hassle, especially if you do not know much about digital marketing and its benefits.

If you are unclear on why digital marketing has the power to blow up your business, you should keep reading.

WHY YOU NEED A DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Being knowledgeable about the importance of digital marketing in your startup will undoubtedly change the outlook of your business and help you make sound business decisions in terms of marketing.

Here are five (5) reasons why you need a digital marketing strategy for your startup:

1. Cost-effectiveness

Many startups feel digital marketing is not affordable for business promotion, and as a result, money is not conserved. 

Contrarily, digital marketing is actually less costly than other marketing types. Marketing online saves money while possessing the ability to reach your potential customers even outside of your geographic location. It’s a win-win situation for you. You are relieved of the financial stress, which makes you focus on other important things with money demands.

2. Direction

Knowing what to do next and how to go about it with a digital marketing strategy becomes easier. This is because your track records of progress can easily be accessed and used to plan further or re-strategize the marketing procedures.

3. Integrity

People look out for businesses with integrity and credibility before they can be committed to using their products and services. Startups find it challenging to establish integrity and credibility as no one can vouch for them because they know little or nothing about them. 

Digital marketing provides a platform through which you can build integrity and credibility with your customers.

Most digital marketing strategies allow you to have better communication with your customers, which in the long run helps gain the customers’ trust and give them more reasons to use your products and services 

4. Exposure without boundaries.

The world going digital has made it much easier to reach people staying miles away from you. Adopting a digital marketing strategy guarantees getting your startup from the hideout into the limelight when it comes to business. This exposure will draw your potential customers to you, which will bring in the sales you desire.

5. Uniqueness

Most businesses have a lot of competition attached to it. Your startup will always have competitors: those with products and services relatable to yours and those who have been there longer than you. 

Using digital marketing for your business can help distinguish it from other businesses.  

HOW TO GET THE DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY THAT WILL WORK FOR YOU

Knowing that digital marketing can genuinely take your startup from the hideout into the limelight doesn’t rule out the necessity of getting to know which of the various digital marketing strategies is best for your business.

This is as important as knowing the importance of digital marketing. Understanding the type of digital strategy that is perfect for your startup will require you to consider these three points:

1. YOUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Your products and services have a specific target audience. For instance, assume that your startup deals with children’s clothes. This means that your marketing strategy will focus on reaching the parents of these children because, of course, they are the ones with the credit card to pay for your product. 

Also, because you deal with clothes, you will need to invest more in a digital marketing strategy that allows you to engage your audience with a lot of visual content and that also allows a variety of payment options.

Having clarity on your products and services leads to understanding your target audience, so it is essential to have a niche and not just sell different products and services. 

2. AUDIENCE

Once you know who your target audience is, the next thing is to discover where to find them. 

In a 2009 study on media, Nielsen reported that kids spent less time watching TV as they grew older and gravitated more toward the internet. This media report implies that marketing to teenagers through TV commercials won’t yield effective results. 

You need to find where your target audience spends most of their time and use that as a tool to get the best strategy in marketing your products and services. It creates ease in planning and lets you know the exact digital marketing strategy that will be the most effective, whether email marketing, content marketing, or social media marketing.

3. CONSISTENCY

It is quite beautiful to see startups identify the target audience for their products or services. However, being consistent in marketing is crucial, and remember, consistency is the rule of the game.

Almost half of SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) spend less than two hours per week on marketing efforts. For these kinds of businesses, underinvesting in marketing can be fatal. 

For startups and SMBs, marketing should be given priority.

Before you can conclude that a particular marketing strategy did not produce results like you thought it would, you need to verify that you gave it the proper attention and consistency it needed to grow and yield profit.

DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR STARTUPS

We will explore the top 4 digital marketing strategies you can employ to blow up your startup and become successful.

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

89% of small businesses believe that SEO is an effective digital marketing tactic. According to them, having a website (blog marketing) and utilizing SEO is critical for startups.

