Digital marketing on mass, requires lots of funds and time to provide tangible bulk returns, funds for startups is a difficult task at the best of times.
So, what should you do? Purple Yak have created a list of ways showing how to make digital marketing both effective and affordable.
One of the most affordable ways to market your startup is by using social media platforms. These are simple to handle, provide effective promotion, easy to operate, access to people on mass and customer service opportunities for startups.
Here is a list of things we recommend to implement in your startup or any business moving into digital marketing.
Establish a Marketing Strategy
First, you have to determine what your goals are as a business, know your limitations, how much time you may dedicate to this strategy, and what makes you different or better than your competitors. Once you have figured it out, this will enable anyone to be involved to be on the same page and resolve any issues that could come up within the business.
Focus on Long & Short Term Goals
Many startups believe they should grow fast without thinking long-term but this is a huge mistake. While it's true that you need to grow fast, thinking long-term will allow you to prevent mistakes and anticipate changes.
In terms of setting goals for the marketing plan of the startup, it is essential to think of the long-term objectives and goals because it provides everybody involved a target to reach and clear strategy to measure all actions against. This needs to be balanced with short-term attainable objectives that are aligned to your long term strategy, this will avoid your team and business getting lost with passing of time.
Build Your Brand Voice
You need to build a voice for your brand. Your voice will be the message you deliver and how you deliver it to your audience. The key is to deliver your message consistently and frequently sending out promotional messages and posts. According to research, it is effective to send between 5 and 10 posts every week to Facebook; once a day for LinkedIn and Google+ and 5 tweets daily to Twitter.
The voice of your brand needs to be present on every relevant communication channel and materials such as your emails, brochures, business cards, social media channels and offline marketing.
A great medium you could use to elevate your brand voice is Podcasting. You’re literally turning your businesses voice into reality, share value and your businesses reversibility will raise.
Track Customer Engagement and Progress
As your digital marketing campaign starts to bring in interactions and engagement with the startups, you may learn a lot through watching how things progress and what users like versus what they do not. When the startup gets a sense of what is going well in this regard, it enables them to adjust as required and implement CRO or conversion rate optimisations for you to maximise the campaign’s performance.
Online Presence
Online presence is more important and complicated than ever before. Promoting your brand is so important in a world where access to businesses is expected to be instant, online and store fronts are moving online as opposed to the high street. You’ll need to have a functional, well thought out website that allows you to engage with visitors, accompanied ideally by a blog and relevant social media accounts.
Creating a well-designed website as well as relevant images will help you shows up quickly with the searches. This will give you a great foundation for your digital marketing campaign. Next, focus on the structure and content of your site along with SEO because they’re crucial for website visibility.
SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a must for sustainability and longevity of success for your website. An SEO digital marketer can deliver organic growth through keywords, make your website mobile friendly to attract more customers, optimise all the pages of your website and ensure they’re properly tagged with descriptions or headlines.
Mobile Device Optimisation
Mobile traffic has surpassed desktop in a majority of developed countries so the importance of mobile device optimisation is key now more than ever if you wish to reap the benefits from your digital marketing campaigns.
Don’t Promote, Educate Instead
Simply promoting your startup will not keep your audience captivated, you need to be delivering value to keep them engaged. Put out information that’s mixed with promoted content to make your offering more attractive through raising awareness.
Interact With Your Visitors
Digital platforms provide users with choices to learn, research doubts and investigate queries. This is a great opportunity for you to interact and engage with potential buyers at a stage where they’re not quite in a buying stage. Providing guidance, advice, knowledge or recommendation will turn you into an authority in the prospects mind. give them with the opportunity to interact with you. This won’t only enhance your credibility, but also show your customer service capabilities.
Content is King
While developing your page content, keep some important things in mind including your target market, relevant in the industry, and existing customers.
Developing a content strategy and delivering against it consistently to engage your audience. Don’t talk about the features and benefits of the product you must instead talk about the benefits to the user in your content.
Content delivery can be your guardian angel but it can be your worst nightmare if you don’t get it right. There is a fine balance between delivering value and delivering your business message/products. Too much of your business message and products will lose the readers attention and potentially confuse the value they’re trying to get out of your content.
Be Reliable and Consistent
Social media is considered as the method for you to build the image of your brand. Post regularly but never overpost or deviate from the meaning of your brand. Experts suggest that the optimal number of the posts are...
LinkedIn: 1-2 a day.
Facebook: 2-4 times a day.
Instagram: 2-3 times a day.
Twitter: 4-8 times a day.
Work On Branding
Strong branding is key to foundational success and is often overlooked by startups. If there is one digital marketing tips for startups you don't want to overlook, it's branding!
Branding will help your business develop emotional connections with your clients and help you stand out from your competitors.
Developing your branding will take daily work and it isn’t a one-time piece of work. It needs to be implemented in every aspects and channels of your business.
Work on Your Landing Pages
Having compelling, engaging and high-converting landing pages is one of the top digital marketing tips for startups. I think most startups know that but they still don't spend adequate amounts of time and resource to develop them enough.
Whether you’re working on paid or zero cost marketing campaigns, you should have a landing page, which converts prospects into leads. Your land pages are the first point of the customers journey with your brand, it becomes imperative that you concentrate on delivering a good experience to them.
Let’s wrap this up
The majority of startups fail due to one main reason, their failure to execute a consistent marketing strategy.
Executing marketing for a startup on a shoestring budget is tough. If you can retain the costs of marketing down while making most of the best digital opportunities, you can quickly strengthen the visibility of your brand without needing a huge budget.
In the long term, you can't be cheap and always try to save money here and there. If you find a digital marketing tool, software or anything else that can save you time, don't hesitate to spend tour money. Time is not renewable and is your most valuable asset!
At Purple Yak, we specialise in helping startups, SMBs and entrepreneurs. So, if you want to take your digital marketing strategy to the next level, contact Purple Yak today!