Digital Marketing for Startups
As an entrepreneur launching a new brand or company, there are probably several things on your to do list. Creating a budget, perfecting your product, and so much more goes into building a brand from the ground up. Is developing a digital marketing strategy on that to do list of yours?
It should be.
No one should start a business today without having a digital marketing strategy in place or without hiring a startup marketing consultant. No matter the product, idea, or service you are trying to sell, the market for just about everything these days is extremely saturated. New brands launch daily, and they face some pretty stiff competition: long standing companies and millions of other marketing campaigns.
Digital marketing is crucial for startups and should be at the center of all marketing strategy as a company is first starting out. Digital marketing for startups allows new brands and companies to tailor the perfect marketing campaigns and strategy for their intended customers, while also keeping up with the dynamic nature of consumer behavior.
Digital marketing is a method of inexpensive customer research where you are able to engage with potential clients, get a better understanding of customers, use real metrics to drive your strategy, increase your visibility, track your ROI, establish your brand, and increase your revenue!
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Digital marketing differs from traditional marketing in many ways, the biggest being that digital marketing can be much more cost effective. As most startups begin with a limited budget, digital marketing is the way to go when it comes to interacting with new and potential clients, building a brand, and developing relationships, all with a low price tag.
There are many sub categories that fall under the umbrella of digital marketing, but a few of the most common startup marketing strategies are Affiliate Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing, and Viral Marketing. Marketing firms will often implement strategies which employ a variety of these types of digital marketing.
So, how can digital marketing set your startup on the path to success?
Digital marketing allows you to gain a better understanding of your customers
Marketing digitally, using a website or social media, is a high quality method of inexpensive customer research. You are able to grow an audience, access data describing those who are digitally interacting with your digital marketing, and much more. Using social media can help you to gain a better understanding of customers as you have the ability to interact with them through comments, direct messaging, and shares.
With these digital marketing tools, you can learn where your potential customers are located in the world, their age, their interests, and what they like and dislike about your product. Gaining a more detailed understanding of your leads and customers can help you to tailor your product or service to your target audience as your startup grows and develops.
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Increase your brand awareness with digital marketing
Digital marketing is one of the best ways to get your company, business, or brand in front of the eyes of potential customers, all across the web. Marketing today is not just selling products or services, but rather selling a brand, a lifestyle, something that keeps customers coming back for more. By using digital marketing, you will be able to develop a cohesive brand, and a cohesive marketing strategy around that brand. This will help to attract paying customers to your small business.
A combination of advertisements, email marketing, social media pages, and a website can help you to increase the audience awareness of your brand tremendously. Because so much of the world is online these days, without digital marketing channels and tactics like these, your brand will likely only reach a fraction of your potential customers.
Digital Marketing is a way to track your metrics and ROI
With the boom of digital marketing today, and along with it the ease of tracking real time metrics, it is likely that traditional marketing will soon become obsolete. Metrics in digital marketing are different from digital marketing in that their availability is almost immediate. You can track website views, social media interaction, and so much more, with updates every second. Instead of, say, a traditional print ad, with online advertisements, you will be able to gauge who read and interacted with your advertisement in real time.
Digital marketing also makes it extremely easy to track your startup’s ROI, or Return On Investment. Before digital marketing, you had to wait for the marketing you had set up to finish & run its course before you could begin to measure your ROI. With digital marketing, you can track a campaign as it runs, allowing you to make adjustments or cancel the campaign altogether if it isn’t producing any results, which helps you avoid further losses.
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Digital marketing is inexpensive compared to other marketing methods and strategies
When done right, digital marketing can be vastly less expensive than traditional marketing. The cost for a local or network television advertisement will run you anywhere from $200 to $6,000, and one radio spot can range from $70 to $250. This doesn’t even include development or production costs for a television or radio advertisement, which can be hundreds or thousands of dollars, even on the low end.
Comparatively, most digital marketing is available at a much lower cost. A pay-per-click ad will run you about $200-$500 a month, a blog post for your website about $40 for a 300 word post, social media ads start around $100 a month, and search engine optimization starts around $1000 per month. For the cost of production and running of a single television advertisement, you could pay for roughly a month’s worth of digital marketing instead! Different agencies will charge more or less than these figures, but these are general starting rates. As a bonus, digital marketing techniques often reach a wider audience and offer a greater return on investment than traditional marketing.
Digital Marketing should be at the core of your startup’s marketing plan
As you can see, online marketing has tons of remarkable benefits which make it so important and useful for all young startups. Digital marketing allows startups to boost their visibility, increase online conversion rates, reduce their marketing budget, generate leads, increase sales, develop a brand awareness, increase online conversion rates, boost revenue, improve customer engagement, influence purchasing decisions, and track their return on investment
Setting up a digital marketing strategy (or choosing not to) can make or break a young startup. For a company to be successful, it must reach out to potential customers, develop leads, and turn those leads into sales. Without proper digital marketing, new businesses can be run into the ground before they’ve even had the chance to get started. The best thing an entrepreneur can do for their startup is hire a skilled marketing firm, with marketing professionals with years of experience, to take their digital marketing to the next level, because digital marketing in startups is extremely crucial for success.
