If you have a small brand or business, implementing a good startup marketing strategy is the key to making it grow, increase customer acquisition, get more sales, and more money. But a good marketing campaign is difficult to build. You need to keep in mind dozens of factors and steps.
But don’t worry, in this startup marketing strategies guide, you will discover the best practices regarding this topic. You will learn the following:
- How to market your startup;
- How to develop your strategy;
- How to connect with your target audience.
Define Your End Goal
Source: Slideteam.net
To be successful in life and business, it’s mandatory to have an end goal and a plan to reach it. So, at this point, in necessary to ask yourself:
- Do I want to increase my number of followers?
- Do I want to generate high-quality traffic to my website?
Questions like those will give you an idea about the aspects you need to focus on in the strategy.
Having clear specific objectives, step by step will save you time, money, resources, and attract early adopters.
What goals do you hope to accomplish over the next year? Three years? Five years? When you have a clear end goal, you should use metrics to gauge the success or failure of your marketing strategy.
Determine Your Target Market
Source: nimdzi.com
Satisfied customers are the cornerstone of any successful brand since the goal is to sell as much as possible of your product or service.
But, do you have an idea about who these customers are? Do you know the age, gender, style of life, or preferences of these target people?
You must define your target customer so you can structure your marketing strategy and valuable content to meet their needs. Let’s take a look at some ideas of industry experts you can adopt to identify your digital marketing strategy audience:
- Identify the basic demographics of your target customers, such as their gender, age, and location.
- Learn how to relate to your audience by analyzing their personalities and/or purchasing behavior.
- Establish your brand’s message following your research.
Set a Budget
Source: financesonline.com
As your business is a startup, you probably have a limited budget for your goals.
Your business’ marketing plan can be expensive and needs more resources, which is why setting a budget is important.
Fundamentally, you know the total cost of your operations, as well as the marketing budget you have at your disposal.
You’ll know how much money you have to spend on different marketing methods, and you’ll lower your chance of overspending.
When you set a budget and then run your media marketing campaigns, you will be able to measure ROI (Return on Investment). This metric will help to compare the profit you have received with how much you spent. Thanks to this comparison, you can find out if your efforts are worthwhile.
Even knowing that your startup campaign lost money, or has a negative ROI, is valuable info to help you make necessary changes in your marketing strategy.
Social Media
Source: smartinsights.com
As you can know, the number of people who open accounts on social media increases day by day. For this reason, it makes sense why you should be on all social channels. In this regard, a general social media marketing campaign will provide you the opportunity of pointing to different users through different gateway.
Each social media channel is different, thus your approach should be different for every channel. Also, your end goal will define which social media networks you should address.
Companies, either smaller or bigger, are always trying to cover new social media right channels, but the top social media ones currently include:
- Parler
- Yelp
As you know, building an entire business in addition to a specific marketing campaign may take a lot of time, thus to have a simple business profile in every social channel is an interesting option to consider.
Referral Program
Source: cleveroad.com
Referral marketing is one of the best paths to develop a huge group of followers very quickly. This is a basic one that allows current and potential customers to promote your product, app, or game.
It’s a simple concept, but it isn’t used enough by most of the startups you can find on the web.
An interesting metric about this says that 92% of consumers trust the word of mouth and/or personal recommendations over traditional marketing strategies.
The idea here is that you keep more customers excited to share the news of your startup with their friends and promote it heavily.
One piece of advice: do not build a referral program from scratch. It’s better if you use a great tool to facilitate your market research. Boyapowa is a powerful tool in this regard as well as Ambassador to drive traffic and get new leads.
These platforms will take advantage of the hard work that other companies have already done in terms of managing the details, allowing you to focus on creation and promotion.
Build a Website
Source: safaridigital.com.au
Every serious and strong brand or business has a site and a landing page through which they can expose their products and/or services.
Did you know that 97% of people use online search engines to find a business? For this reason, it’s relevant your brand has a strong presence on the web.
We know building a website may take a long time, but all the marketing efforts you do in this regard will pay off.
Once you have built your small business webpage or platform and your business grows, you can start to use the analytics to monitor the website traffic. This data will help you understand how to update your website to help potential clients find it when they search.
Otherwise, your website needs to be continually updated and have fresh content. It’s advisable to create a blog page that responds to specific questions of your visitors.
A piece of advice: Start recording baseline metrics to compare future growth with the current one.
Create a Blog That Converts
Source: expresswriters.com
This point is strongly related to the previous one. But, building a good blog post that converts is a really hard task. The main reason is that most companies write about what they want their clients to read, rather than writing about what their clients want to read.
For instance, Corsair.com is a brand that sells PC gaming products that, at the same time, has a very interesting blog about PC components. This way, the company attracts new users interested in its products.
Talking about formal aspects, to create a truly successful blog, you should write at least 100 great articles. What’s more, every one of these articles must have, at least, 1,000 words.
