Looking at the present scenario of the business market, it can be said that each day either a new brand gets launched or an existing business launches its new products or services. When a small business or a startup is launched, it is likely to face a great deal of competition from the existing brands.
Even if a startup brings unique or new products to the market, it has to ensure promoting its products efficiently and effectively in the market and grab the attention of the potential audience. This is where digital marketing plays an essential role for the startups.
Need of Digital Marketing for Startups
The growing trend of digitalization has made it necessary for almost all businesses to implement digital marketing in their business strategy. Digital marketing tends to act as a boon for startups and here’s the top reasons why your startup should embrace digital marketing.
Gaining an Understanding of Customers
Digital marketing is the best means for understanding your customers at present. It enables you to track and analyze the needs, preferences and expectations of consumers better. Social media gives you an opportunity to directly connect with your customers, responding to their queries and feedback. In a way, digital marketing enables you to set and focus on customer-centric goals and objectives.
Creating Brand Awareness
Your brand is completely new in the market and so, you need to make your target audience aware of your brand. The best way to increase your brand awareness is social media marketing. Yes! You need to invest some money and promote your page or advertisements.
Even if any customer does not make a purchase of your product or service, you should know that the campaign will greatly increase your brand awareness. People will come to know and talk about your brand.
Potential customers are searching for solutions on the web. Their first stop is the Google search engine; however, most users do no go beyond the first page to search for a solution. For startups building brand awareness is critical to rank on top pages of a search engine. It is your first and most crucial step to popularize your brand, your new website and product or service range. A focused Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy can help you narrow down your customer’s needs, provide valuable and link worthy content that helps to solve your customer’s problems, improve user experience on your website or ecommerce shop; and it can help you assess the improvements and changes needed on your projecting your services on the website.
Enhancing Brand Visibility
A digital marketing campaign helps new customers to learn about your business. If you are using video content marketing, then customers may get an opportunity to share your content with their network in the social media channels like Facebook. This increases your brand visibility on the web, thereby assisting your brand to grow.
90% of marketers confirmed that social media is important to their businesses, according to a Social Media Examiner report. And 89% of marketers indicated that their social media initiatives have generated increased exposure for their companies. Why should startups be left behind. Social is the second most important digital marketing strategy for startups. It is one of the most challenging and time-consuming tasks. But it is an opportunity for you to showcase your creativity, consistency and ability to understand your customers’ pain points, engage with them and build a strong community over a period of time. Once your authenticity is established, your loyal customer base with increase exponentially. Of course, patience and consistently is key.
Increasing conversions
This is one of the major benefits of digital marketing for startups. If your website or page contains videos and images, it is likely to drive traffic, thereby bringing users to conversion. By looking at the conversion rate, you can effectively measure the extent to which your digital marketing strategy is working.
As a startup you don’t have the luxury of time to grow organically which is slower and then generate leads. One of the most effective strategies is to use pay-per-click marketing to get sales-ready leads and more visitors to your site, faster. You reach customers based on their search phrases and needs. Driven by strong data analysis and insights, startups can sharpen their marketing strategies when they use Google ad campaigns. PPC campaigns so exhaust your budget quickly, but generate more clicks that can lead to faster conversions.
For accelerating your lead generation process, you can consider social media ad campaigns like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn ads, depending on where your target customer spends most of their time.
Improving Customer Engagement
You can efficiently improve and increase your customer engagement by using emotionally-appealing content or messages. Apart from seeking feedback and responding to customer queries, you can share their reviews in your page or website. Remember, the higher the level of customer engagement, the higher is the conversion rates.
Social media platforms may be daunting, but they are a great opportunity for a dialogue with customers. Facebook and LinkedIn Groups are great platforms where you can understand conversations, and engage with prospects with your point of view or solution.
Platforms like Twitter and Instagram enable you to connect, share, ask questions, interact with influencers and experts. When you create content that can ‘wow’ your customers you make a link, that can become a strong bond over time. Which platform to choose should be decided based on your target audience profile and where they hang out most. Social media is time consuming so, choose your platforms wisely.
Free webinars, Live streams, custom content and interactive content like polls & surveys, quizzes & tests, assessments, contests & promotions, and interactive infographics are some of the effective engagement tactics.
Saving Costs
Contrary to traditional means of marketing, the digital marketing strategies and tools are extremely effective in lowering your marketing costs. Since startups do not have strong support of financial resources, digital marketing is the best strategy to save your costs.
Startups can engage with prospects with literally zero or minimum cost to create brand awareness. All they need to invest is creating high quality content, unique solutions, and their valuable time. Some of low-cost digital marketing strategies startups can adopt are:
- Email marketing campaigns
- Social media marketing
- Free zoom/ online webinars, live streams, consultation
- Blog/ Vlog or Podcast
Easy Tracking of ROI
You do not have to wait for the digital marketing campaign to end for tracking your Return on Investment (ROI). You can easily review and track ROI during the campaign. Even you can make changes or increase investments if you find that the campaign is working well.
Top 10 metrics startups should focus on
- Number of daily active users and monthly active users
- Inbound Website visitors and traffic
- Website Impressions
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Monthly Active Users (MAV)
- Brand Searches
- New Signups
- Qualified Leads
- Time on Page
Digital marketing enables you to use a wide range of data coupled with sophisticated tools to analyze customer segments and their behavior, identifying opportunities and predicting future actions.
