Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Startups

by Startacus Admin

Having a strong digital marketing plan will help your startup stand out from the crowd. To get you started, here's some useful tips and tricks, from Nicolas Finet, co-founder of sortlist, covering many of the key elements of online marketing.

"Creating and running a startup is an exciting job, especially in the first few months of business or when you’ve just landed your first investors. But, with thousands of new businesses everyday, it’s clear that you need to come up with a way to set yourself apart from the competition.

Having a strong digital marketing plan will help you stand out from the crowd. To get you started we’ve put together some useful tips and tricks, which cover these important elements of online marketing:

• Online Marketing Basics
• Content Marketing
• Web Page Marketing
• Analytics
• Online Marketing Basics

1. Remember Pareto's Principle

80/20 is a golden rule in life and business - it’s said that for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. When it comes to marketing your startup bear this in mind as it will save you from wasting your time and resources.

Be selective with your channels and only choose a handful of them when getting started in online marketing. Once your activities are underway, you’ll soon see the effectiveness of each channel and you can assess from there. Invest more in the methods which are working for you and pull back from those which are not generating as much traffic.

2. Invest in Marketing Tools

There are alot of incredible marketing tools available online and no doubt you’ve been utilizing the free ones up until now. If your startup has recently been funded, you should take the plunge and start investing in premium tools as they are much more powerful than their free counterparts. Whatever problem you’re looking to solve, whether it’s SEO, project management, analytics or customer acquisition, there’s a tool for you.

3. Create Your Brand

Now that you’re starting your marketing activities you need to think about your brand’s communication style. Sitting down and fleshing out your brand’s personality will help you identify your brand’s voice. Once you’ve gone through this process coming up with a tweet, instagram caption or even a blog post will become a lot easier. Having a clear personality and voice will also help prospects and customers develop an emotional connection with your brand and set you apart from your competition.

4. Create an Exciting Company Culture

So, your startup is off the ground and your staffing budget may only be on a shoestring right now, but hiring may be on the cards sooner than you might think. Finding the right people who fit the role and the company is a difficult task, you need to encourage great people to join your company before positions are open. A great way to do this is to show that your company is an exciting place to work and have a following of people who aspire to work with you.

Brainstorm and assess your company culture as part of your branding and make sure it fits with your overall brand. How can you represent your company as a great place to work?

Most startups have a nice team page and some even have a dedicated staffer blog. Another great way to engage people is to encourage your team to interact with your company on social media and share the work they’re doing.

Having this public dialogue shows that your employees are happy and engaged at work, creating positive perceptions about your company that will reach your employees’ wider network and will lead to word-of-mouth marketing.

Social Media

5. Increase Your Reach

Statista estimates that in 2018 there are currently 2.62 billion users on social media, with users increasing rapidly year on year.

It goes without saying that social media is a great tool to increase your visibility and reach new people. If you don’t have company accounts on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter yet, what are you waiting for?

To gain traction and reach new people, create posts that resonate with your customers and provide value to them. This is sure to get the likes and shares you need to grow your reach.

6. Run a Competition

Hosting contests and giveaways is an effective way to grow your startup’s following and get people to your website. Entice people with a prize and they’ll be heading over to your landing page to find out more about the competition, as well as clicking around your site to learn more about your company.

Content Marketing

7. Explore Different Content Types
If you’ve spent time on the internet in the last couple of years then you’ll know that the humble blog post is no longer king. From videos to infographics, and from case studies to downloadable PDF’s, there are a huge number of ways that you can create and share content in order to get more people to your website. In fact, a recent study found that an infographic can increase web traffic by 12%.

Remember that the point of the content is to increase sales or leads, so making sure that your content is relevant to your business will encourage prospects to learn more and buy from you.

8. Create Great Content
Content marketing is one of the best ways to generate organic traffic because it does wonders for your SEO. In fact, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads. However times are changing as gone are the days of stuffing blog posts and pages full of keywords just to get a higher rank on search results pages.

