Starting a business is not an easy task. A great product won’t sell without marketing, and neither stellar marketing would be able to sell a poor product. In this competitive digital era, businesses should aim to keep a great balance of both in order to succeed. Keeping the product aside for now, marketing is a big challenge for startups indeed. It is not the same as stable companies would do so. Startup marketing requires exploring different horizons to find the best fit; many traditional marketing strategies fail for emerging businesses. You have to identify who and where your customers are, and then target them towards sales.
In this article, we will outline the essentials for startup marketing.
Vision
Every business has a vision. This is the reason which you strive to achieve. It is essential for startups to clearly state what they expect to become in the future. Having it documented then helps in aligning the mission and goals of the company.
Keywords
Once you have the vision outlined, you can select the relevant keywords you would use for marketing. These keywords play a vital role in all of content marketing. When it comes to increasing traffic on your web presence, these keywords would play an integral part. The key to identifying keywords is to create a relevant list and then match with tools such as Google Trends to figure out which ones are more commonly searched. The combination of the two will then help you create a targeted list, which you can use for blogging and SEO for the website you create.
Social Media Marketing
Social media has the power to reach out to people at a minimal cost. An average person spends about an hour daily on these platforms. If you are aiming for B2B sales, Twitter is the platform that is more likely to be used, while Facebook for B2C. Depending on the nature of your business, the platform you choose is key. The advantage of social presence on Twitter and Facebook is that you get access to the right segment of the market, and can advertise at a very low cost. Content marketing is key here. You must figure out after a few trials the sort of content which receives most feedback, the time of the day people engage the most, etc. These will help you align your content strategy, and you can then create graphics and post accordingly. Moreover, social platforms also help in marketing outside the platform, such as Web Conversions and Re-Marketing. These features make Twitter and Facebook a powerful tool to drive traffic directly to a company’s website.
Landing Pages
Web presence is essential for all businesses. If you are opening a restaurant, developing a software, or starting an education institute, in this modern era, websites are a must. If you are a business and don’t have a website, you are losing out on many opportunities you could benefit from. You need to reach your end users, but what if your end users hear about you but have no means to connect with you? This is where websites come in; to provide information about what you are offering with a complete control on design.
But, this is something that everyone knows. The catch here for marketing is that, you can use landing pages on your website when driving traffic from social platforms. This way, you can generate leads and funnel them for your sales. You can search for the most beautifully designed landing pages to have an idea of what rules you should follow. These pages are different than the homepage of your website, and are created to optimize lead generation through purchases or web forms. You can create several landing pages to split test what works best and for which channel. What happens next? List building!
List Building and Email Marketing
Once you start getting leads, you can easily build a list. Acquiring new customers is 3x more costly than pursuing warm leads. These people are aware of what you do and have shown interest already. You must make the most effort to convert them into successful customers. For this, you can use the re-marketing strategies of social platforms along with email marketing. Sending newsletters or emails will help you connect with these leads and push them towards sales.
Wrap up
These are the basic essentials for startup marketing, and you may find various other ways to attract and connect with your target audience. As this is a fast moving industry, we should adapt to the development in techniques that arise every now and then. Marketing is all about testing. Some techniques work for some businesses, while they don’t for others. What is essential is you run trials and test, and once aligned, you can then push the marketing strategies around it. The best brands strive to combine physical, emotional, and logical elements into one exceptional customer experience.
If you have any experience or would like to comment on what we have outlined, let us know by tweeting to us @cygnismedia
Also, don’t forget to check out the 5 mistakes you should avoid in UI Design!
