Digital Marketing For Startups: Dos & Don'ts For A Winning Strategy
Table Of Contents
Digital Marketing For Startups: Dos & Don'ts
Gone are the days when businesses used to pursue traditional marketing strategies to promote their brands and attract customers to increase sales. Today, nearly every business is going online, and they all start with two important things: creating a website for themselves and establishing a social media presence across different platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and, of course, Instagram to enhance their online presence and be reachable to as many consumers as possible at the same time. Companies spend tons of money and appoint their best teams to make sure the marketing is done right.
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The strategies amplify when startups enter the picture, given the recognition they seek in the market as a newcomer. They build their own social media marketing teams and involve groups of brainstormers working day and night to craft a winning digital marketing plan for their businesses. However, having a foolproof digital marketing strategy is not that easy. One must know what's right and what's not when it comes to marketing products and brands online.
Below is a list of key do's and don'ts that startups must keep in mind when trying to develop a winning strategy for digital marketing -
The Do's of Digital Marketing
Here are the dos of digital marketing that you should follow -
✅ #1 - Define Your Goals Clearly
This has always been the first step in any marketing strategy. Without knowing your goals, you can never know whether you are moving in the right direction or not. The first thing you must do while developing a digital marketing plan is to define your goals and that too as early as possible. The more precise your goals are, the better you can think of ways to attain them. There is absolutely no loss in planning before. Figure out if your goal is to attract customers, market a new product or service, or increase sales, and work accordingly to achieve them one by one.
Goal setting is the most important, crucial, and initial step in establishing a winning digital marketing strategy for your startup.
✅ #2 - Understand Your Target Audience
Does it ever happen to you that you and your friend watched a movie together, and while you liked it, your friend didn't? It is only because your preferences are different. Hence, not everything one likes is desirable to others. This difference in taste is what segregates one's target audience. Hence, identifying the set of audiences for a particular product is a crucial step.
As a digital marketer, you need to understand that every product or service has its own potential customers and target audience. If you can't find the product appealing, that's okay, but there is always someone who will connect with it. For instance, you don't sell a comb to a bald person; you find the person who actually requires and likes to comb their hair and will be interested in buying the comb from you.
✅ #3 - Leverage Link Building for SEO
It is where you will need SEO experts and smart online marketers who understand the importance of making your page rank high in search engines. Link building for startups or any business is nothing but ensuring that links from other websites redirect customers to your website. There are always things that you simply can't do yourself, and there is no harm in outsourcing or getting help from people who have experience and expertise in them. We recommend you find some cool marketing agencies, such as Outreach Monks, to help you with link building for your business website and thereby optimize it according to the search engine requirements.
✅ #4 - Use Social Media Wisely
Digital marketing strategy for startups can be an ally or an enemy, too; you need to learn how to use it wisely for your business, especially from a professional perspective. Every day, businesses spend tons of money on their social media campaigns and digital ads and try to score by running pay-per-click strategies, but there is more to it than meets the eye. If you have a good team with out-of-the-box ideas and they can help attract an audience and increase sales on social media, it's well and good. However, if you do not have experts on board yet, you can start with training team members, enabling them to explore and understand the wise and smart use of social media.
The Don'ts of Digital Marketing
The following are some key don'ts of digital marketing that you must be aware of:
❎ #1 - Don't Try to Do Everything
We know that being young entrepreneurs and owners of a startup, every person is filled with enthusiasm and a spark to work on everything themselves. In fact, many entrepreneurs do it to avoid expenses even when it is not their domain. We recommend that you avoid making this mistake.
You need to understand that some aspects require expertise and experience. If you think that it is a waste of money to hire someone with the required knowledge to do the task, you are indirectly sabotaging the growth of your business. Social media marketing for startups is an essential part of publicity and promotion. Hence, you must not overburden yourself with it. We recommend you connect with some good digital marketing agencies to outsource such services.
❎ #2 Don't Overlook Mobile Users
Most of the time, startup ventures keep their online presence restricted to a bigger screen, and hence, they are found missing out on a huge audience that uses smartphones. Remember, a major part of the crowd uses smartphones to access the internet today, and not everyone likes to surf the internet on laptops and computers. Smartphones are mobile and offer a sense of extra privacy than laptops and screen computers. Therefore, mobile optimization for startups should be your go-to move. Optimize your business and content, including your website and social media profiles for smartphone screens, and make sure that it offers the same seamless experience that it offers on laptop websites.
❎ #3 - Don't Focus Only on Selling
Yes, sales are important; yes, you are seeking revenue, and yes, profit is observed as the basic ambition of any business, but not everything is related to selling. Startups should understand that digital marketing is more about creating your presence, building your brand, and getting in the brains of your audience. If you can do this, the sales will eventually follow. Digital marketing for startups creates a persona of companies, with websites, social media profiles, ad campaigns, the type of content they post, the reels and stories through which they connect and become relatable to their audience and potential customers.
❎ #4 - Don't Skip Analytics
Keep checking the digital analytics. Every ad campaign and social media platform offers key insights and comparable data that you can use to understand what is working for you and what isn't. The analytics also helps you understand the reach, likeability, and interaction quotient of your content and profile across platforms. It is highly possible that a piece of content that is working on Instagram may not work on YouTube and vice versa. You can only check on this by using analytics. Digital analytics can be used to understand the performance of your profile and business, and it can be done by using several different SEO tools and engagement metrics that are provided. You can search for different plugins and extensions that can track the performance of your digital marketing practices in a quantifiable way and present you in the form of analytics that can help you make better decisions, so always pay attention to the data analytics.
