For startups to develop a digital marketing strategy, where do they need to start? This is a common challenge that almost every startup has to go through. However, the good thing is, a lot of startups are aware of the fact that digital and mobile channels are vital for acquiring and retaining customers.
The problem is most of the startups don’t have an integrated plan for growing and engaging their audiences. It could be due to a possible fear of creating massive reports and analyses. However, the plan doesn’t have to be a massive one, but lean planning works the best.
Another possible challenge is the sheer scale and scope of digital marketing. There is a wide array of digital marketing techniques like social, search, display, email marketing, social media marketing, and more to improve the digital experience.
Within every digital marketing technique, there are a plethora of tricks that are important for success. This is why you have to prioritize the strategies and evaluate them accordingly. For instance, you will need dynamic content for email automation, website personalization to programmatic, skyscraper, and retargeting content for organic search.
Some statistics on the top 10 digital marketing techniques
SL No. | Elements of Digital Marketing | Statistics |
| 1 | Email Marketing | Email marketing delivers a strong ROI. The average expected ROI is $42 for every $1 spent on email marketing. |
| 2 | Social Media Marketing | 73% of marketers believe that social media is very effective for their business. |
| 3 | Search Engine Optimization | 93% of the global traffic comes from Google Search, Google Images, and Google Maps. |
| 4 | Pay Per Click Marketing | On average the cost of PPC ranges from $108,000 to $120,000. Google Ads can increase brand awareness by 80%. |
| 5 | Influencer Marketing | 89% of the marketers suggest that the ROI from influencer marketing is better than other marketing channels. |
| 6 | Retargeting Ads | Retargeting ads can lift engagement upto 400%. 60% of the online buyers say that they see ads from other websites they have searched on. |
| 7 | Content Marketing | 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to reach their target customers. |
| 8 | Viral Marketing | 80% of the online firms use viral marketing and 56% of the browsers look for new sites through viral marketing. |
| 9 | Referral Marketing | 85% of the Millenials and 83% of the Gen X population trust referral marketing. It is the most trusted form of marketing. |
| 10 | Affiliate Marketing | For marketers, Affiliate programs generate 15-30% of the sales, and Affiliate Marketing will hit $6.8 billion by the end of 2020. |
Why do startups NEED a digital marketing strategy to expand the business?
The reason why we are stressing on this is that to date 45% out of 1000 startups don’t have a well-defined digital marketing strategy in place.
Here are the following reasons why every startup should have a proper digital marketing strategy in place.
1) Enables startups to be aware of their online target audience
With online business, the dynamics will be completely different from any traditional marketing medium. There will be a wide array of customer profiles, behaviors, competitors, and propositions for marketing communications. There are numerous tools that help in understanding the level of customer demand.
Use Search Gap Analysis or Google’s Keyword Planner to check how you are tapping into the intent of the searchers for attracting them to the site. These tools will help in knowing how many people are interested in your products or services.
2) Helps in creating a strong value proposition
Most of the startups don’t have a strong value proposition. Now, if you don’t have a well-defined value proposition tailored to the different target customer personas, you will not be able to differentiate between the online service between the existing and new customers. Thus, it will be difficult for you to make new customers into loyal customers.
Developing a proper digital marketing strategy is the key to a wide array of organizations. The reason is, the content will engage with your audience through different channels like search, social, blogs, and email marketing. Digital marketing strategy involves true engagement
3) Cost-effective
This is one of the primary reasons why digital marketing strategies are important. With a proper digital marketing strategy, you will be able to reach out to a myriad of customers without spending a lot of money. It is very cost-effective. This is why it is a great marketing tool for startups and small businesses that don’t have a major source of capital. Also, digital marketing techniques bring better results than any form of traditional marketing.
4) Digital marketing strategy brings integration
With so many things to do in digital marketing, it is important to create an integrated plan of action. This will help in ensuring an effective marketing effort that will have much better results. Digital media will work best when it is integrated with the traditional media and the response channels. With an integrated digital marketing strategy, the digital marketing activities will become a part of your business as well.
5) A digital marketing strategy enables you to optimize
With a proper digital marketing strategy, you will have the basics in order. Then you can track the progress of every aspect of your business in the right way and ensure continuous improvement in different segments like site user experience, search marketing, social media, email marketing, and more.
Now that you know why it is important for startups to have a proper digital marketing strategy in place, here are the top 10 digital marketing strategies for startups.
Digital Marketing Strategies for Startups
1) Email Marketing
A lot of people might consider email marketing to be a bit of an old digital marketing strategy. However, emails are offering a good return on investment to the marketers. According to a recent survey conducted by Demand Metric and Data Marketing Association, it was found that email marketing has an impressive ROI of 122%.
This is four times higher than any other marketing channel. It is true that a lot of startups are aware of the power of email marketing. However, they are not able to harness it.
Follow these to create a successful email marketing campaign:
- Create a catchy subject line
- Avoid all sorts of jargons
- Break up the text
- Talk clearly about the benefits
- Optimize the email for mobile devices
- Include a professional email signature
2) Social media marketing
There is no doubt that social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools these days. Social media increases traffic and exposure, helps in developing loyal customers, improves search, generates leads, conversions, and whatnot.
However, to build a strong authority on social media, you have to create good-quality content on a daily basis. It is important to maintain consistency and engage with your audience. You can use social media marketing tools like Hubspot for engaging with your audience and monitor the social media mentions.
