Best Digital Marketing Strategies For Startups

In this social-media era, digital marketing has become a crucial part of businesses – especially small and medium businesses that cannot pay enough for marketing agencies. In recent years, Startups have relied heavily on digital marketing to create brand awareness and expand overseas.

When it comes to customer segmentation, digital marketing is the life savior. It helps the brands understand consumers’ preferences to target a niche group of consumers. As a startup with limited resources, you must understand your target audiences and their demands.

Besides, in most cases, startups do not have enough resources at the beginning. So, they cannot afford to hire marketing agencies. It’s better to start online marketing from the very beginning, where your audiences exist and want to know about your business, services, and products.

According to an article from digitaldot, 64% of SME Entrepreneurs have their own website to illustrate their brand. They also stated that over 60% of startups invest in online marketing.

There are more than 250 million active internet users including mobile internet users. If you have a solid business idea and your products’ quality is up to the benchmark, then going online is the perfect way to display it to these users.

Whether you expand your business and hire marketing agencies in the future or not is up to you. But at the very beginning, you must have proper knowledge of digital marketing and how to implement strategies if you want your startup to succeed.

Depending on their situation, startups can implement several digital marketing strategies at the beginning stage. The proper way to do it is to go through all sorts of strategies and evaluate that can bring satisfactory results.

Take a look at these digital marketing strategies that are booming these days.

Social Media Marketing

Name one person who isn’t active on any social media platform. I bet you can’t. The first and foremost thing that comes to people’s minds after hearing about digital marketing terms is social media.

Social media marketing refers to representing and promoting your brand through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. Launching a product and going live via Facebook or Instagram falls under this famous digital marketing strategy.

If you interact with internet users or potential customers via comments, that is also social media marketing.

According to many social media experts, this tool is the most powerful digital marketing strategy startups use nowadays. This is the most straightforward and essential digital marketing strategy for startups worldwide.

The significant benefits startups can get from social media marketing are –

Generate leads as well as upgrade search rankings.
Helps to boost traffic and exposure.
Provides data related to consumers’ preferences and choices.
Increase audience engagement.
Keep up with the trends.
Establish yourself as a thought leader – share your concerns over social media and make a deeper connection with customers.

Your customers prefer engaging content. So, as a startup, you need to share your story and provide content with impactful meaning that can draw audiences. Keep doing it consistently and engage with your audience.

If it becomes challenging to continue doing it, you can use social media marketing tools like SocialPilot, Buffer, Loomly, and Hubspot. These tools can show you audience engagement data and preferences that will help you with your next move.

Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Pay-Per-Click, in short, PPC is a digital marketing strategy when marketers launch advertisements on a platform like Google Ads to drive traffic from search engines. The exciting part is startups will only need to pay if the ads get them results, meaning people click your ads and visit the websites. It’s the perfect channel to use for marketing as a startup.

There are several platforms PPC marketing channel covers, but the most common ones are Google Ads and Bing Ads. As a startup, starting your PPC advertising on Google Ads is wise since it has the largest audience to catch.

You’ll get great results if your business idea is excellent and makes the ads’ content appealing.

PPC marketing channel helps you to receive clicks fast.
As a startup, you completely control the payment and when the ads can be played.
Google Ads shows you lead values and ROI numbers. It means you can track and measure the results quickly.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing is one of the most accessible digital marketing strategies any startup can follow. But first, understand what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is.

It is basically the process that helps a website establish informative content, technical configuration, page speed, keyword research, and making it finable through link popularity.

SEM strategy can help startups to boost their websites’ visibility in search engine result pages, in short SERP.

SERP means when an individual use a search engine like google to find a product or any information, then several websites related to that search word pops up on the first page. So, startups need to optimize their content to improve their SERP ranking.

As a startup that always wants audiences to visit the website, you must keep a few things in mind.

Keyword research – If startups want to gain high user engagement, they need to learn the organic keywords used by competitors ranking at the top of search engines.

It is also essential to figure out your customers’ demands and try ranking for keywords suitable for your business.

Site speed – It is important to boost the speed with which your website loads. If it takes more than 5-6 seconds, you can lose a lot of potential consumers.

Backlinking – In simpler terms, hyperlinking other websites to your websites’ contents. It is one of the easiest ways to increase visitors to the website.

Also, once you have a hyperlink on any third-party website, it increases the authenticity of your website as well. But you have to acquire high-quality backlinks which means, backlinks from reputable websites will boost the chances of improving the SERP ranking and increase the trafficking.

Header Tags – You can use different header tags like Header 1, and 2 to establish your content properly. This will help the search engines to understand your blog or content hierarchy and improve the ranking.

Negative keywords – This term refers to the words which help you avoid showing up in unwanted searches. It not only helps you with efficient ad investment but also, improves getting the targeted audiences on your website.

