Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Five Stages of Business Growth (25-slide PowerPoint presentation). This presentation introduces a framework for entrepreneurs to use when building and navigating their business from a nascent, startup state to an enterprise with a global footprint. This framework, called the 5 Stages of Business Growth, is based on the fact that all businesses experience common [read more]
4 Best Digital Marketing Strategies for Startups
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Digital marketing is a great way for startups to reduce their advertising costs while improving their reach at the same time. However, not all digital marketing approaches are equally effective. To help you choose what’s right for your startup, below, we list some of the best digital marketing strategies.
If you’re running an eCommerce store, you might want to enter into a partnership with well-known influencers. This way, you can increase your brand awareness and reputation at the same time. If your startup has a minimal marketing budget, you can effectively promote yourself using social media sites or well-written blogs. You can also maximise your profits by using email marketing to remind your customers about attractive sales and loyalty discounts.
Read the tips below and make your digital marketing effort more effective than ever before!
Partner with Influencers
Partnering with a well-known influencer is one of the best digital marketing strategies you can use.
An influencer is a person with a large social media following who can promote your brand to their audience. However, before approaching an influencer, check if they’re in line with your brand image. If they post content that could be seen as controversial, it may reflect poorly on your business.
It’s also essential to ensure the influencer has a large audience that matches your target market and possibly your area of operations. You’ll gain much more from a video titled “Where to buy nangs Melbourne” if it’s released by an Australian food influencer than if it’s made by a fashion influencer from Canada.
Finally, check out the influencer’s engagement rate – this will give you an idea of how much their followers care about their content.
The price of partnering with an influencer depends on several factors, including their number of followers, engagement rate, and influence level. Generally speaking, you should expect to pay more for partnering with a famous influencer with a large following than a micro-influencer. However, it’s important to remember that even an obscure influencer can still generate a lot of attention if they have a highly engaged audience.
Use Social Media Platforms
A good move for small businesses is to promote their brand on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The main advantage of this approach is that it allows you to reach a large number of potential customers at little to no cost.
In addition, social media are great for building relationships with customers and creating a community around your brand. Finally, they can also provide valuable insights into what your customers want and how you can better serve them in the future.
To make sure your posts get seen by as many people as possible, you need to post regularly and create high-quality content that’s relevant to your target market. You can create videos, infographics, and GIFs for your social media feed to improve engagement. You should also try to include relevant hashtags and post during times when your target audience is most active on social media.
Create Compelling Blog Posts
Creating compelling blog posts works really well for both small businesses and large corporations. This approach has several advantages. First, it helps you build authority with customers; and second drives traffic to your startup’s website.
In addition, blog posts can promote sales and special offers as well as provide valuable information about your products or services (though they shouldn’t be all about direct marketing). Finally, well-written blog posts can also improve your website’s search engine ranking, making it easier for potential customers to find you online.
If you’re worried about the quality of your blog content, you can hire an SEO content specialist or agency to create it for you or hire such a professional in-house.
Use Email Marketing
Email marketing is a very effective digital marketing strategy because it allows you to reach a large number of customers with no effort at all. Once you have a template ready, you can simply change vital information such as names or offers but leave the rest as it is.
Email marketing works great with a loyalty program in place. It’s very simple to create an aura of exclusivity – your most devoted clients get emails with better discounts or other benefits than the rest of your customer base.
To get the most from email marketing, you need to make sure your emails are sent on a regular basis. You can easily automate your email marketing campaign by using a dedicated email marketing automation tool. This allows you to schedule your emails in advance, so you don’t need to worry about forgetting to send them.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many digital marketing strategies that can help you promote your startup effectively. Influencers, social media, blogs, and email marketing are all great ways to reach a large number of potential customers.
However, it’s important to remember that no single approach is guaranteed to be successful – you need to experiment with different strategies and see what works best for your business. Fortunately, these digital marketing solutions either don’t require money to try out or aren’t prohibitively expensive (some influencers might be very eager to enter into a partnership with you and won’t ask for too much, or you can come up with a sort of mutual exchange). As such, you have much to gain and little to lose! Good luck!
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The Lean Canvas is an adaptation by Ash Maurya of the Business Model Canvas. Four building blocks were replaced with new ones with the aim of making the canvas more startup-oriented. The adaptation emphasizes importance of clearly understanding the problem the customer faces.
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About Shane Avron
Shane Avron is a freelance writer, specializing in business, general management, enterprise software, and digital technologies. In addition to Flevy, Shane's articles have appeared in Huffington Post, Forbes Magazine, among other business journals.
