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Last Updated on May 14, 2019 by Work In My Pajamas
14% of startups fail because they don’t understand how to properly market their business.
It’s okay. Marketing in the digital age can be a tough task to tackle, especially if you’re working on a startup budget.
However, you don’t need to have a lot of money to make marketing work for your startup. All you need are these seven digital marketing tips and a lot of focus and commitment.
Ready to get started?
In This Post:
Get to Know Your Audience
You’re not going to go anywhere with your marketing efforts if you don’t have a really solid idea of who your audience is and how they behave online.
This means developing more than a simple profile. Sure, you want to sell to jewelry to women aged 25-50, but what else do you know about your potential customers?
Factor in things like:
- What is their income level?
- What is their marital status?
- What social media platforms do they use most frequently?
- What kinds of content do they love interacting with?
This will help you develop a more in-depth customer profile. The more specific your target audience is, the easier it will be to craft quality content that is attractive to them.
Create Quality Content
In 2019, content truly is king. Long gone are the days when you could keyword stuff your blogs just to rank higher on SEO. Google’s smarter than that now!
To rank on search engines and to ensure that you’re creating a community around your business and the content you release, you’ll need to create quality content.
Here, your focus should be on creating content that:
- Provides value to your readers
- Is highly shareable
- Converts your readers into customers (i.e. causes them to take action)
If you’re not consistently ticking off these three items every time you publish a blog post or share a video, then you might need to rethink how you’re marketing your website.
Always Include a Call-to-Action
So, now that you’ve created quality content, you’ll want to always ensure you include a call-to-action.
This can take shape in the form of a button at the bottom of each blog that says “subscribe now.” Or, it might be a simple, text at the end of each paid ad you’re running.
Whatever it is, it should encourage your viewers to do something.
This is one of the biggest mistakes that small startups make when venturing into digital marketing. They develop a target audience and design great marketing content, but forget to direct their viewers what to do after they interact with it.
Some of the best call-to-actions include language specific to your brand. They’re also very specific. That means you shouldn’t use the example above of a simple “read more” or “subscribe.”
Get creative and be specific!
Develop a Strong SEO Strategy
Digital marketing for startups is largely based on social media and search engines.
Because PPC (pay-per-click) ads are pretty cost-effective compared to other forms of online marketing, you’ll want to get serious about developing a strong SEO strategy.
SEO Journal notes that focusing on this can help you achieve higher rates of business loyalty, increased business longevity, and develop a source of steady targeted leads.
If you have a solid understanding of your audience and you’re creating quality, targeted content to fit their tastes, then this won’t be that hard.
However, if this sounds a little confusing, then it’s best to contact a professional digital marketing company to learn more about how they can tailor an SEO strategy and online ads to fit your specific needs.
Learn About Landing Pages
If you’re going to try and run a Google Adwords campaign alone (or any other type of paid search marketing campaign for that matter), then you’ll need to learn about landing pages.
Whenever you’re dealing with PPC ads, you’ll be able to rank higher if you have a designated landing page for people to click through to when they click on the ad.
This is because Google ranks pages higher that have landing pages that are relevant to the ads.
This means that, if you’re selling beauty products online, you’ll want to send your viewers to a clean and simple beauty product landing page when they click on your ad.
Make this page clean and simple but specific. Was the ad about finding the right color concealer for their skin tone? Make sure the landing page offers them information about that exact same subject.
Pay Attention to the Analytics
Learning how to grow a business online is about more than simply developing a marketing strategy and publishing content. Yes, there’s more!
To truly get the most out of your digital marketing efforts, you’ll need to learn how to make sense of the data you’re gathering. Then, you’ll need to learn how to implement changes according to that data.
This is optimization, and it will help you achieve greater success.
To do this, you need to determine what is most important to you. Is it:
- How many sales did you make selling your products online?
- How many people subscribed to your blog?
- How many people are viewing your pages for longer than five seconds?
- The number of clicks your ads are receiving?
No matter what it is, you’ll need to take a look at your analytics to see if your marketing campaigns are working. If they aren’t, then you’ll know what you need to change.
It’s worth mentioning that if you’re going at this alone, Google Analytics offers all of the data you probably need as a small startup.
Always Brush Up on Your Digital Marketing Tips
The last, and honestly the most important, of the digital marketing tips we can give you is to always brush up on startup marketing trends.
It’s a great idea to constantly browse articles related to marketing in your industry. Read about small beauty business marketing or about how to use video to promote an Etsy store.
Staying up-to-date on marketing tips and trends is one of the easiest ways to ensure that you and your startup never fall behind.
If all of this sounds great but you haven’t quite figured out just what your startup is going to be about, then take a look at our blog about the 40 different side hustle ideas you can do to make money in the meantime.
