7 Digital Marketing Ideas for Startups to Succeed

Digital marketing is changing the face of marketing and business. It is ever evolving and a very important part of establishing ones business in today’s day and age. Big or small, our technology-driven environment requires all brand and businesses to have some, if not a strong presence.

However, very often startups miss the bus to success simply because they do not give enough importance to establishing a strong presence. Being present on social media isn’t enough. Other marketing strategies like optimizing your website for search engines with relevant keywords, running email marketing campaigns, considering pay-per-click advertising, etc are overlooked or sometimes not even considered as a viable option.

Much of the attention for startups goes into creating the perfect product or service. But startup owners must leverage the capability of digital marketing to maximize reach and bring success, especially when it has proved to be successful for startups around the world.

As a startup owner, are you aware of what online brand management is? Have you ever thought about drafting and implementing a well thought out marketing strategy for your startup? A digital marketing strategy that addresses the goals and objectives of your business and outlines a plan to achieve these goals is likely to bring you more success as compared to when you do not have a marketing strategy in place. The greatest benefit of creating a digital marketing strategy is that you can analyze what might work for your startup and what will not.

Here are 7 best digital marketing strategies for startups:

Social media marketing

The most effective tool in the hands of a marketer is free, easily available and highly effective if used the right way. Establishing a strong presence online is possible through setting up social media profiles on relevant social media channels; ones that are aligned with the nature of your business.

Being present on social media can be highly beneficial for businesses for a number of good reasons. First, it becomes easy for your brand to disseminate information to your target audience. Secondly, almost all social media channels offer insights and analytics that helps you identify the type of content that your target audience likes consuming. Lastly, content can easily go viral on social media, and you never know when it can be your brand going viral!

Competitor research

New players in the market always run an in-depth competitor analysis in terms of product, service, quality and price. But very often they forget to analyze marketing strategies their competitors tried and tested. It is essential that you evaluate and study your potential competitors and the strategies they use or implement. Competitor analysis plays a huge role in improving your business strategy and this is why brands invest in it.

Search engine optimization

The objective of optimizing your website is to make your business discoverable to those looking for it. Optimizing your website is as important for a startup as it is for an established business.

The process of SEO begins with a thorough and detailed keyword research. This keyword research must be location specific (if the business offers its services in a particular area). A good way to go about it is to target highly relevant keywords with a fairly high search count.

Ideally, every piece of content you push out to the internet must be optimized with the keywords that you would like your business to rank on. As long as you keep your content (and images) optimized for keywords you wish to rank on, you should be good with your search engine optimization!  

Content marketing strategy

Successful content marketing is something that we experienced with our own brand, RedAlkemi. Once our team understood the value of publishing keyword based, informative and useful content that solve pain points, we knew this was the direction to head in.

The underlying cause for successful content marketing remains the same; people who are interested in finding a solution to a problem are willing to consume a lot of content, based on which they plan what to do next.

If your business offers informative, useful and unique content that is being searched for by your target audience, your brand is bound to build a sense of trust and authority in your domain or industry. Before you know it, relevant people will start to notice your brand and you will soon establish your brand as a credible source of information.

Email marketing

What is email marketing? If you have a registered email ID, you’re probably familiar with promotional emails that you receive from multiple brands, even if they are completely irrelevant to you. When a business starts reaching out to its customers and potential clients via emails, it is email marketing.

Email marketing is a quick, simple and efficient way to get in touch with potential clients or initiate various collaborations. Email marketing tools like Mail Chimp are easy to use and also give you access to insights that help measure the efficiency of your campaign. This is something that does not require a huge investment and can be easily taken up by startups.

Research and analysis

The research sets the foundation for any type of marketing that needs to be carried out, irrespective of whether it’s being done by a startup or a big, established business. Research and analysis pave the way for a startup to identify the strategies being used by their competitors. This helps you identify the kind of strategies that you would like to try out, or not try out. Strategies that are successful with competitors are often picked up and tweaked by startups for their own benefit. In order to stay ahead in the game startups must invest some of their time on market research.

Video marketing

Creating and publishing videos is not as easy a task as creating and publishing graphics. A lot goes into video marketing and very often, startups do not have the funds to facilitate this. However, video marketing is one of the most important aspects of marketing today. This is because video content is at least 5 times more engaging than static content, enabling audiences to interact with brands for longer and with more attention.

Videos enable businesses to share valuable information about themselves in a manner that is engaging but also evokes an action. Startups or businesses that are short on funds can opt for animated videos and GIFs, instead of professionally produced videos. In either case, videos are a great alternative for static graphic content.

If you’re running a startup, we hope we helped you kick-start ideating and implementing your digital marketing ideas. If you think we missed out on some points, let us know in the comments below!