A Strategic Approach to Digital Marketing for Startups

Introduction

The success of a startup firm depends critically on its digital marketing capabilities and associated actions.

In an era of omnichannel marketing and big data, digital marketing helps not only in acquiring customers but also in customer retention. More than creating a single sale, the real target is to create loyal and happy customers.

Remember: Brand advocacy and positive word of mouth marketing will always bring you more customers.

According to a survey by Campaign Monitor, out of 1000 start-up businesses, 78% said that they want to invest more in digital marketing.

The challenges for today's start-up marketers are plenty, particularly when trying to figure out the correct digital technologies to implement legacy systems amidst the dramatic transformation of the marketplace and business models.

Adopting a strategic approach to digital marketing for start-ups helps them start with the right moves to optimize customers' experiences and work backward to implement apt MarTech solutions for the same.

Modern startup marketers looking to optimize their digital endeavors should more than ever seek answers to the following questions:

Who are the customers constituting the ideal personas that they want to serve?

What are the needs of their ideal personas that they want to satisfy?

How can they work for producing superior customer values for their customers?

How can they provide better competitive value?

In this blog post, we unveil approaches to strategic digital marketing for start-ups which will help them stay competition-focused, and pioneer their ways to attract, delight, convert, and retain customers.

Let's explore!

1) Work on the Democratization of Your PR Strategy

While framing your PR strategy to make the most of the era of digital transformation, marketers need to focus the most on customers' reactions to their products and thereafter, they can focus on their stakeholders and on the reaction of the press to their pitch, in that order.

Media presence not only helps in improving your brand resonance but also helps you accomplish your business goals.

The startups should follow the following steps to strengthen their PR strategies:

Put your best foot forward by optimizing your designing and messaging techniques on the business website as well as on social platforms

Focus on content marketing and steady flow of content on your targeted external platforms, as well as, on your 'owned' channels

Optimize your content for SEO using tools such as SEMRush and Moz

Showcase yourself on discovery sites such as ProductHunt or StartupRanking.com

Pick up your media channels in accordance with the preferences of your target audience

Start building relationships with industry influencers and editors

Increase your reach by flaunting your subject-matter-expertise

Host events to build media relationships

Offer interesting content, that engrosses the attention of readers

Reach out to the journalists who already have a background in your sector

Managing expectations and planning your PR strategies for the future will allow your startups to grow their digital footprints and reputation over the period of time, to accomplish the bottom line business ambitions.

2) Email Marketing

As startups, your email marketing strategy requires thoughtful planning which can give your businesses a competitive edge.

Running both email marketing campaigns and newsletter campaigns is an inexpensive and effective way to optimize your business revenue.

Start with building an email list for your business and make it a priority

Email marketing can drive revenue for your business

Introducing a sales funnel in your email marketing

The balance of freemium and premium

Building third-party revenue streams

Hooking users with subject lines help in improving the email open rate

Reeling in users with header pretext gives users a chance to engage readers

Use automated email marketing campaigns to improve your brands' messaging capabilities: you can use welcome emails, replenishment emails and abandoned cart emails to achieve success with your email marketing campaigns

Customize your email marketing campaigns and improve their appeal to your audience groups by using:

A/B Testing, and

Targeting and Segmentation

3) Pay-Per-Click Marketing (Google AdWords)

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing uses Google search engine advertising to bring visitors to the website.

PPC is a powerful marketing tool that helps generate sales-ready leads.

PPC advertising offers practical advantages including:

Addressing what problems your business is solving

Collaborating and learning valuable digital marketing skills along the way

PPC campaigns improve the search engine visibility of your advertising campaigns

4) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization techniques have evolved a lot, especially after the outbreak of a pandemic.