You have to choose the right social media platform and then create a marketing strategy. If your target audience is mostly on Facebook, then Facebook should be your focus point. As a startup, you have to keep track of where your target audience is. To build a good social media marketing plan, you have to build a customer persona and then create a strategy.
3) Search Engine Optimization
It is common to think that when you have an awesome website design and optimized service pages, people will come to your site. You are wrong! There are thousands of websites on your niche. So how will your website come up on top when people look for similar services or products?
This is where SEO comes in. Search Engine Optimization not only increases traffic to your website but it also builds trust. When the website ranks high in the search results for keywords related to your services or products it indicates that you are a reputed brand.
Search Engine Optimization strategies like on-page SEO, off-page SEO, local SEO, and content writing, are must for any digital marketing strategy to work. Use tools like SEMrush to keep track of your website’s SEO.
This will help you in conducting keyword research, track the SERP rankings, monitor the competitors, and help you find out where you are compared to them. To get your search engine optimization attributes in order, you can opt for a good SEO company.
4) PPC marketing (Google AdWords)
Pay-per-click marketing is a form of using search engine advertising to get more visitors to your website. This is a very powerful marketing tool for generating sales-ready leads. Pay-per-click advertising brings a lot of advantages. They are as follows:
- It helps to reach your customers at the right time with the right ad
- It offers a high ROI because you will have to pay only when someone clicks
- You will have control over how much you want to spend.
- You will not have to wait for results
- Data insights to optimize other marketing strategies
5) Influencer marketing
The trend of influencer marketing has become very popular in the last few years. It was observed in a study that 84% of the marketers expect to launch at least one influencer marketing campaign in 12 months.
Influencer marketing is a very useful tool for startups for growing their brands. Here are a few reasons why every startup should consider influencer marketing.
- Most of the customers don’t like traditional marketing channels
- Influencer marketing is less costly than other promotional strategies
- It is easy to execute
- With the word-of-mouth promotion, influencer marketing builds trust for the brands
- Customers engage with brand because influencers feel much more authentic
Even if you don’t have a high budget, you can find micro-influencers for startups. They have higher engagement rates than macro-influencers. The best part is, they charge less because of a comparatively smaller follower base.
6) Retargeting Ads
You started your business because you believed in your idea. However, that doesn’t mean that your audience will believe in your products or services.
You have to convince them about your products and services. They will need one or more nudges before they would want to become your customers.
Retargeting does the job for you. Retargeting is a means of marketing where you show the relevant ads to those that have already visited your website.
When anyone visits a website, a pixel (a piece of JavaScript) is placed within their web browser. In simple terms, your visitor’s web browser is cookied.
With effective retargeting ads, you will be able to convert the visitors that have earlier shown interest in the products or services and enhance the conversion.
7) Content marketing
Content marketing is something that no business can avoid these days. 90% of the B2C organizations are serious about content marketing and 88% of the B2B marketers agree that content marketing is a very important segment of digital marketing.
The reason why content marketing is so effective is that it helps in mapping the content strategy for following the different stages of a buyer’s journey. You will create new content that your target audience will love.
Using content marketing, you can do the following:
- Increasing the visibility of the brand
- Create long-lasting relationships with the customers
- Boost brand awareness and brand recognition
- Develop credibility and brand authority
- Content marketing also supports SMO and SEO efforts
8) Viral Marketing
For startups, the best way to create a buzz on the internet is to go viral on the internet. If it is done in the right way, it can help you get your business an overnight success.
The interesting thing is, viral marketing is a combination of all the marketing efforts we mentioned above. So how do you go viral? Well, you can do something that is out of the box and leverage social media to get attention.
It will cause an intense surge in traffic to your website for a certain period. This works as a boost to your brand recognition and awareness plan. Once you are trending in social media, your job is half done. Now it will be a lot easier to convert the traffic into your customers.
9) Referral marketing
Doesn’t it feel good to let your audience do the promotions for you? This is exactly what referral marketing is all about. This is one of the best digital marketing strategies where your audience does the promotion of your brand.
When you launch a referral program for the promotion of your products and services, you can share a referral code with every customer and they can share those in their circles. Now, when anyone of their circle purchases from your brand, you will be able to provide a freebie or discount to the referring customer.
This will motivate them to refer more people and that in turn, will help you grow your startup. To set up a referral program you can use different tools that will help you set up a campaign on social media or mobile apps easily.
10) Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a lot similar to influencer marketing. It also relies on the influence of people to draw in more sales. This is why you have to consider integrating affiliate marketing campaigns with influencer marketing.
In affiliate marketing, you can just sit back and enjoy the show because others will be doing the marketing for you. What happens in Affiliate marketing is, you recruit affiliates for your brand to draw leads.
Think of them as salespeople who work on a commission. You will decide on the commission. Whether you want to pay them according to the sales they generate or on a flat fee per product, will depend totally on you.
Now, the question is, how do you keep a track of these sales? You can do it through affiliate links. The affiliate links are customized links that you offer to your affiliates. They share the link in their social media circles and their social media contacts can use the link to visit your site and buy anything.
You can use tools like Google Analytics for generating customized links. Along with that, you can also track the number of incoming sales from every link. This will also help you in tracking the performance of your affiliates.
In conclusion, It can be said that building up a successful startup is surely an uphill battle where you have to go through intense competition. However, using these digital marketing strategies for your startup will help you establish your brand and your startup. All these above-mentioned digital marketing strategies are proven to deliver high ROI.
