Startup companies deal with lots of hiccups to build and maintain their brand presence in the market where some leading companies already enjoy a huge market share. If you’re a startup and seeking some help to create and optimize your brand presence, this guide on digital Marketing strategy for startups will help you a lot.

In the beginning, usually, startups have no brand recognition and their budget is also limited. In this phase, marketing your brand as a startup can be a little bit difficult. Planning and implementing a strong Digital Marketing Strategy is all that you need!

Digital Marketing Strategy

A Digital Marketing strategy for a startup can be considered as a roadmap to build brand awareness online. It requires creating a cohesive plan for how to generate leads for your brand, products, and services to grow your business online.

Without a proper understanding of digital marketing, you will not be able to get your business. In fact, you’ll miss out on seeing a big picture of your potential customers and their pain points.

How to create a digital marketing strategy for startups

Not a single plan works for all. Your digital strategy for branding may vary from industry to industry based on your marketing objectives and other factors.

However, you can utilize the steps mentioned below to come up with a winning digital marketing strategy for startups.

1. Define Your Marketing Objectives

If you don’t know what’s your destination, how will you define your path? You can’t!

So, first of all, define your marketing objectives so that you can create a proper plan accordingly. Your goals and objectives must be realistic and achievable to assist your teamwork in one unified direction.

Your objectives can fall under the following categories:

• Acquisition objectives: How and from where you will have visits to your website.
• Conversion objectives: Decide which actions are done by your site visitors will act as the conversions to your business. It could be purchases, downloads, registrations, etc.
• Customer retention objectives: Define how you will retain and engage customers to your website.
• Advocacy objectives: Define the criteria for tracking customers’ loyalty.

So, what’s your marketing objective?

2. Research Your Target Market

Next, you need to define your target niche. Analyze your marketing environment to get a clear picture of your current situation. Figure out the factors that can affect your marketing efforts to build relationships with your audience.

You can break down your target market into two ways:

Macro-environment: The macro-environment consists of major uncontrollable and external forces that can influence your company’s decision-making and its performance. Such forces can be related to economic, technological, natural, demographic, socio-cultural, legal, and political factors.

Here, you need to study the current online marketing trends and your target users. On the basis of your target market, define your target age group, target geographic location, demographic details, the approximate size of your niche.

And, of course, the study of a competitive environment should not be overlooked. Analyze their marketing strategies, audience, product prices, brand presence, etc. At this step, SWOT analysis is also required to be done.

Micro-environment: Then you need to study the micro-environment of your business. It consists of all those controllable factors that affect the company’s ability to serve its customers. Such factors can be related to the company, its competitors, workers, suppliers, marketing intermediaries, customer markets, etc.

In order to understand your micro-environment in the digital world, we recommend you conduct a web audit and social media audit of your brand presence. Get into detail regarding your web architecture, user experience, SEO, blog visits, comments, and other social proofs. One best tool that will help you analyze your market is SEMrush.

3. Keyword Research

Now, you know a lot about your target market. Your next step would be to conduct keyword research. These keywords will help you bridge the gap between your brand and your target customers.

Start with creating a list of primary keywords. And, then expand it with the secondary keywords list.

For example, you have launched a new sports company where you deal in sports equipment. If you want to promote one of your sports equipment, ahead squash racket, your primary keyword can be ‘Buy squash racket’. On the basis of this primary keyword, your secondary keywords can be ‘Buy squash racket online’, ‘Best squash racket near me’, ‘get squash racket online’, etc.

Now, it’s your turn. Think about which search queries your target customers can use to reach a business like yours. Prepare a list for all those target keywords.

4. Find Your Prospective Customers

In order to entice your target customers to come to your website, you must first provide them with something of value. For that, you need to create your presence where they usually hang out. Hence, your next step would be to find out where your target customers love to spend their time the most. Also, find out how they prefer to find a business like yours.

Do they prefer Googling first to resolve their problem? Do they like to spend their time on social platforms? How often do they scroll the stories on social media? Do they follow any major influencers in your industry? Do they prefer to find solutions to their problems on YouTube?

Answer these questions and it will be easier for you to create a digital marketing campaign for your brand.

5. Create Marketing Funnel

A marketing funnel is required to plan strategies to convert your site visitors into paying customers. In this step, you need to break down your customers’ journey from the brand awareness stage to the brand advocacy stage.

• Awareness: Include brand awareness strategies to inform your target customers about your company, brand, products, and services.
• Consideration: At this stage, your target customers start taking interest in your brand and compare you against your competitors. They try to learn more and more about your brand and how you can help them.
• Conversion: If they find your company and brand reliable and secure, they will make their purchasing decision to experience your products.
• Brand Loyalty: A customer becomes loyal to your brand when they think that will get value every time from your company.
• Brand Advocacy: Your loyal customers will become your brand advocates if they get continuous support from your company. They won’t hesitate to do word-of-mouth promotion for your brand.

On the basis of each stage in your marketing funnel, your marketing activities will change. Your digital marketing activities should cover:

a.) Content Marketing: Content Marketing involves the creation, publication, and distribution of valuable content to the target audience.

b.) Social Media Marketing (SMM): Social media marketing offers the opportunity to establish thought leadership and build relationships with your target customers.

c.) Search Engine Optimisation: SEO involves optimizing your website for your target keywords and helps drive high-quality traffic to your website.

d.) Email Marketing: It involves creating emails and newsletters and other ROI-driven email programs for business growth.

e.) Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC): Investing in PPC campaigns can help you generate sales-ready leads.

6. Set Your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

Identify the key metrics that define your success. Is it the number of likes and shares? Is it the number of followers you gain in a particular time period? Is it the increase in retention rate on your website? Or is it the increase in the conversion rate of your business?

Whatever KPIs you’ll set, make sure they are measurable and specific. An ideal practice should be to define KPIs both for the short term as well as long term for each stage of the marketing funnel.

7. Set Your Marketing Budget

And, here comes the most important step! Decide your marketing budget. After analyzing your target market, target audience, and current marketing environment, you have to figure out how much you want to invest in promoting your startup business online. This will help you figure out an estimation of profits and ROI that you’ll generate from your digital marketing campaign.

Plan Your Digital Marketing Strategy Now!

So, this is how you can create a digital marketing strategy for startups. And, now, it’s your turn to plan yours. We would love to hear your words on it.

Need a marketing expert? Feel free to contact our brand and marketing consultants.

Stay tuned! ?

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