11 Essential Digital Marketing Tactics For Startups
Startups are businesses that tap into a particular niche and follow growth-hacking methods to expand over time. They also seek to cater to their consumers and capitalise on the opportunities in the market.
Marketing for a startup is often quite different. It requires a combination of appropriate marketing channels to devise a strategy that best suits the business’ needs.
Traditional tactics may not work every time for startups, especially with a vast array of digital marketing solutions available to established businesses.
If you are building your startup, digital marketing provides an excellent opportunity through which you can achieve your business goals in today’s competitive market.
When it comes to digital marketing, entrepreneurs have a wide array of digital marketing channels are available, but not all give you the same results. That’s why you need to adopt a digital marketing strategy that best suits your business.
Importance Of Digital Marketing For Startups
New startups are launched every day and soon they have to compete with more established companies in a particular niche — often these companies have well-developed marketing campaigns.
startups often have a limited budget, which means they have to make the most of their capital to expand their customer base and generate revenue. Businesses that show up on the first page of search engines get 92% of the total customer traffic, according to a report published in 2019.
Digital marketing helps startups in a more cost-efficient manner instead of traditional marketing campaigns that are often quite expensive. A good digital marketing strategy is needed to create a new brand, generate traffic and retain loyal customers in the long run.
Undoubtedly, the biggest advantage of digital marketing for startups is that it improves communication between the brand and its target audience — mainly through online platforms. This is the reason why emerging entrepreneurs prioritise digital marketing initiatives to boost conversions.
Digital Marketing Tactics For Startups
While it is important for budding startups to understand the overwhelming importance of a concrete digital marketing strategy – it is crucial to implement one from the start.
Before we dive into the crux of the subject at hand, it is important to remember that your digital marketing strategy has a scope beyond the core components of online marketing.
Not only should it prioritise your target audience, it should also entail tactics to leverage different platforms to provide the best possible consumer experience in order to scale your organisation.
Build An Online Presence
Maintaining a decent online presence is vital for startups. Considering this, the digital landscape has many advantages to offer as it allows you to develop a brand image and lets you communicate with potential customers.
To promote your startup, you can begin with an interactive website with responsive web design to improve your business’ visibility on search engines. A compelling website design, with proper SEO integration, can provide long-term benefits in attracting organic customers.
Similarly, an informative blog, a dynamic corporate account on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube can maximise your online presence.
SEO Strategy
If you have created a mobile-friendly website and curated a content marketing campaign for your startup, tweaking your SEO strategy can help you improve organic traffic to your website.
SEO boosts a business’ visibility on the Internet and helps entrepreneurs generate a higher return on investments. A well-written content equipped with the best SEO practices i.e. keyword placement and backlinks will attract more visitors to your website.
61% of marketers choose SEO to improve organic traffic for their inbound marketing campaigns, according to a recent study.
Innovative Content Marketing Strategy
Startups need to focus on multiple digital platforms to grow. The most promising however, is content marketing.
With fierce competition in the digital world, content marketing is the best way to brand a startup for growth. A startup can establish a long-term relationship with its customers if it regularly posts quality and engaging content the customers may want to read.
Research suggests that a startup with an informative blog gets 126% more leads than a startup that doesn’t post quality blogs.
Educate Your Audience
Another tactic to employ is to educate your target population about your product or service. In the case of startups, you should aim to create awareness about the need for a product or service that your company offers. This helps establish a relationship of trust with the customers.
When customers have knowledge about the product’s features and limitations, it helps them make a better decision about their purchase — and that is what most visitors seek. This leads to customer loyalty and improves satisfaction in the long run.
Over 46% of marketers believe educating the audience about the need for a certain product can increase sales of a startup.
For startups, awareness can be created by hosting webinars and posting weekly tips or guides about a product or service through social media posts, websites, emails, or videos.
Target Your Customers
Reaching out to the maximum number of visitors may seem more attractive and convenient — but startups should focus on their target customer base.
If you do not narrow down to your specific target population, your brand’s message may be conveyed to irrelevant audiences with little to no interest in your offering.
So digital marketing efforts should be employed after thorough research with a pre-determined objective so that a startup can assess its performance and tweak the strategy as and when needed.
Therefore, it is wise to segment your audience in different categories and target them on the basis of gender, age, region or other attributes to maximise returns on your digital marketing campaign.
Deliver Exceptional Consumer Experience
Digital marketing lets you communicate and interact with your customers. To make them feel valuable you must engage with them. This helps build your brand’s credibility and shows your commitment.
A number of digital marketing tools are available that make it easy to engage customers. Additionally, you need to post unique and impressive content regularly, such as Q&A sessions, infographics and interactive images on your website or social media platforms.
59% of Americans believe good customer service makes them want to return to a business and trust their offerings.
Leverage Social Media Platforms
Social media continues to be the most popular and effective way to generate leads for both B2B and B2C startups. It has the power to transform any startup into a profitable business.
With a variety of social media platforms available at your disposal. Startups must use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to engage with their customers.
Social media engagement through polls and Q&A sessions helps build trust. A startup can target relevant groups in the niche to attract people looking for a certain product or service.
Email Marketing
It is another cost-effective technique to expedite growth and strengthen the relationship with existing customers. According to research, 81% of startups rely on email marketing to attract new customers, while 80% use emails to retain existing customers.
A well-curated email list of potential customers is a good place to start since it gives you a fair idea about your possible customer base for your business. You can build your email list through referral activities that are carried out on your website or social media page.
You can provide information about your products and services to the targeted audience. With regular newsletters, discount codes and testimonials pushed out through emails you can generate leads and eventually convert them to boost sales.
Create Your Brand Identity
A strong brand identity is vital for a successful product launch. Most startups make the dreaded mistake of ignoring to develop a brand identity. It is the key aspect of any marketing strategy that must not be overlooked, as it helps build emotional connections with the client, gives you a competitive edge and introduces your brand to potential investors and customers.
To formulate a brand identity, you must research your customer base and the surrounding market. This will help you communicate the qualities that set your brand apart from its competitors. The ability to then sell these unique products and services will bring in new customers.
Applying The Pareto Principle
The Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule states that: For any event, about 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes — which means that a small minority will have a superfluous impact.
Since most startups have limited resources, Pareto’s approach will help understand projects and activities that are most important in terms of business and require special attention. It lets startups stick to a strategic plan to expand and reach out to bigger audiences.
Track Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Building a startup can be a challenging task with frequent highs and lows. You need to focus on your long-term goals and assess if your business is headed in the right direction.
Many startups might rely on their instincts in running a business, but a successful entrepreneur depends on actual data to track his business’ performance.
To ensure your digital marketing efforts produce the desired results: You need to keep a track of total visitors on your website, generate more traffic from different sources, increase interactions per visit and reduce bounce rate.
The Wrap Up
Building a startup from scratch can be very challenging in today’s competitive marketplace as they have to catch up quickly with the established B2B and B2C companies in the niche.
Although traditional marketing is still relevant, digital marketing efforts have become more relevant as they allow businesses to achieve business goals quickly. It also proves to be less costly and convenient.
One can easily say that in order to establish a brand in the modern market, no business can succeed without a custom-made digital marketing campaign.
Small businesses recognise the importance of digital marketing efforts and the opportunities it holds for them in the short and long term.
More and more startups now invest in digital marketing campaigns to ward off competition, introduce a brand, and increase revenue by making use of these tactics.
So if you already run a startup or are planning one, we hope these tactics will help you establish your brand and achieve your business goals!
