Startup companies are in a unique position because they are agile, insurgent and can make decision very quickly to move things forward.
Digital marketing strategy for startups need to take into consideration the following aspects in order for them to succeed.
Email marketing
Reaching your email subscribers is one of the most cost-efficient way to promote your products and services. Startups does not have to worry much about investing a lot of money in this channel as compared to PPC or Display ads.
Start capturing email addresses using opt-in forms as soon as you launch your website. There are a bunch of email opt-in tools out there, i would recommend using Hubspot or Optinmonster to get started.
SEO
Most of the startups will have a website representing their brand online. While it is good to talk about products, services and other great offerings, it is critical to build trust and authority.
You can create fully optimized blogs, articles and video content that is highly relevant for your target audience.
By creating quality content, you can slowly start ranking for business critical keywords and start generating organic traffic to your website.
Use tools such as SEMRush to understand which keywords your competitors are ranking for and try to analyze their top performing content for that keyword.
Create a better content that has more research, data and relevant information and publish them regularly to start out-ranking your competition.
Re-targeting
Now that you have built a website audience, you can start install tracking pixels and re-targeting them on Facebook, Google and YouTube and other social advertising platforms.
Re-targeting is one of the best digital marketing strategy that a startup should implement as soon as they have a good presence online either via a website or a social media channel.
The cost to acquire new customers via re-targeting ads is much lower than other digital channels.
Re-targeting also helps to reach a “warm” audience as compared to cold audience. Warm audiences tend to respond better on ads and drive down the overall campaign costs.
PPC Advertising
Startups rely on solving business problems. They thrive, grow and scale due to the fact that they are able to solve business problems effectively as compared to other solutions in the market.
PPC ads let you target keywords that users search to research, identify and solve problems. As a startup, you can target this audience and bring traffic to your blogs/articles that share informative content.
It is not a good idea to start pushing your products as soon as they land on your site.
Here are some steps to effectively run a PPC campaign:
- Understand searcher intent – what are they searching and why are they searching.
- Conduct keyword research – Use SEMRush, Ubersuggest or SpyFu to find words and phrases that has good search volume
- Organize your campaign by creating multiple ad groups and ads.
- Create engaging and relevant ad copies.
Startups should set, measure and analyze the key performance indicators(KPIs) as soon as they have an online presence.
The above digital strategies will help achieve the business goals, benchmark which channels perform best and optimize the performance.