For example, if you want to start a saloon, you want people who are looking for a haircut, not the ones who want to buy saloon equipment like a hairdresser, shaving cream, etc. So, you use saloon equipment as a negative word which eventually can improve your ROI.

Email Marketing

Before all of these modern digital marketing, what strategy do you think people used? Yes, you guessed it right! It’s email marketing! Because it is one of the oldest digital marketing strategies, do you think it is still effective?

Imagine investing $1 and getting $36 ROI. That’s exactly what Katrina Kirsch, an editor and brand consultant, mentioned in an article in Hubspot.

The article also mentions that around 4 billion people use email daily, and 77% of businesspeople have noticed an increase in email engagement during 2021-22. So, the number says this old trick has not faded if the startups can use it properly.

And most importantly, startups don’t need to pay a big chunk of their ad investment money for email marketing.

Though the ROI of this old digital marketing strategy is attractive, many startups cannot crack the code of using it properly. They need to implement some effective methods to launch email marketing.

DO NOT MAKE THE CONTENT BIG AND COMPLEX – Avoid using jargon and make the writing plain and simple; also, persuasive.

PROPER SUBJECT LINE – Brainstorm and make the subject line eye-catching.

PROFESSIONAL EMAIL SIGNATURE – Include it at the bottom of the email when you send them. Besides your name, company details, and contract, you can include kinds of stuff like photos, logos, or even links to your company’s website.

BREAK-UP MESSAGES – Make different para, or write in bullet points that can quickly grab your consumers’ attention.

Referral Marketing

This is one of the simplest digital marketing strategies startups can use. In the easiest term, let your consumers do the marketing for you. It may sound like a word-of-mouth marketing method, but it differs from it.

You can launch a referral program by creating a referral code and sending it to individuals. Now your best bet is that if they love your products and service, they will share their experience with the group and this referral code with them.

Suppose anyone from that particular group buys your products or services. In that case, you can discount the first customer who provided the referral codes.

This cycle will keep on going, and they are doing the promotion for you. You can use tools like Referral Factory, CrewFire, Mention Me, and Refersion.

It may sound like not so big of a deal, but it is. Human nature is predictable. They tend to believe their close ones more than paid advertising or influencers. So, what better way to convince them than not letting their close ones share their positive experiences?

Retargeting Campaign / Ads

Retargeting ads are not like usual banner ads. It is one form of online targeting advertising which tries to persuade people who have already visited your website once or several times.

Retargeting ads can be done in two ways. Firstly pixel-based, where a potential consumer visits your website, and the pixel is launched on their web browser. In simpler terms, your potential consumer’s browser is cookied.

It is the most common one which is used by most businesses. On the other hand, list-based targeting refers to retargeting after you have someone’s personal contact information. It can be a phone number or their g-mail address.

According to Andrew Meola of Business Insider, revisited consumer transactions covered up 48% of the United States of America’s E-Commerce sessions in the final three months of 2015.

Some data says that more than 90% of internet users visit your website for the first time and leave without buying anything.

Now, as a startup, it is not only essential to acquire these potential consumers but also to make sure they revisit and buy your products and service again and again. In that case, implanting this digital marketing strategy is not a bad idea.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one sort of digital marketing strategy where businesses use third parties as promoters of their brand via their websites and social media.

It sounds quite similar to influencer marketing. Instead of using influencers, you hire third parties as affiliates who can do the marketing task for you.

At which stage a startup should recruit top-notch affiliates is up to the needs and the ad budget of the business.

You can use affiliate recruitment tools or software like Everflow, Reditus, and Grovia (Not the baby product ones). It will help you with other affiliate-related issues as well.

There are some benefits that you may consider before avoiding this digital marketing strategy.

Safe investment – Yes, it is a little bit more expensive than the above-mentioned strategies but it will cost far less than hiring marketing campaigns at the initial stage.

Easily track sales – By using Google Analytics, you can keep track of the number of sales coming from customized generated links. It will help you to track the performance of your affiliates.

It can boost sales – Great affiliate marketers will produce leads and increase traffic enormously which will eventually boost the number of sales.

Having the edge – In recent times, there has been massive competition between startups. Before you have the time to think about using an affiliate marketing strategy, some other startups already took the best affiliate marketers which you could have grabbed.

So, you need to hire great and well-known affiliate marketers who can not only generate leads but also become your brand ambassadors and believe in your business.

Special mentions – Influencer Marketing and Viral Marketing

Startups can use a viral marketing strategy, which sounds controversial. Still, if done correctly, it can generate enormous traffic quickly. Sometimes, startups cannot start a business with a sufficient ad budget, which is where it comes into play.

Also, Influencer Marketing can be applied if startups feel the necessity for it. It’s the mix of old and new marketing tools. It takes the celebrity endorsement concept into the present-day marketing campaign.

Startups can hire great influencers who know their job well and have large page followers. Then you can put them into their social media’s live streaming channels, e.g., Facebook lives, and endorse your products or services.