A Beginner’s Guide to Startup Marketing

Starting your own business is inspiring – it creates opportuinites for you to grow your business ideas and your company, as well as to further develop yourself professionally. On the other side, it can be overwhelming, as you’re bound to face many challenges, such as limited time, money or skill resources. One of the challenges that you’ll face, from the early days of your business venture, is marketing. 

To increase your chances of success on the market, you need to make sure your every marketing effort is well-planned and flawlessly executed. Here is how you should begin.

Have Your Website

Your business is never too small to have a website – if you don’t have one when your potential customers search for you online, they might get the impression that you’re no longer doing business. Your website will often be the first touchpoint between your customers and your brand, so you want it to make a great first impression. There are several things you should pay special attention to when creating your webpage:

• Design. The design doesn’t only reflect your brand’s aesthetics, it also influences the overall functionality of your website and thus reflects on your customers’ satisfaction levels. To make the most out of your website design, make sure that it doesn’t cut back the speed of your website performance. As up to 70% of web traffic happens on mobile, the design of your website should also be mobile responsive.
• Pages. Except for the homepage, business websites often include other pages such as: about the company page, services or products page, pricing page, features page, contact page, FAQ, blog, etc. It’s a good idea to research websites of your competitors too, and make sure you’re not leaving anything out. Make sure to include a subscription form for your latest offers, news, and your blog, as well as a form for your customers’ feedback, as it’s the number one driver of your success.
• SEO. All the content you use on your website or your blog should be SEO friendly so that your prospective customers can easily find you in online searches. You should include relevant keywords on each page, and use them in page’s title, meta description, URL, and image alt text too.

Create Profiles On Social Media

There are 3.499 billion social media users nowadays, which makes around 45% of the total worldwide population. People use social media to connect to their friends and families, but also to connect to brands and companies and communicate with them – actually, 63% of customers expect companies to deliver customer service and support on their social media channels. 

In such a developed digital surroundings, you can’t afford not to be where your customers are and provide them with timely and adequate support.  It’s a good idea to do thorough research of social media that are used in your industry. Start with the most popular ones, where youre most likely to find your prospective clients.Apart from having all relevant information filled out on your profiles and pages, a great profile picture and a cover photo, you should make sure that you post frequently and regularly on the channels of your choice, and keep your customers engaged. One of the best ways for boosting engagement on social media channels is by organizing contests and giveaways. People love freebies and discounts, and they’ll participate in such competitions for a chance of winning a free trial, a sample, a discount or their favorite brand’s merch, such as personalized branded stress balls as a part of the prize pool.

Produce High-Quality Content

For your marketing efforts to have better results, it’s important to keep your customers and prospects engaged with the quality content you provide. But to be able to create high-quality content, you need to follow certain steps:

• Create buyer personas. You won’t be able to meet the content needs of your customers if you don’t have a clear idea of who they are. Research their relevant characteristics, such as their age, gender, location, education level, position in the company, income. Also look into their pain points, interests and habits, as well as their buying motives.
• Nurture them with your content. Try to identify their position in the content marketing funnel, and use this data to determine what kind of pieces will fit their needs best. To create content for those who are at the top of the funnel, you need to produce content which grabs attention by solving your customers’ needs and pain points. For the middle-of-the-funnel leads, you need to create enough informative and educational pieces and nurture them well. Those who are at the bottom of the funnel need highly personalized and product-focused pieces of content, which will convert them to purchase.
• Use different types of content. Try to use various forms of content to better fit the needs of your customers. Adding visual content to your text is highly beneficial, as the human brain processes it 60,000 times faster than text, so we are able to grasp the meaning faster and value it more. Make sure to add illustrations, photos, and infographics in your posts. Video is one of the most popular content types nowadays – 52% of marketers worldwide name it as content with the best ROI.

Boost Your Outreach

When you’ve got your website and your blog covered with high-quality content, you need to boost your outreach and bring more qualified traffic to your site and your content. We’ve already mentioned the importance of search-engine-optmization for increasing the odds of your content appearing high in search results and attracting the right kind of crowd to your website. 

But, to go one step beyond, use the power of influencer marketing. When choosing influencers, prioritize those who have both a solid social following in your niche and a strong and influential website. Also, by regularly posting fresh and well-tailored pieces of content on your website, and taking part in social media discussions in your industry, try to position yourself as an authortity and a relevant source of information in your industry.

Building a successful business out of your newly founded startup or small business may seem overwhelming, but with a good startup marketing strategy in place, you can have great results and mark a successful beginning of your entrepreneurial venture.