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What Startup Businesses Need to Know About Digital Marketing
One of the secrets you can take advantage of is using digital marketing to progress.
Have you started a new business? Do you have a new idea ready to hit the shelves or grace your local marketplace? Every new business is vulnerable to risks. You’ll need every edge you can get to make a success of your new startup.
Why is Digital Marketing Important for Startups?
Using digital marketing as a tool in your startup’s arsenal can reduce your marketing budget by a large margin. It can also help you generate leads, increase sales, and build brand trust and awareness for much less. This is the kind of benefit your business needs most at the start, so you can gain momentum and reach more customers without overextending your capital.
Traditional marketing is more expensive and less effective than digital marketing. You can also track results to keep improving your strategy when using digital tools, where much of traditional marketing is guesswork. As effective as it is, digital marketing is also vast and complex.
To get the results you want, you’ll need to use the tools available to you in a way that is effective. To start, you will need a digital marketing strategy. This strategy will guide your marketing efforts so that you achieve clear goals.
How to Create the Best Digital Marketing Strategy for Startups
1. Identify Your Audience.
A great strategy for digital marketing starts with identifying your target market. In the digital world, you want to identify the segment of your target market who are most likely to be the audience to your online marketing efforts. Who are you marketing to online? You can create an avatar that represents your typical target audience.
Think of all the details about this persona to whom you will market and write them Down as the first step in your digital marketing strategy. Details you can include would be their age group, location, employment, income, and hobbies. You can also include things like what problems your business could solve for this person and how they would typically behave online.
This step will help you figure out which platforms to use in your marketing and will guide many details in your planning, from your messaging to your imagery. If you start by researching and defining your audience, research shows that your efforts could be up to three times as effective!
2. Optimise for Search Engines.
SEO is the secret ingredient to online success. That’s because most users use search engines to find what they’re looking for. If your website can get to the top of search engines, you’re more likely to get more visitors. To start, identify keywords your audience is using online.
Keyword research can help you increase visibility online by discovering the probable keywords and searches your target audience carries out. Once you know what they’re searching, you can optimise the content on your website, so it solves your target audience’s problems. A good place to begin when optimising for keywords is long-tail keywords.
Startups can benefit most from long-tail keywords, or keywords that are more than three words because you are more likely to rank highly for long-tail keywords faster because there will be less competition. They’re easy to target because they show clear intent, and they also happen to account for more than 50% of searches. Businesses that operate in a specific location should optimise with location-specific keywords. You can also claim and update your Google Knowledge Graph and get some good reviews up.
3. Create Content Regularly.
Most online marketers create content for their business or brand daily, weekly, and monthly. You will need a blog that is updated often so you can rank well for your keywords. Buyers also tend to read three to five pieces before engaging with a brand.
Blogging is about more than just pushing out content. Relevance matters. Your content needs to be relevant to your target audience, and it should aim to answer their questions and solve their problems. Guest-blogging will also be great for your SEO, so don’t stick to just writing for your own blog.
4. Use Social Media in Your Marketing Strategy.
There are more than 3.3 billion social media users in the world, and many of them go onto their social platform of choice daily. Your target market is on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn today reading, engaging, and exploring. You can’t ignore this powerful tool when setting up your strategy.
First, determine which platforms your audience would most likely use. Moms are more likely to be on Facebook, for example, while teenagers may be on TikTok and businessmen on LinkedIn. Each platform is different, and to be successful you will need to research how to create content and engage on that platform optimally.
Figure out whether you will be using hashtags, how many, and which kinds. Work out what imagery and messaging you want to put out there, and what your goals are when using the platform. Goals can include engagement with your audience, brand awareness, lead generation, clicks to website, and other calls to action.
Social Media platforms have made it easy for you to engage directly with the people who are most interested in what you have to offer. Social Media has been shown to increase your direct and organic website traffic. Your social strategy should include content creation for specific platforms, community management, and paid social media advertising.
5. Use Emails in Your Marketing Strategy.
With emails, you can increase the returns on your investment into digital marketing. That’s because sending an email is cheap, and responses and engagement are high. What’s important with email marketing is personalisation. You want your subscribers or recipients to open the email and to click through to your site. Use buttons, linking, great imagery, and personalisation for more recipient engagement. If your email has a personalised subject line, it is 26% more likely to be opened.
6. Track Results & Adjust Regularly.
Is your strategy effective? With Digital Marketing, it’s easy to tell. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Facebook’s Business Advertising platform, and many other online resources to track the results of your strategy. You can see whether you’re hitting your goals, whatever they may be.
Are more people aware of your brand? Are more people engaging? Are more people visiting your website and ordering your product? All these goals are trackable. And when you see something isn’t working, you can change it. You can also troubleshoot any issues and fix problems on your website for better results.
The future of your business can only benefit from digital marketing in the right way. Your digital marketing efforts can really boost your business at its inception and in the first vulnerable months of its existence. If you execute a good digital marketing strategy well, you can reap the benefits of the digital world at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing! .
Steven Green
Sporty fun loving “Half IronMan” with self-acclaimed degree in Search engine optimisation & Entrepreneurship. CEO & Founder of Trafficfundi, P.tch Digital & Greenies Comics.
