Digital Marketing Strategy Basics for Start-ups
When you are marketing a start-up, there are two fundamental truths. The first is that having only a great product will not be enough to guarantee that you will be successful. The second one is that if your product is crap, there is no amount or type of marketing that will gain you a mass audience. If you want your start-up marketing to be a success, you need to have both a great marketing strategy and a great product.
Here is a quick look at some of the things that you need to incorporate into your digital marketing strategy:
SEO
Are you aware that Google is used by more than 500 million people each day? For this reason, expert SEO services are something that should never be ignored by start-ups. The main strength of this is that when you have a product that people will be searching for, your website will be able to appear with perfect timing – right when they are looking for it. Remember that hiring a cheap SEO service will not really save you money. Search rankings work both ways. If you hire a service that is cheap because they take shortcuts or use black hat practices, it can end up costing you way more than what you bargained for.
Also remember that a promise of fast results should never be guaranteed. If they are, run…fast. Keep in mind that SEO will typically take a bit of time for it to work.
Social Media
A great way to establish a new business is through blogging and social media. Using blogs and social media can be a fantastic way to build your audience, create new relationships, and to have interactions with your target demographic. Creating content that is high quality and then marketing it works because of the fact that people will respond to the types of information that pertain to them. Most of the time, readers will even follow up with the creators of the content so that they can follow or subscribe in order to see additional content.
This strategy is one that is long term and can take as much as an entire year before you see a significant amount of growth. However, once you get past that point, you will have established brand awareness along with an immense presence in the marketplace.
Many times, start-ups will not track their conversions, making it extremely difficult for them to scale their results. When you don’t know what is working, how can you decide where to spend your money on digital marketing? One solution that is available to start-ups is Smart Goals by Google Analytics. This solution works to solve that particular issue by creating different purchasing personas from data that is collected anonymously.
Then, Google will determine what part of your traffic is high quality traffic. You will need to import your goals right into Google Analytics to utilize this data for your bidding on cost per acquisition. When you do it this way, Google will automatically make sure that your ads are shown to people who will be more likely to purchase from you while not going over the amount that you are willing to pay.
Budgeting
It is critical for start-ups that you determine your budget for digital marketing and then stick to it. If you have already been in business for at least a quarter, you can take a look at your historical data and find out what has brought you good results – or which channels brought in leads that were good but at a price that was low. You can also make the decision of whether or not to use paid promotions such as ads on social media that you pay for or AdWords. If you will be using paid promotions, determine how much of your budget will be used for each aspect of it.
This is where Google Analytics can help you – in the determination of which digital channels are giving you the most reach as well as the most conversions at the lowest rate. If a certain part of your strategy for paid promotions is not giving you the results you want, consider reallocating the money you spend on that to a different channel that is bringing you more positive results.