SEO is a difficult ball game particularly for startups, nonetheless, the startups need to compulsorily invest in SEO to grow their businesses and to test, measure, and optimize their digital endeavors:

Align your SEO strategy with your business goals. Depending on your business goals you can tweak your SEO strategies to get the quality traffic for your website

Implementing the right SEO strategies can help you make more profit, revenue or ROI

The right SEO strategies can help your brand equity

You can get high-quality target leads with the right implementation of SEO strategies

SEO does wonders for improving your business longevity and promoting customer loyalty

SEO can help you optimize your content strategy by finding the right keywords for your website, blog posts, guest posts, podcasts, videos, images, tools, and web apps and lead magnets

SEO helps you in link earning which in turns improves the credibility of your website as you're able to link your website from authoritative sources

Optimizing and fixing your technical SEO issues make it easier for the website to be properly indexed and rank well on the search engines

Addressing the SEO requirements along with website maintenance can boost your startup game plan and can help you optimize your conversion goals.

5) Develop an Effective and Agile Content Strategy

Your content strategy should be agile with an effective content plan which includes goal setting and resource allocation for each goal.

Developing an agile content strategy requires you to follow the steps below:

Come up with a content marketing strategy and define your goals

Assemble your content marketing teams including your marketing strategists, content writers, editors, designers, videographers and analysts

Pen down your mission statement

Assure that your content marketing goals are SMART - Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely

Develop your ideal personas and audience groups based on demographics, psychographics, challenges, pain points, and other customer preferences and triggers

Establish what types of content you want to promote and determine your promotion channels whether:

a. Organic Search Channels

b. Email Newsletters

c. Organic Search Channels

d. Third-party distribution

Develop your content calendar

Distribute and market your content on right social media channels

Define and measure your content marketing metrics and KPIs and take adequate steps to optimize your content strategy

6) Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is more important for startup marketers than ever before.

Using your social media channels in the right way equips you to attract relevant and high-quality traffic, engross, and convert your target audience groups to finally drive more down-the-funnel conversions to optimize the business bottom-lines of start-ups.

The following are some social media marketing tips for startups:

Identifying the best social media marketing channels

Focusing on target market groups

Participating in live video streamings

Creation of visually appealing pieces of content

Focusing on mobile optimization and other trending stories

Unleash the advantage of AI and virtual reality

Track data and create engaging social media marketing (SMM) campaigns

Leverage influencer marketing and A/B test your campaigns

Build a community around your brand and share coupon and sweepstakes

Build a community around your brand and use social media to improve your customer service

Identify best timings to post and follow the top accounts of your niche

Develop relations and not followers and stay active

Applying the above tips will allow your startup to grow more prominently as you use social channels aptly to market your startup by keeping your target audience in focus.

7) Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing can immensely benefit startups to widen their reach and engagement.

The power of influencers helps marketers tap into a larger base of target audience groups. Influencers know how to sell and they can help your brand in building much-needed trust and authority.

A powerful influencer marketing strategy requires the following steps:

Tracking your business goals and KPIs

Relationship building with influencers

Getting to know your influencers, and

Designing and planning your campaigns with the influencers

Influencer marketing thus, helps startups and brands have a significant increase in market share in a comparatively shorter time.

8) Omnichannel Marketing and Retargeting

In an era of the Internet of Things (IoTs) and omnichannel marketing, it is imperative for startups to provide seamless digital as well as physical channel experiences for startups.

Omnichannel marketing and retargeting ads help brands in defining their future marketing strategies, driving brand awareness, and generating quality leads that can ultimately help your company grow.

Retargeting helps marketers and advertisers focus their digital marketing endeavors and dollars to users who have already engaged with their brands.

With the help of their omnichannel marketing and retargeting endeavors, the marketers can build a strong and reliable community, engage audiences with their email lists, and can employ their resources for digital brand building.

Wrapping Things Up

The startup brands need to understand that the first requirement for success in business is to understand the requirements of the customers and to tailor their efforts to meet those requirements.

Therefore, a strategic approach to digital marketing for start-ups requires customers to be the center of the organization and marketing to be the center of the business.

Brands need to comprehend that targeted digital marketing costs them significantly less than mass media and other conventional forms of advertisements and helps them establish their presence in the marketplace; which in turn helps them in acquiring new customers, retaining them, and converting them into long-term customers.

Valasys Media is a well-renowned name in helping B2B clients broaden their marketing reach by optimizing their digital marketing endeavors with the help of an array of services including lead generation, lead nurturing, account-based marketing, list building services, contact discovery services, content syndication services, event promotion, appointment setting, business intelligence, and CRM services.