Google and many other search engines are now focused on user experience rather than the number of times a term appears on a page. Writing high quality and engaging content not only pleases search engines, but it’s also a great way to engage your audience and position your brand as an authority within your niche.

9. Build up Your Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is the kind of content you can go back to again and again, making it a major time and money saver. This type of content is great to promote your new company at any given time. Whether it’s a blog post breaking down a problem in your niche, or a seasonal promotion, if you write the content in a way that’s of value to your customer and that isn’t time relevant, you can use the same content again and again over the years.

Web Page Marketing

10. Landing Pages That Convert
We can’t stress enough how crucial it is to have well-designed landing pages with effective copy. Especially if you’re marketing strategy is focused on paid marketing campaigns on Facebook or Google. Don’t just leave your landing pages to run on autopilot though, set up A/B tests to find out what elements convert more prospects into paying customers.

11. Use Popups
It’s well documented across the web that popup forms work. For example, this blogger went from 40 to 350 email subscribers per day just by adding a popup form!

If you want to accelerate the growth of your email list, remember to follow best practices. Use popup forms in a smart way which doesn’t annoy your customers - a great tactic is to offer a freebie in return for your visitors’ information.

And if all else fails,

12. Hire a Senior Digital Marketing Resource
If you can’t make heads nor tails of the digital marketing sector, don’t worry as there are thousands of professionals who can help your startup.

Hiring a professional will certainly help as you won’t be overwhelmed by the size of the sector and you’ll be able to work together to create your strategy. Be on the lookout for a Senior Digital Marketing Resource with 7 to 10 years experience, and who is well-versed in major channels like SEO, SEM, Social Media Marketing. Ideally, they’ll have a great working knowledge of analytics and will have worked with startups before.

Lastly, Let’s Look at Analytics

The most important takeaway from all of these tips above, is that whatever you choose to do in your strategy, you need to be analysing data so that you can see what is and isn’t working. There are many tools available online which will help you do this.

It can be daunting to look at data across multiple platforms so make sure that you have a clear plan of what you want to measure. It’s also important that you understand the differences between platforms like Google Analytics and Facebook. Here are some simple tips to get started:

13. Measure What Matters
Everyone who visits your website is on a customer journey ,whether they’re a new prospect or a loyal customer - your prospects are making their way through the sales funnel.

If you’re seeing a lot of traffic come through but not many sales, you can turn to your analytical tool of choice to see what’s happening. This is incredibly useful information that you can then analyze in order to make necessary changes to the various elements of your website.

14. Show the Same Data When Reporting Across Platforms
At some point in the future you’ll probably have campaigns across multiple different platforms. If you want to compare your campaign performances then you need to ensure that you’re measuring the same thing. It gets tricky to do this as different platforms have different ways of reporting, so spend some time making sure that your comparison data is the same.

15. Google Analytics Limitations
Google Analytics is one of the market leaders with 57.2% of all websites using Google Analytics - it’s clearly an amazing tool. However, it does have it’s limitations so don’t trust the data blindly. Take some time to learn about the quirks of the platform before you start using it’s numbers. An example of this is a problem with the Facebook attribution as many businesses have reported that Facebook and Google Analytics data don’t line up. Discrepancies have been reported to be anywhere from a 10- 80% difference on Google Analytics compared to Facebook’s own analytics platform.

We’ve covered a lot above - each of the points being worthy of a blog post of their own - but, this run down of the basics should help you get off to a flying start when it comes to devising your startup’s digital marketing strategy."

Author bio:

Nicolas Finet is the Co-founder of sort-list.co.uk – an online solutions company which helps customers to find the best marketing agencies. Follow him on Twitter @nifinet!

Email: nicolas.finet@sortlist.com

 

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• #
• #analytics
• #online marketing
• #blog content
• #social media
• #marketing plan

Published on: 21st April 2018