The perfect way to build your startups business is to follow solid digital marketing techniques.
Growing a startup is incredibly difficult, and if you don't have a plan in place, you might end up wasting time and money on the wrong things.
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In this article, you'll find detailed instructions on how to use digital marketing to expand your startup business.
Everything you need to do to succeed with digital marketing and increase the visibility of your business online is covered in the techniques listed below.
Top digital marketing techniques for startups
So here are the most effective digital marketing steps to follow in order to expand your startups:
- Develop your website and brand
- Make use of social media advertising to raise your brand popularity
- Create a content marketing strategy
- Begin with email marketing right from the first step
- Do advertising on Google and Facebook
- Run retargeting campaign
- Invest adequately in search engine optimization (SEO)
All these steps I've mentioned, I am going to explain in detail for you, so that you should be able to implement them by yourself.
1. Develop your website and brand
Establishing your online presence and developing your brand is the first stage in any digital marketing strategy.
A successful online business must have a strong brand. In its search results, Google adores showcasing businesses, and customers enjoy following and interacting with them.
Implementing these suggestions can help you begin branding your new business:
Design your logo
You should create a logo that communicates your brand's story because it will be used everywhere (website, social network sites, browser icons). A logo symbolizes your brand's identity. It doesn't need to be very intricate or beautiful, but it must set your business apart from the competition.
Develop a website that properly reflects your brand
Create your website as the next significant step. Although many people would consider this to be a no-brainer, many entrepreneurs actually miss it or don't give it the proper consideration.
As the center of all your digital marketing campaigns, having a website is crucial.
You'll attempt to increase website traffic, email list signups, social media following, and ultimately sales of your services and products through branding and marketing.
While a startup company's website doesn't need to be sophisticated, it does need to effectively represent your brand. A website is the "front door" of your company, therefore don't forget to be proud of it.
Whenever you start creating your website, make sure to follow the following guidelines:
Pay attention to your homepage - It needs to be very clear about who you are, what you do, and how your services or products may assist others in resolving an issue.
You can talk about your achievements, objectives, and mission statement, but it's more crucial to talk about how you can assist your potential customers.
Use hierarchical structure - It's crucial to have a solid site structure for both usability and SEO reasons. The depth of your website's hierarchy should be at most three layers, and your homepage should link to all of your key pages.
Legal pages - Apart from the products and services pages of your business, you need to have legal pages such as: About Us, Contact Us, Disclaimer, and Privacy Policy pages.
Mobile Friendly & Page Speed - A modern company website runs quickly and is responsive to mobile devices because the majority of your visitors will likely be using mobile devices.
In addition, you should choose a design and layout that is user-friendly and displays attractively.
2. Make use of social media advertising to raise your brand popularity
The next stage is to hop on the social media marketing bandwagon and start developing your brand awareness after getting your website ready and securing your social media presence.
Brand awareness is just one of the advantages social media marketing has for entrepreneurs. In fact, it's the best digital marketing technique for promoting your company's name, products, and services.
So how to promote your brand using social media platforms:
Facebook- To increase your Facebook followers, adhere to the instructions provided in this article. It's the first stage in creating a community around your company to have a lot of followers, which significantly helps social proof.
Since organically increasing your Facebook followers base takes a lot of work and time, you may regrettably need to set aside some money for this. However, you must do this, especially in the beginning.
Make customer personas and select your next network. Make customer personas and choose your next network- All startups need to be on Facebook, but not necessarily on every other social network.
After you begin using Facebook, the next stage is to develop consumer personas, determine which social media platforms your target customers are most likely to use, and join those.
For instance, Instagram and YouTube are excellent platforms to use if your target audience is made up of persons between the ages of 20 and 30. On the other hand, if you are going after executive managers, LinkedIn will be a better option for you than Instagram.
It's crucial to realize at this point that maintaining an active presence across all social media platforms can be overwhelming, particularly if your budget and resources are small.
Include the networks that are most likely to achieve greater outcomes in your digital marketing strategy.
Ensure that all your social media pages are active- you must make sure that your social media accounts are active till you go on to the next level, where we'll show you how to develop a content marketing strategy to provide content for your social media networks.
By active, we imply that the content is current and fresh. It's possible that people who find your website or brand will also visit it on Facebook, so keep it from appearing to be inactive.
Make sure your posts aren't overly promotional as a general rule. Users aren't interested in your accomplishments; they're more interested in how using your services or buying your products will help them.
2. Create a content marketing strategy
Contents marketing is creating, distributing, and promoting relevant content to a targeted online audience.
To me, As a startups businesses, content marketing is crucial in digital marketing because it gives so much brand awareness.
You may create content for your social media sites, website (blog), paid advertising, and SEO by developing a clear content marketing strategy.
