No matter what expert marketers say, building an online business is by no means easy. Least of all, a successful start-up, which at times is a very huge battle to get noticed online! Everyone gets to fight against very fierce competition in today’s business world. Getting noticed and patronized is what everyone out there craves for. For a start-up, your chances are brightest if you carefully use some effective digital marketing strategies to help launch your business out there. With the internet, things can become fairly easier since almost everyone now has access to the internet. This is a digital age remember! If you can handle the online marketing aspect of your business correctly, your start-up gets brighter chances of succeeding and flourishing.
Here are a few tested strategies which can help you out in that quest.
#1. Content Marketing
This involves writing and getting your message out there in form of what you know and want to share with others for their own benefits. It is providing valuable information to help others solve their problems. Content marketing is a strategic approach to modern digital marketing efforts. It is where blogs and bloggers become highly relevant in the marketing process. Online, all bloggers are focused on creating, publishing, and distributing quality content for a specially targeted audience. This relationship helps to build a base for drawing traffic which ends up becoming potential clients/customers and customers.
#2. Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Any content not read online is not useful for online marketing efforts. It takes search engines to help rank and distribute content online for the benefit of readers. For that reason, every content needs optimization for search engines like Google, Yahoo and others. Search engine optimization, SEO, is a methodology involving strategies, techniques and tactics most bloggers use to achieve the sole objective of a high-ranking placement in the search results pages, SERP of search engines. The higher they rank your website content, the more traffic they send to it.
#3. Influencer Marketing
Welcome to the world of celebrities and influencers. Depending on what your business is, if you have the endorsement of persons with large social media followers, you get traffic and patronage through such influence. Simple ads from influencers get to reach millions of followers easily because of the influence of social media. Persons with large followership in social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram by mere words of mouth can help build a formidable and trusted brand. Reason, the growing trend on social media mostly revolves around influencers. Potential customers and customers easily trust the authenticity of products/services linked to influencers. If you are a brand, that helps to influence customers to get engaged with your brand.
#4. Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence, AI
Chatbots are like intelligent talking machines. Instead of humans, you can easily deploy chatbots in your frontline base to assist potentials customers take business decisions. Chatbots are usually imbued with Artificial Intelligence AI, with which they can engage in meaningful business conversations with customers and potential customers. Start-ups for cost reasons cannot afford to hire many people for their customer service departments. That is the gap chatbots step up to fill. When properly deployed, chatbots usually work with pop-up text messages which you cannot fail to notice as a website visitor on mostly the top right hand corner of the website as soon as the landing page opens. That is where they nicely welcome website visitors and invite engagement.
#5. Web Analytics
Every start-up needs analytics to help make meaning out of the dark recess of zillions of activities on the internet. For that reason, web analytics is a must-have tool for start-up digital marketers. When deployed, they help to collect, analyze, measure and report website data for understanding and optimizing web pages. The analysis of Internet data and user information through various means is referred to by expert marketers as Web Analytics. Data concerning traffic, its source and what keywords that bring them to your website can be deciphered for web analytics data. Google web analytics is about the most popular and easy to deploy in this category.
#6. Social Media Marketing
These days and around the world, nearly everyone who has easy access to the internet is on social media. Really huge market no doubt! Social media has thus become a major marketing platform and an increasingly rising trend for promoting products and services online. It is simple to use and deploy by creating and sharing content on social media networks, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others. The first thing a start-up really needs to do is to create business profiles on as many of the social media platforms as convenient and suitable for the type of business to be promoted. From these platforms, you gradually build trust and followership which benefits your brand. Getting out a promotional message to millions of people is fairly very easy on social media platforms. The real reason they are very good places to build a brand from. The mere presence of a business on most major social media platforms is a very smart primary step for start-ups to build brand trust and influence in the target market.
#7. Digital Advertising
Just like billboards carrying ads offline on the streets and highways, digital advertising is the promotion of your business on the internet. The usage of the internet as a unique platform for promotional work requires its own techniques designed for effective on the internet. Specially worded messages deliberately and uniquely deployed to be noticed be search engines help to make digital advertising very effective. These unique massages get deployed by banner ads, text ads, emails, social media ads, blogs, mobile apps and other marketing channels available and effective in the digital media space.
#8. Optimizing for Video Search
Advertising professionals now say “effects” is always very useful for every online ads massage. That is where videos alongside text ads are becoming increasingly popular. The videos help provide most of the “effects”. Even search engines can now index videos for search purposes. So, if you optimize your video messages alongside your text ads, the messages reach farther and are more effective. Most online surfers like to see video ads alongside text ads. In fact, the videos are usually more attention-captivating than even the text ads they accompany. For effects, you must habitually rename your videos with the relevant keywords then add the keywords in your video description as well. Marketing experts believe that adding videos to a start-up website makes the start-up to achieve a more significant market presence and growth much faster.
#9. Optimizing for Voice Search
With the improvements and updates in their algorithms, search engines now distinctly recognize sounds and voices. For that reason, digital marketers now benefit from voice optimization. Welcome to audio digital marketing! Voice search technology has become an excellent step for improving user experience for devices such as telephones and audio CDs now widely used by a huge population on the go. Start-ups because of their characteristic low ads budgets can benefit a great deal from these cost-effective devices in their marketing efforts.
