Each such byte focuses on a functional issue startups need to solve as they build their company, from idea to scale. In this edition, we speak about digital marketing.
Most of you as entrepreneurs have heard this oft-repeated question from investors “what is your go to market strategy”? Have you ever wished that you had a magic wand in form of a marketing strategy to spike up your orders or revenues?
Majority of start-ups and small business owners would love to hire a consultant to solve their marketing problems. It is, however, expensive to outsource marketing and advertising work. While having a marketing budget is important for any small business, it is equally important to spend it in the right direction and make the most of it. How do you know where to spend it when it comes to digital marketing vs traditional marketing? These days digital is a new buzz word, there are variety of platforms, approaches and one often wonders how to make the best of it. What will be return on investment on these channels, is traffic more important or conversion? Do likes matter or shares and comments?
The main difference between digital and traditional marketing is the medium through which an audience encounters a marketing message. While traditional marketing uses traditional media like magazines and newspapers, digital marketing uses digital media, such as social media platforms and websites.
Digital marketing has the edge over traditional marketing when you do not have a significant budget for marketing or would not like to allocate significant resources. In addition, it is also a lot easier to track the reach through analytics. As Pierre Omidyar – tech entrepreneur puts it “We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people.”
Here are 7 digital marketing tools to help your start-up get noticed-
Content marketing has a long-term orientation and helps you distribute relevant, valuable content consistently thereby spreading brand awareness. Content does not merely refer to blogs, it also covers podcasts, videos, webinars, or authored articles. If you have a small team you can allocate a topic to each of them and see that you churn out content at least once a fortnight. You can also reach out to your customers depending on the relation you share and ask if they can share an opinion piece for your blog.
Tip: Track news on Google using keywords associated to your business. This will help you stay updated and write on current topics that are relevant to your business. In addition, as Seth Godin says, “Tell Stories”. Engagement is the key.
Social media allows you to build followers and engage with a larger audience which leads to spreading your organizations brand awareness and lead generations. Social media is vital when it comes to sharing content. Just be careful that you do not push your sales agenda. Most prevalent platforms are Face Book, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. The effective use of this platforms depends on your business model. B2B business benefit from Linked in more than Face Book. B2C model will benefit from Face Book and Instagram. You can use schedulers like Hootsuite to schedule updates on social media to save your time.
Tip: If you are not sure what platforms you should be using for social media outreach, chalk out your competitors and analyse what platforms they are active on and which of these have better engagement rate. You can just choose to use the platforms where there is better engagement rate from your target customers instead of trying all the platforms. And finally, as aptly said by Erin Bury, “Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t want plastered on a billboard with your face on it.”
Public relations are a very important aspect of marketing and communications. You can find the contact details of relevant journalists from the author by-line of an article. You can prepare a pitch note and mail it to journalists, just ensure that you do not end up spamming their mailbox and pitch note is personalised.
Tip: Most of the journalists are active on Twitter and LinkedIn. Engage with them and update them once per quarter. Have an updated boiler plate about your organization and spokesperson profile ready to share it along with the press release. Always share your mobile number along with press release.
Make sure the keywords on site are the ones you want to be found for. If they are not, you will probably end up with a very higher bounce rate and a very low conversion. You can keep a list of keywords and analyse which keywords works best for you and change the keywords accordingly.
Tip: Use short URLs. Ensure that your website loads fast. Use descriptive alt tags for images. Use your target keyword in the title, meta description. Most importantly keep your content simple and readable.
When it comes to customer interaction, email marketing is one of the most effective strategy with ROI of 4400%. Email campaigns help you improve brand recall and can very easily be automated using right tools like mailchimp or Sendy.
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/company/annual-report/2016/
Tip: If you do not find much response for your email marketing, check the analytics for the open rate and bounce rate. If your open rate is not great, try using an engaging subject line or try sending it in other time of the day. A/B testing helps you test for multiple such parameters to improve results. Sendy provides an option called perfect timing, which sends your email to your target user when he/she is online.
You can give new life to your old data with Infographics. Infographics are very powerful marketing tool as they are packed with content, visually appealing, easy to digest. You can create infographics on your own using professional graphic tools that are available on internet for free or on shoestring budget.
Tip: Platforms like Vengage and Canva are easy to use and provide a huge range of templates to customize. Canva also provides over 50 million stock photos which otherwise would be priced anywhere between 10$-100$. If you still find these platforms hard to use or time consuming, then you can post your gig on Fiverr and get your work done for 5$ within 24 hours.
Most of us have experienced this when are making some major purchase decisions, we rely more on feedback or advise of people we trust rather than what the companies say about their products as articulated by Danny Brown, Award-Winning Marketer and Author “ 90% trust peers on social networks (even strangers); only 15–18% trust brands.” This makes people endorsing our products very important.
Tip:Find the top influencers for your area. Get authentic reviews, get appropriate influencers to write about the company and listen to what is coming up.
In the end it is about doing more from less. Levine, Author of The Cluetrain Manifesto said, “Authenticity, honesty, and personal voice underlie much of what’s successful on the Web.” The fundamental brand values are critical to communicate. Audience will quickly see through the content created only to sell versus content created to build relationships and trust. Happy Marketing all of you. Let us know if you have questions or feedback. Reach out to us on info@caspian.in.