Create a content marketing strategy by following these steps:
1. Analyze your market and identify your target audience.
2. Set up your strategic objectives and plan your actions.
3. Create relevant content and optimize it before publication.
4. Disseminate your content through the right channels.
5. Finally, analyze outperformance to improve your strategy.
3. Begin with email marketing right from the first step
Integrating email marketing into startups businesses plays a vital role in the digital marketing world because it will help you gather a lot of subscribers that you have control over them.
By the time you reach this stage, you ought to have a fantastic website, a brand presence across all social media platforms, and a content marketing plan in place to create articles for all your needs.
The next step is to begin considering conversions and sales, which is when email marketing may come into play.
You may create a community of people who are interested in learning about your business and its products through email marketing.
These people are more likely to convert, or to buy one of your products and become clients if they freely sign up for your email list.
This is similar to social media marketing, right?- Not quite. Email marketing differs from social media marketing in that you own the data and may use your list any way you see fit.
To provide your subscribers a more individualized experience than social media platforms, you can choose to contact each subscriber personally or divide your list into different groups.
The good news is that email marketing is still a powerful sales tool, therefore it's best to start expanding your list as soon as possible.
In order to begin email marketing, You must:
1. Sign up with an email marketing platform- there are many email tools you can start with such as Mailchimp, Convertkit, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, MailerLite, etc.
But I advise you to start with HubSpot or Mailchimp and if you experience some difficulties in operating it, you can go to Youtube and search for their channels and watch the tutorials.
2. Offer incentives to those who signed up for your list- Simply adding sign-up forms to your website is enough. Incentives (such as freebies, ebooks, discounts, and deals) are quite helpful in attracting new subscribers to your list, which is something you need to figure out how to do. See how to collect email addresses from every angle.
3. Set up a marketing automation campaign- Email marketing has the advantage of being completely automated. Email marketing will therefore provide leads and sales for those who work with the other digital marketing channels for the expansion of their startups business. So the same thing applies to you.
4. Do advertising on Google and Facebook
In digital marketing, paid advertising is the quickest way for a startups business to increase traffic and sales. It's not the only approach—as we'll see below—there are others as well (consider SEO), but this one is the quickest.
All networks include advertising platforms you may use to market your products and services, but Google Ads and Facebook Ads are the most well-known and successful and that's what we are going explain to you below.
How to use Google Ads to Expand your startup business
The platform to use for Google Ads (previously known as Google Adwords) is to advertise on Google search, on other Google products like YouTube and Gmail, and to the millions of websites that take part in Google AdSense.
You can choose which keywords you want your ads to appear for in Google search results, which makes Google Ads a very effective channel.
Because Google Ads is a PPC (pay-per-click) system, you only have to pay when someone clicks on one of your ads.
The cost you pay is determined by a number of variables, including the level of competition, the popularity of the keywords, the country, the device, the effectiveness of your ads, and many others.
The fact that Google Ads is an auction-based system should be noted. Google will conduct an internal auction when a search is done to determine which ads to display above the results.
As one who is starting up a digital marketing business, you have to pay attention to investing your money into Google Ads. Here is what we have discovered:
1. Losing money on Google Ads is very easy - Although the general structure is extremely appealing if you don't know what you're doing, you'll likely lose money rather than earn it. In Google ads, there is a lot of optimization work to be done; if you lack the requisite skills, it is best to leave this to specialists.
2. When selling high-profit products, Google Ads performs better - Google Ads should not be used if your profit margin is small. If your margins are too small, you won't make any money. When estimating your net profit per sale, you must account for the cost of items sold and the costs associated with advertising.
3. Always begin with a small budget - Don't use your entire budget right away when you first start using Google Ads. Always begin with a modest budget to give the system some time to get to know your campaigns and potential clients, then increase it gradually.
How to use Facebook Ads to promote your startups Business
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Facebook reigns supreme among social media platforms with more than 2.5 billion active users each month. In addition, it's a fantastic sales tool and fantastic for raising brand awareness and connecting with your audience.
In other to make sales with Facebook, you need to use their paid advertising platform, which is called Facebook for Business.
You may make paid advertisements and target Facebook and Instagram users with Facebook for Business.
Contrary to Google Ads, you can segment audiences based on their interests, demographic information, and location. However, you cannot target people based on what they search.
You need well-defined client personas and a variety of Facebook campaigns to replicate the traditional marketing sales funnel if you want to use Facebook advertisements efficiently.
Facebook has a user base that may be divided into the following categories:
- Cold audience - users that are not familiar with your company or your products.
- Prospect - People who have already visited your website or Facebook page.
- Lead - People that engaged with your Facebook advertisements or page but are not yet consumers (liked, shared, commented).
- Customer - people who have previously bought from you and have a Facebook account.
You can use several campaign styles and ad copy types for each group of users to move them from the awareness stage (cold audience) to the consideration stage (prospects and leads), and finally to conversion (customers).
Take look at this image below:
The good news is that Facebook allows you to segment people into audiences based on the activities they carry out on your website and on Facebook, allowing you to target each audience with a customized set of advertising and messages.
