Digital marketing strategies for start-up companies
Having online visibility and attracting customers online is fundamental for any new business. As there is a lot of competition, startups need to have effective digital marketing strategies to deliver short, medium, and long-term results. Let’s detail the main techniques that give good results.
- Plan your digital marketing strategies
Before we get into the detail of the tools and techniques that a new business can use for its online marketing, it’s important to remember that strategies need to be planned.
- Five key elements
What are the objectives of your online marketing strategy? Who do you want to target? What media or channels are you going to use? What financial and human resources do you have available for this purpose? What deadlines do you set to achieve these objectives?
You should know how to accurately answer these five questions before you start dedicating time and money to your digital marketing. Planning will allow you to optimize your resources and obtain better results.
- Professional help
A company’s digital strategy is an increasingly complex task that requires time and knowledge. Therefore, as with other necessary aspects of the business, it can be interesting to have the help of professionals. For example, PaperHelp company focuses primarily on crafting custom academic works.
A couple of digital marketing strategies
- Your website
The first step in a digital marketing strategy is your company website. It has several important features with multilingual websites.
- High performance at the technical level
It is essential that any user visiting your business website has a good experience. From a technical point of view, that means fast loading, no connection errors, and no crashes. For that, you’ll need good web hosting and a technically well-built website, whether it’s developed from scratch or uses a CMS like WordPress.
- A nice design
It won’t do much good if your website is fast as a rocket if it looks archaic and looks like it was created in the late nineties. User tastes are gradually changing, but some trends stand out, such as a clean style, with neutral and discreet photos, hidden menus, and a greater presence of images and videos than text.
- Optimizing the user experience
It is also essential that the page is optimized to maximize the quality of the user experience (UX) and increase the conversion rate of visits into sales. A very important facet in digital marketing consists precisely in a continuous improvement to optimize the website, both at the general level and the landing pages.
It is better to convert 20% of 1000 visits than 5% of 3000 visits. However, too many companies are obsessed with traffic when sales matter. What good would it do you to have a store in which hundreds of people enter every day if they buy almost nothing?
Digital marketing strategies with immediate results
All three techniques have a cost, but they allow you to start selling from minute one, which is why they are so interesting for startups.
- Search engine advertising
You already know that when we talk about search engines, we usually talk about Google. Therefore, in this case, I am referring to hiring the Google Ads service so that, within the sponsored results, some reviews appear that lead users to your website.
It is an auction system. You allocate a budget for your advertising, and you choose some keywords to appear among the results when users search for those specific terms. If you have little competition, you will pay little money for each click. If you are in a very competitive niche, the price may go up a lot.
- Advertising on social networks
I’m going to use the example of Facebook Ads, but in this case, you have more options, such as Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, or Youtube, for example. Again, you allocate a budget for your campaign. You don’t choose keywords, but you can segment your target audience with geographic criteria, demographics, or users’ interests.
- Use affiliate systems
This is an interesting strategy that takes advantage of the potential of other media to achieve sales. What is done is to reach agreements with these media to promote the company’s products. If a customer who has come through the media buys, a commission is paid. These are automated systems with tracking codes that use cookies. In this case, it is crucial to find media with an audience that could potentially be interested in the company’s sales proposal, such as a comparison website or similar.
Digital marketing strategies with medium and long term results
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Instead of paying every time someone clicks on one of your ads on Google, it is much more profitable for a page of your website to appear among the first organic results of the search engine, simply because Google considers its relevant content.
To achieve this, it is essential to optimize the website technically and create great content designed for the user experience but optimized for SEO. It is often a good idea to create a blog on a topic related to the business, as it will allow you to create articles that can be optimized according to some of the most relevant searches for your niche market.
- Creating a community on social networks
Having followers on social networks allows you to maintain a conversation with them without paying for advertising. One example is Facebook pages. If you publish quality content, you will get people to “like” and share it. That can allow you to reach new customers. However, Facebook’s current algorithm has greatly reduced the reach of publications, intending to make you pay to reach people.
- Manage the opinions
When your business has been running for a while, it is normal that you start to receive customer reviews. They can leave them on your business listing on Google Maps, on your Facebook profile, or any sectorial page (Tripadvisor for the hotel industry, Trustpilot for all types of services).
It is important to be aware of these comments to respond to customers, solve problems, and prevent negative opinions from damaging the image of your business.
- Email marketing
Another technique that works very well in the medium and long term is email marketing. It collects emails from people interested in what you sell, with all the guarantees of the data protection law, of course. Then, you start periodic communication with these people, with a balanced frequency, so they do not forget about you but do not feel overwhelmed.
It is a technique that usually gives very good results in terms of conversion, as long as you have captured the mails of an audience that may have a real interest in your products.
Measure the results of your digital marketing strategies
To finish this article, I have to tell you that it is essential that you measure the results of your strategies. If you did your planning well, you would have clear objectives, and you will be able to compare your results with the numbers you had set. Measuring is the only way to see what works and doesn’t and make changes.
Every business is different, and a digital marketing strategy that works very well for one company may not have good results for yours, and vice versa. You will have hits and misses, but in the end, you will improve precisely because you will have learned what works.