Note that for a startup business to utilize SEO fully, it needs to have a website and not just any kind of website but an SEO-optimized website.

A startup must have a website through which SEO marketing can function.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) means optimizing your content for search engines. 

With the proper use of keywords and creating high-quality content, you can inform search engines that your website is informative and trustworthy.

SEO ticks off the advantages of digital marketing, from cost-effectiveness to exposure. 

I talked a lot about how a business owner in this century can utilize SEO effectively in my blogging for business owner course, including setting up a payment gateway on your website.

Underestimating the importance of blogging and SEO by businesses has contributed to startup failures that we see today. 

Starting a business, getting capital, establishing a consistent customer base, and all the hurdles of most startups can easily be overcome using blog marketing and SEO.

SEO is a cheap way of attracting traffic to your website and increasing your leads, and it helps boost your presence and visibility on the internet. 

Once a post on your website can rank high on a search engine’s algorithm, you will get traffic to your startup website. SEO marketing is a strategy, and you can hack this marketing strategy if you can grasp how it functions. 

Find out how to have a higher SEO ranking here.

Additionally, having a website means exploring other ways to make money. So, not only is this a short-term marketing strategy, but it is also an investment with a very high ROI.

2. Content marketing:

Many business owners in emerging markets downplay why content marketing is important, not knowing it is vital for their business growth.

Retaining your customers as a startup or a large-scale business is crucial and definitely more important than getting them. 

As soon as the doors open and you have an interaction with any of them, securing these customers should be your utmost priority at that moment. And one easy way of retaining customers is content marketing.

 Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy that does not directly position your products or services out to be accessed, but this strategy flaunts the relevance, value, and benefits of your products and services to attract your customers.

So, while this marketing doesn’t scream the words, ‘Come and buy’ or ‘Use this product’, it lures you gradually into taking this same action but only through creating content relevant to your business.

I especially love content marketing because it caters to the needs of your audience at different stages of the sales funnel. Read more here. 

Be assured that your startup can blow by employing this digital marketing strategy.

3. Social media marketing:

Another effective digital marketing strategy that will cause massive growth for your startup is the use of social media.

Entrepreneurs underinvest in their social media platforms when utilizing blog marketing, content marketing, and SEO, which is a big mistake.

With the need to socialize and get entertained, humans will always be found on social media platforms. So, your startup can easily influence its potential customers on social media.

And the majority of social media platforms, if not all, are built to engage with people. Your social media platforms should give your clients access to the behind-the-scenes of your business, get an insight into your personality, and share their thoughts and opinions with you.

The trick here is to come off as entertaining, sociable, and interactable.

Technology has even made it easier by creating options to share your content across several platforms. This is something that you should use as an entrepreneur.

Several social media platforms are available for business owners, such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.

Note that you have to know your target audience and where they are mostly found before deciding which platform to use. And if you can be consistent across several social media platforms, all the better!

There are also several social media plugins you can use on your website that will help you integrate your content for social media.

Read more about social media plugins.

4. Email marketing: ​

After your startup gets a handful of customers, you will not be able to keep track of them directly, which is where email marketing comes in. 

Email marketing involves sending promotions, special offers, festival greetings, and discounts to your customer’s mailbox. You can also send congratulatory messages on special occasions like birthdays depending on which of your customers’ data you have in your database.

You create a mail list through several methods and start effective email marketing.

This strategy will help you build relationships and retain customers while maintaining your credibility and trust, which are vital for every startup.

These four digital marketing strategies are more than enough for your startup when effectively utilized.

When you use any digital marketing strategy, you must keep up to date with changes that are applied to them as technology keeps evolving. 

As a startup entrepreneur, it is easy to get intimidated sometimes. You tend to see the competition and wonder if your products and services can ever gain visibility. Always remember that the big competitors you see out there were once startups like yours. 

The ability to learn the best digital marketing strategies for your startup from this blog post will set you on the path to having massive growth in a few years.

Let’s get your business the online visibility it needs.

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