You have a great business idea; you have the passion and you have the products. The key question is, how do you get through to customers to make them aware about what you have on offer and explain how your products will help them and make sales? Sometimes, the passion you have for your product will make you think that it will sell itself and everyone will just love it, but reality is far from it.
If you do a quick google search for ‘online marketing strategies for startups’ and spend 30 mins reading the top few articles, you will know that you need to optimize your content for search engines, use social media to spread the word, and invest in paid advertisements. While all this sounds straight forward, it’s easier said than done.
The brand
A product is not a brand. As a young, small-scale startup, the first step is to build a brand. You need to invest in building a visual identity and a tone of voice that extends your vision and evokes emotions in your target audience. That is, you need a powerful brand name, logo and a tagline as the foundation of the online marketing strategy for your startup. Once you have that established, you need to align your online presence; everything from content and copy to sign and visuals on your website and your social media platforms with your brand identity.
Keywords
Next step is to find out the keywords for your business. Keywords are essentially the phrases that people will use to find your product or solution. Run your keyword list through Google analytics or a similar keyword planner to find out the monthly search volume, competition and the cost per click (CPC) and filter the ones you want to spend your energy on.
Know your customers
Knowing your customers’ needs is the best way to reach them. You need to know who your customers are, what makes them tick and why they buy. Next, use that information to hyper-target your audience through powerful, valuable, reliable and impactful content because there is a significant difference in how each audience takes, interprets and digests your content. A starting point is to do thorough research on demographics, psychographic and behavioral data of your preferred audience and build buyer personas to use as the foundation for your content and all online marketing efforts.
Set your goals
It is easy to lose focus unless you set measurable goals. As a founder, you need to write down what you want to achieve in the first three month, first six months and by the end of the first year. Success means different things to different people. Define your success by setting realistic, specific and measurable goals for the short term and the long term. While its temping to go after many types of goals like building awareness, improving profits, growing sales, enhancing customer retention, given the limited resources, you should prioritize and pick 2 things you want to focus on in the short term and align your resources accordingly.
Social media marketing
The fast growth of social media has made it clear that these platforms should be part of any brand's primary marketing channels. As of 2022, More than half of the world's population uses social media now (Smartinsights, 2022) and Almost 45% of internet users research products on social media (Hootsuite, 2021).
Social media marketing is not about building audiences and posting regularly. We see many people dive into social media marketing without much of a strategy, because social media has essentially become an extension of us. What many don’t realize is, social media marketing for a business is a different game altogether which requires well planning and immaculate execution.
As a new business, the initial struggle is to build a relevant audience without an extravagant budget. When we say a relevant audience, it’s not your friends and family. You need followers who will one day buy your product or service. To attract a relevant target audience, you need to publish content that is worth their time using content types they prefer. This is why your marketing strategy has to be centered on your audience.
In a 2021 HubSpot Blog poll of 1,000+ global marketing professionals, 85% of marketers rank short-form videos as the most effective type of social media content in 2021.
Website
With many cloud-based website development platforms such as WIX and Wordpress, building a website is quite easy, but attracting visitors is where it gets tricky. Again, content marketing and paid advertising plays a crucial role in luring relevant people into your website. One way to bring visitors to your website is to share quality blog posts that are relevant and give valuable information. Your blog posts should address pain points of your customers and should include your keywords in a meaningful way, not just placed randomly to get attention.
Google Paid ads is another good way to gain traction if you have good content. Google Ads generates the highest ROI when it comes to online advertising (Neil Patel, 2021). Create campaigns based on CPC analysis to drive visitors to your website and improve conversions.
End of the day, there is no overnight success story. Marketing requires dedication, knowledge and a lot of hard work! Start with a results oriented, data driven online marketing strategy to take your startup to the next level.