With this experience, you’ll not only have a good understanding of what works, but also each article will be driving high traffic and a few sign-ups each day.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is likely one of the most efficient marketing for startups strategies you can use to increase your brand awareness, visitor, and conversions, with some sources claiming a return on investment (ROI) of 400 percent or more.
The strong point here is to create a good database built through organic strategies rather than bought lists. Also, to send a steady but non-invasive stream of outgoing email blasts.
Thanks to new technologies, nowadays you can automate the process of sending emails according to customers’ preferences. For example, the software in charge of sending these emails will send a personalized message based on user behavior.
Email marketing is ultimately a pursuit to send the right message to the right people at the right time. Marketing automation is a perfect procedure to scale this.
But, do you know what makes a good email?
An email is not just about writing clickable lines and creating a good template design. It’s more about creating a good product that your audience wants to find in the email box.
A good question you can ask yourself before sending the email is: “would I want to receive this email?
Note. Make sure to experiment with different frequencies of emailing. Comparing the open and click-through rates over time is the only way to know what works and what doesn’t. Also, remember to be careful not to be overly promotional in your email.
Press Releases
Press releases are an inevitable and inexpensive way to keep and raise brand awareness of your business. Thanks to press coverage, your new business can be mentioned in major publications, giving you inbound links along the way.
Press releases can provide you with a strong online presence at minimum cost, even free. Anyway, consider creating a PR department or having a PR professional in charge of this job.
SEO
Source: Spriteit
If you are going to spend a lot of time working on your blog’s articles, you should pay special attention to the SEO traffic.
You have heard about Search Engine Optimization, but you don’t know what exactly it is?
SEO integrates many factors that can determine the organic traffic of your website. But don’t worry if you don’t know anything about SEO. With a bit of reading, you will understand the basics of this organic marketing activity.
SEO works mainly through keywords, which are the concepts that searchers use to find things on the web. On the Internet, dozens of platforms can help you find the main keywords to create relevant content for your topic and attract thousands of visitors. Some of the tools you can use are the following:
- Semrush;
- Google Keyword Planner;
- Octoboard.
Beyond this, a good SEO strategy will propose a determined structure for your articles involving headings, images, and keyword density. It may require a lot of work, but your only cost will be time if you do it yourself.
Forums and Groups
Although forums and groups may sound a bit old-fashioned, these types of media still have their utility. The idea here is that if someone is asking a question, you can respond by promoting your startup.
It’s relevant that you’re involved with the community. This way, you will obtain more responses.
Best of all, it usually doesn’t cost anything to become a member of these communities so that you can reap the benefits with nothing more than a few hours of your time.
Measure Your Results
Source: slideteam.net
Last but not least, measuring search results is a more than important stage to gauge the success or failure of your strategies. Let’s take a look at some of the questions you should ask yourself:
- How is your audience interacting with your brand online?
- Do you have high conversion rates and low bounce rates?
- Are your Instagram posts driving more engagement than your Facebook posts?
- Are you getting some revenue or benefit from your campaign?
In other words, assess your strategy’s performance to identify areas of improvement.
How often you measure your results depends on the metric you want to measure. Probably, you will need to check some metrics daily (such as the number of visitors and leads), whereas other metrics can be measured weekly or monthly (such as new vs. returning visitors, and cost per acquisition).
After measuring your results, don’t be afraid to modify your marketing plan if needed. Your marketing strategy should evolve with your business, no matter what its field is.
Conclusions
We know that marketing a new business is not easy. To finish this article, we’ll mention some extra tips that give your startup a good chance of reaching new users:
- Pay attention to Earned Media Marketing including public relations (PR) as a marketing channel.
- Create ads on social media networks to let people see your brand and recognize it.
- Use paid media if you have enough marketing budget.
- Leverage the user-generated content to boost your presence on the web.
Good news! If you’re struggling with marketing strategies, GamerSEO can help you to promote your startup and get your ideal customers. Of course, we’ll conduct hundreds of new users to your landing pages. Trust in us, we’ll do all the work for you!
We’ll develop your strategy, measure your core metrics and take the best decisions on your behalf, giving you proper feedback. Contact us and leave us your contact information! We’ll get in touch shortly.
FAQ
How Do Startups Advertise?
- Send emails.
- Post on social media.
- Write a blog.
- Use paid targeted ads, Twitter ads, Linkedin ads, and others.
- Sponsor an event.
What Are the Best Marketing Strategies for a Startup Business?
- Lay the foundation for startup marketing.
- Develop a marketing plan.
- Develop a social media marketing strategy.
- Build an earned media marketing startup strategy.
- Create content marketing.
What Is a Startup Marketing Strategy?
A startup marketing strategy is a plan that fits a startup’s budget and promises quicker growth than traditional strategies. In general, startup strategy involves organic and paid advertising and SEO.
All rights reserved. Copyright 2021.
SEO specialist with over four years of professional experience. A/B test and Data-Driven SEO enthusiast. In his work, he focuses on the development and implementation of a strategy that achieves predetermined, specific goals. Privately, a fan of mountain biking.