When starting a business, it may be appealing to imitate the marketing strategies and growth hacking techniques utilized by established brands. However, this approach is often costly and not feasible. Big companies with substantial revenue can easily finance expensive marketing approaches like YouTube pre-roll video ads, billboard campaigns in major cities, or sponsoring popular podcasts with a large audience. Additionally, the marketing tactics employed by these companies currently differ from the strategies they initially used to acquire their first customers.
The first version of the Apple computer was presented by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to technology enthusiasts at the Homebrew Computer Club. Dropbox implemented a referral program where users could get 500MB of free space by inviting friends to the storage and file sharing platform. Slack used traditional word-of-mouth marketing, as early employees requested their friends to use the team communication app at their own companies.
To achieve the same level of success as these companies did in their initial stages, you must adopt a resourceful and determined approach, focusing on cost-effective marketing strategies for startups that effectively showcase your product to customers without significant expenses. Embrace a marketing strategy that encompasses various elements such as PR, partnerships, content marketing, and crowdfunding, enabling your company to experience exponential growth and generate revenue.
Digital marketing for startups with personas
In this post, you will come across numerous best practices. However, the most crucial one is likely the following: digital marketing encompasses two sides.
- Your business
- Your audience
Using marketing channels is the only way to connect your business to its audience and motivate them to take specific actions. Nevertheless, it is extremely challenging to market to an unknown audience.
The first step in digital marketing is creating buyer personas, which are detailed documents containing information about your ideal customer or customers.
Digital marketing for startups personas:
- Name
- Age group
- Job
- Income
- Location
- Solutions they need from your business
- How they research products online
- Their favorite social media channels
- Their favorite customer support channel
Once you obtain these details, you can concentrate on marketing channels that have a higher probability of generating positive outcomes for your business. Additionally, data indicates that utilizing personas can increase the effectiveness of your website for specific users by two to five times.
In order to effectively market a product or service, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the target audience.
Optimize your content for search engines
When your website appears in search results for the solutions you provide, you will attract more visitors. Consequently, converting these visitors becomes significantly easier as they are already interested in what you offer.
As a beginner, how should you begin with SEO?
In order to enhance your presence on search engines, the initial step is to conduct keyword research.
By conducting keyword research, it is possible to discover the specific terminology that your potential customers employ while searching on search engines. It is advisable for a new business to focus on long-tail keywords, which consist of three or more words.
Have a regularly updated blog
In order to assist your potential customers during the buying process, it is important to provide them with appropriate content. According to DemandGen Report, 47% of buyers prefer to view three to five pieces of content before interacting with a sales representative. To facilitate this, you can establish an editorial calendar to ensure consistent publication of fresh content on your blog.
Companies that consistently update their blog have the opportunity to increase their ranking in search engines and generate more leads. According to HubSpot, businesses that publish 16 blog posts per month obtained 4.5 times more leads than those who published between zero and four posts.
In order to understand, it is important to recognize that blogging involves more than just consistently creating posts. To effectively engage your audience, you must develop blog content that addresses their problems. Additionally, to expand your reach and enhance your website’s SEO, it is beneficial to contribute guest blog posts on websites within your industry, thereby generating more inbound links.
Engage your audience through personalized emails
Email is one of your best options if you want to connect with your audience on a personal level. The outcome is self-explanatory.
According to a study, it was found that for every dollar spent, email campaigns generate a return on investment (ROI) of $44.
Long-tail keywords possess three significant advantages when considered in a sequential manner.
- They have clear intent.
- They have low competition (and therefore it’s easier to get those top spots).
- They account for a large portion of searches.
According to Casie Gillette, four-word or longer search queries make up 50% of all search queries. Additionally, Neil Patel was able to increase Quick Sprout’s monthly search engine visitors by 173,336 using long-tail keywords.
If you have a local business, it’s important to optimize it for local search by uploading your business details to significant local directories and gathering customer reviews.
Personalized email marketing for startups
There has been a change in email marketing over the years, as it now requires sending personalized emails to subscribers in order to encourage them to open and click-through to your website.
If subject lines in emails are personalized, there is a 26% higher chance that they will be opened.
Get started with SEO marketing
An effective marketing strategy to enhance your search engine rankings and visibility involves optimizing the content on your website, not just limited to blog posts. This approach aims to boost website traffic, generate brand awareness, and increase revenue. To achieve this, it is crucial to comprehend your target audience and their search preferences so that you can create top-notch landing pages that appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) and successfully convert visitors into customers.
Tips for a startup business starting SEO marketing:
- Do robust keyword research: Think through the keywords your ideal customer might be searching—for instance, if you’re a VPN service consider landing pages that target keywords like “watch US Netflix in Canada”. Use tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMRush to find keywords and get information on search volume, difficulty, backlinks, and more.
- Improve your technical SEO: Ensure that your website loads quickly, your website structure is intuitive, your pages can be crawled and indexed, your URLs are short and descriptive, and your website is mobile-friendly.
- Develop a backlink marketing strategy: From guest posting to outreach, prioritize earning backlinks to your website to improve your domain authority and see improvements in your search results.
Build a social media marketing strategy
With numerous trending topics on Twitter and a busy newsfeed on Facebook, it may seem pointless for a startup to establish a social media presence. However, these popular platforms have millions, if not billions, of users, some of whom can be targeted through an effective social media marketing strategy. Utilizing social media has become crucial for businesses to expand their reach, create brand recognition, and effectively manage customer interactions.
Tips for a startup business building a social media marketing strategy:
- Embrace organic social media marketing: Use organic social media to share updates across social channels like Twitter and LinkedIn can build familiarity with your brand, provide a channel for prospective and current customers to reach you, and establish your positioning in public.
- Avoid social platform overload: As a tech startup, the photo and video based format of Instagram is unlikely to serve you early on. But Twitter, where there’s a thriving developer community, could be worth pursuing as one of your marketing channels. Speak to your ideal customer rather than attempting to reach everyone.
- Join the existing conversation: Use social media listening tools and search queries to track conversations relevant to your industry, and then join in to become a trusted voice.