In order to promote your brands and products to the first group of people (the cold audience), you usually show them advertisements.
You will run advertisements highlighting the advantages of your products for the second set of people (prospects).
You can provide deals and offers to the third group, the leads, to influence their decision to purchase your products or services.
Customers in the fourth group can be kept interested in your brand by receiving cross-selling and up-selling campaigns, as well as updates about new products.
5. Run a retargeting campaign
You can use retargeting in addition to Google Ads and Facebook to pursue website visitors who came to your site as a result of an advertisement but have not yet made a purchase from you.
Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is incredibly efficient and can increase sales at a lesser cost because people are already aware of your brands and items.
Retargeting options are available in both Facebook and Google Ads, and testing them is recommended.
Retargeting campaigns typically perform best when you offer users a unique promotion or a short-term discount.
The scarcity principle, which has been successfully applied in traditional marketing for years, primarily uses offers and limited-time discounts.
6. Invest adequately in search engine optimization (SEO)
The following digital marketing techniques have been applied thus far:
- Website marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Google Ads advertising
- Facebook marketing
- Retargeting
The most effective digital marketing strategy, SEO, is absent from the list (search engine optimization).
In order to rank higher on search engine result pages, your website must be optimized for SEO. More focused search engine traffic means higher rankings for your new business.
Before we get further into SEO, allow me to clarify why I added the most crucial channel as the final one in the whole digital marketing strategy.
Having built and worked with new businesses, I am aware that when you initially start out, you want to find strategies to obtain results as quickly as you can and avoid having to wait months to acquire your first visitor or customer.
While SEO is by far the best approach to increasing your website's visibility on Google and receiving free visitors continuously without having to pay for advertising, it takes time to become effective.
As a result, the proper method to approach digital marketing for your business is to first focus on the channels that may provide you immediate traffic, such as paid advertising, and then simultaneously develop and begin implementing an SEO plan.
Do not misunderstand, if your SEO is not effective, you will not be able to thrive online.
The advantages of SEO are many:
- It promotes trust and brand awareness.
- It can increase visitors without requiring you to make monthly payments for advertising.
- Organic traffic converts better than any other form of traffic
- SEO is good for social media as well
- SEO will guide you in creating a better website
- SEO is the secret to eluding your competitors.
How to use SEO to grow your startups business
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There are strategies to use SEO to generate constant business growth even if you're not an SEO guru.
Take the following steps:
Begin with technical SEO - Technical SEO focuses on making sure that your website's technical foundation is correctly optimized for search engine crawlers.
This step will make sure that whatever you post online can be viewed by crawlers without any problems.
Work on your On-page SEO - On-page SEO refers to methods you can use to improve search engines' comprehension of your content.
Making your content more user- and search engine-friendly includes things like using keywords in your content, optimizing your page names, and providing meta descriptions to your pages.
Promote your website Off-pape SEO - Off-page SEO focuses on strategies for promoting your website online and influencing search engine algorithms that it deserves to be at the top of the search results pages (by accumulating backlinks).
Your website will be found on Google if you take the aforementioned actions and constantly focus on content marketing (i.e., providing content that readers desire to read). Then, everything else will get simpler.
Then, as your traffic and sales continue to increase, you can progressively cut down on your advertising spending and devote more funds and efforts to SEO and content marketing.
Final thought
Digital marketing for startups is nothing new, but it's a procedure to follow if you want to expand your startup company using all of the web channels that are available.
Making a website to promote your startup is the first step in getting things started.
Make a polished website that loads quickly and looks excellent on desktop and mobile devices. Make sure visitors to your homepage can tell who you are and how you can help them.
The next step is to create a social media presence and register your brand name across all platforms. Make sure your profiles are optimized, then add a few posts to your pages.
Decide what to publish, when to publish it, where to publish it, and who will create the content as you work on your content marketing strategy. Since this is a continuous process, be sure to develop a practical plan.
After that, build up your email marketing automation campaigns and collect email addresses. To make the most of your email list as soon as feasible, you must accomplish this early in the process.
You must invest in advertising if you want more people to see your content, website, and offers.
The actual quantity is determined by a lot of factors, including your budget, the cost of goods, the pricing of your goods or services, your target market, the level of competition, and many more.
Spending money should not be done carelessly; instead, you should regularly analyze your campaigns and continue doing so as long as your return on investment is positive.
If your paid campaigns start to lose money rather than make money, you should cease them and redirect your funding to other projects like SEO.
Not all networks require you to launch paid campaigns. Promote your business on the networks that are more appropriate for your audience.
Last but not least, make SEO work for you by taking whatever steps are necessary. Either hire internal SEO experts to handle the job or hire experts to handle it for you.
In digital marketing relying only on paid traffic strategies is a mistake that many startups make because it's too risky and inhibits growth.
When SEO starts to create the majority of your revenue, you can predict your growth and expand your startups into a profitable business.