It is quite unfortunate that 90 percent of the startups eventually fail to sustain in the market. However, that never seems to discourage the entrepreneurs from choosing to undertake an impossible journey. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur who has just started his/her own company, you may need to prepare yourself for a countless number of challenges. At the same time, you will also nmeed to focus on the digital marketing strategy since it is your best bet for attaining your goal of turning your startup into a profitable business.
As you are running a startup, you may not have the option to spend a massive amount of money to engage a large number of audiences through paid promotion. The beauty of digital marketing is that it does not require you to spend tons of money, but it does offer you the results. Here are some of the most effective digital marketing tools that you should know about if you are willing to grow your startup in 2018.
You will be surprised to learn that more than 90 percent of the B2B marketers rely on their content marketing activities to generate new leads. In fact, those who are not using this marketing strategy have also shown interest in content marketing. The reason is very simple – content marketing works, period.
Since almost everything on the internet needs content as its fuel, putting up right kind of content at the right time and right place can do the trick which different forms of marketing efforts cannot achieve in months. Firstly, hire good writers on your team, and ask them to prepare fresh and remarkable content for your website. Since the landing page represents your business, you need to pay special attention to it.
Blogs, articles and visual content like videos, infographics and GIFs can help get the attention of new visitors when they visit your website. You can include these innovative contents in your content marketing strategy to get better results. However, content creation needs to be organized. Publishing random content is not going to bring any traffic to your website. You can either work on the trending topics or something that your target audience prefers to read.
Content marketing and Search Engine Optimization are two sides of the same coin. If you want your content to do well on the internet, you need to make sure it is optimized as per the requirements of the search engines.
Your writers may have written a great piece of content about how your product can solve a certain problem way faster than any other products available in the market. However, if that does not reach the right audience, the whole effort of content marketing will go in vain. In such situations, SEO comes to the rescue.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization allows your content to rank higher on search engine results page (SERP). Since most users choose to click on the links in the first page of their search results, it is absolutely important for you to make sure your content fulfills all the requirements to feature higher in the SEO rankings. This will help your brand become more visible to the audience and allow you to build a unique brand identity.
Social media marketing is another effective form of digital marketing that offers great outcomes in terms of ROI. Marketers are making the most of social media network, which is the easiest avenue to reach to a larger number of audiences. However, without a proper strategy, the results are never going to be satisfactory.
Firstly, you need to figure out which social media platform your target audience uses the most. If it’s Facebook, you can experiment with various kinds of contents including written posts, images, infographics, videos, GIFs, memes and a lot more. Twitter also offers the same opportunities, except there is a limit on the use of characters. If you want to appeal to the visual aspect of the visitors, Instagram and Pinterest are great places to share visual content.
Apart from engaging new prospects with enticing content through multiple social media platforms, social media marketing also provides you with the option to interact with the audience on a regular basis. You can use this aspect of social media marketing to nurture the leads and converting them into loyal customers.
While a lot of people believe that email marketing is dead, it still remains to be the most cost-effective marketing strategy accessible in this world of advanced technology. However, the old ways of spamming the customers with numerous emails don’t work anymore. Now you need to be much smarter with your email marketing approach.
An average office worker receives over 120 emails every day, which is way more than what he or she can read. If you want your email newsletter subscribers to read your mail, you need to level up your game. There are certain tricks that can help improve the open rates of the emails you sent. Tricks like a short and impactful subject, mobile-optimized mail content and call to actions are quite effective in this context.
However, what is more important in email marketing is to ensure that the number of subscribers never goes down. To keep that from happening, you should make the email content relevant to the recipients throughout your marketing campaign. Also, the content should be tailor-made for the recipients. Emails can be quite effective in letting people know about the services, products and latest deals of your business, only if you know when and how to send the mail.
SEO activities usually allow you to receive organic traffic from the internet. However, if you’re not pleased with the results, you may need to turn to PPC ads which will allow you to target high-traffic keywords. For instance, if you cater to the student community, and you are not receiving any traffic against the keyword “assignment help”, using a PPC ad for the link of assignment writing service may get you the traffic you are looking for.
These strategies are certainly quite expensive for businesses, but there are several platforms that offer budget-friendly deals as well. Facebook is one such place, which allows you to enjoy the benefits of PPC ads by paying just over a dollar per day. Even if it may cost a few bucks, it can drive a massive amount of traffic, which can definitely boost your visibility and improve your chances of engaging new leads.
- Press releases:
Press releases may sound like a conservative approach towards promoting your brand’s activities, but it actually works well in today’s digitally advanced world. This still remains to be the most inexpensive method to obtain brand representation in some major publications. In fact, you can also pick up a few inbound links along the way.
If it doesn’t interest you, you can hire a team to handle the press related stuff. However, if you don’t want to spend money on this, you can do important tasks like locating and contacting the press yourself. This will help you save some money and increase your network as you get acquainted with a number of reporters.
- Personal networking:
The people you know personally (even if you have met them only once in life) can be pretty helpful in spreading the word about your business. You can use the social media group and public forums to inform them about your products and services. Even if they don’t want that product, mentioning the name to them can do a lot of marketing without costing you any money.
There are a lot of communities that are active online. You can get in touch with them online and offer them a free trial of your products or services. If you cannot afford to give away freebies, you can think of other ways to involve a larger crowd. If it clicks, you will have a loyal base of customers.
There are several other ways to boost your startup, leveraging the digital marketing strategy. However, some of them can be heavy on your pocket and may not be fit for startup ventures. So stick to these aforementioned digital marketing tools, and watch your startup blossom into a larger brand in 2018 and the years to come.
Ammie Jackson, a dynamic HR exec based in the United Kingdom, works as a essay typer. She has a penchant for writing engaging blogs on marketing and HR trends when not helping students tackle their assignment woes like a pro.