9 Effective Startup Digital Marketing Strategies

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.

How to Find the Right Digital Marketing Strategy

Marketing experts say digital marketing entails the promotion of products with the aid of digital technologies. The main medium of promotion is primarily through the internet. That normally requires the production of internet acceptable digital promotional materials. Once produced, the digital marketing materials have to be distributed across multiple online channels. These channels principally include but not limited to audio and video streaming, email, websites, blogs, social media as well as trivia online games. The type of business you own and what you want to achieve largely determines which method and strategy you decide upon. Each method has its strong points and weak points which can help you take these very vital decisions. That said, it must be noted that some methods are considered fundamental. Meaning, no matter what else you do, such methods must always be employed regardless of the type of business you are running. In that regard, search engine optimization, SEO and social media marketing, SMM readily come handy.


 
Search Engine Optimization, SEO

This is a must for all businesses that seek to establish an online presence. Writing quality content with the right keywords gets your content to be search engines-friendly. What that means is that they get to rank your content high in search results helping your website to get the much needed traffic. Aside the high search engine results, SEO somehow also manages to put out the right information about your business online. With that, both search engines and human viewers get better information about what you are offering and what your business is about.

Social Media Marketing, SMM 

Because of the simplicity and ease of use of social media, it has become really fundamental in digital marketing presently. Like they say nowadays, nearly everyone around the world is on social media. It thus makes real marketing sense to get your products or services where nearly everyone is. As a result, social media now plays a very huge role in the world consumer market. It makes it really easy and convenient to deliver your marketing messages to almost every potential customer who has a social media account around the world.

Email Marketing

This may be considered old school strategy but it is still very effective when properly deployed to side track spamming. It simply entails the sending of marketing materials through email to hundreds of thousands of prospective customers. It only works for people who have the expertise and experience in email marketing. Because of the sensitivity to spam mails online, an improper or ineffective use of email marketing at times turns out to be a huge waste of resources. Worse of all, any improper usage may result in your cherished brand or product getting associated with spam. You risk a marketing disaster if that happens.

Content Marketing

This is characterized mostly by blogs and blogging. It entails regularly writing and publishing quality content that promotes brand awareness and supports search engine optimization and social media marketing. Such content may be articles, videos, memes or images that may be easily shared on the internet by internet users. This sharing somehow voluntarily or unwittingly helps to publicize your product/service very widely.

Videos, Games and Website Advertising
 
Since search engines found a way to index videos and voices online, these marketing methods have become increasingly popular with marketers. They are simply the ads you put on web pages, blogs, video sharing sites like YouTube and games, including mobile apps. Even though this may be a very good marketing method, you need considerable resources to support this type of digital marketing. You may choose to play down on it if you are low on ads budget because it is not very cost-efficient.