How to Improve Online Presence for Start-Up?
10 Ideas and Tactics that Actually Work.
Are you new to the startup game, and even newer to the digital marketing game?
With all the work that goes into starting a business, there's little time to think about marketing strategies that prove successful and are feasible for a startup's teams to execute.
If you find yourself in this boat, don't panic. You probably know the tools that are helpful for startup marketers to use when strategizing - a designer website, social media accounts and a CRM to manage your leads.
Now, what you need to know is how to use these tools, and similar methods, to create campaigns that align with your business goals. You may have seen other startups' glowing marketing techniques and found yourself wondering how to create a winning strategy.
Here are some of the ways you can build a winning startup digital marketing strategy designed to lay the foundation for future success.
10 Digital Marketing Strategies for Startup
- Create a buyer persona for each product/service category
- Define your SMART goals to focus on business-critical success factors
- Have clear, compelling messaging
- Distribute your content to where your customers are
- Run digital advertising for short-term results (search & social media)
- Integrate your lead generation activities with marketing automation
- Measure and improve your marketing campaign
- Establish and cultivate your online reputation
- Build referral marketing activities
- Always plan A/B testing for your marketing activities.
1. Create a buyer persona for each product or service category
A buyer persona is, according to HubSpot, a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It's based on market research, actual data about your existing customers, and a few (educated) assumptions. It helps you to understand and relate to an audience that you want to market your products and services to.
2. Define your SMART goals to focus on business-critical success factors
Defining these parameters as they pertain to your goal helps ensure that your objectives are attainable within a certain time frame. It will be used as a guide during the setting up of your advertising objective in the various advertising platform.
3. Have clear, compelling messaging
A compelling message resonates with the audience's values and beliefs. It is designed to help the audience solve their problems, achieve their goals and dreams, and meet their needs. It uses words and explanations the audience understands and finds relatable. You can use it in the creation of an advertising campaign.
4. Distribute your content to where your customers are
A content distribution strategy is a plan that helps an organization disseminate its content, whether it's promoting the latest blog post or sharing a new ebook. Publishing content can only take you so far; a content distribution strategy makes sure that content is seen by your audience.
5. Run digital advertising for short-term results (search & social media)
Digital advertising is the practice of delivering promotional content to users through various online and digital channels. It leverages mediums such as social media, email, search engines, mobile apps, affiliate programs and websites to show advertisements and messages to audiences.
6. Integrate your lead generation activities with marketing automation
Nurture your leads using the Marketing Automation platform to optimise your time. Marketing automation is the process of leveraging software to automate repetitive marketing tasks. Marketers use this software in order to help nurture leads, often through integrations with customer relationship management (CRM) and customer data platform (CDP) software.
7. Measure and improve your marketing campaign
Advertising effectiveness helps you determine if your ads are hitting the mark with your target audience, and whether you're getting the best returns on your advertising investment.
8. Establish and cultivate your online reputation
Your brand's online reputation is constantly evolving and being re-defined by every social media comment, review, and blog post. When someone discovers your business, they make judgments and buying decisions based on this content online.
9. Build referral marketing activities
Referral marketing reduces your sales expenses and sales cycle. With less time cold calling prospects, your small business can focus on customers and their circle of influence. Referrals can build your level of satisfied customers.
10. Always plan A/B testing for your marketing activities.
A/B testing is a user experience research methodology. A/B tests consist of a randomized experiment with two variants, A and B. It includes the application of statistical hypothesis testing or "two-sample hypothesis testing" as used in the field of statistics.