The majority of our content consumption occurs in the digital realm these days. Marketing has gone digital to keep up with our dependency on technology. This shift necessitates your brand having a digital presence. You’ll need a solid digital marketing strategy to build a successful digital presence for your startup.
You may have a fantastic, one-of-a-kind idea, a wonderful team, and plenty of cash, but it isn’t enough to expand your business and make it stable and successful. More clients, sales, and profits are the main components for your startup’s success, which can be achieved with a well-thought-out digital marketing strategy for startups!
So, what exactly is digital marketing, and why do you need a digital marketing strategy for startups? The phrase “digital marketing strategy” covers a wide range of topics. When you’re on your own, it’s easy to get distracted. This is why we’ve put up this step-by-step guide on how to create a digital marketing strategy for startups in simple actions.
Before understanding the actions required on how to create a digital marketing strategy, let us take a look at what exactly is a digital marketing strategy?
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a step-by-step, practical plan for accomplishing your company’s digital marketing objectives.
Digital marketing is carried out by the use of digital marketing channels. Social media, digital publishing, and paid, earned, or owned media are examples of these channels.
A digital marketing strategy entails a methodical approach to determining your digital marketing objectives and the most effective methods for achieving them.
Steps to Building a Digital Marketing Strategy
1. Create and Set Goals
Before you begin planning, you must first determine what you want to accomplish with your marketing approach. This stage may appear easy, but it necessitates the creation of a comprehensive and explicit set of objectives.
The SMART criterion can be used to do this. Setting targets with the acronym SMART is a highly useful and often used mnemonic strategy. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely goals are among the SMART criteria for creating goals.
Increasing the number of views to your website is not a SMART objective.
A SMART objective for the next two months is to generate 10% more traffic to your website using advertisements on X social media platforms. When you describe the specific actions you’ll take to get there, it becomes even more “SMART”.
2. Creating and Evaluating Your Digital Marketing Presence
The first step in establishing your digital presence is to have a well-optimized website and social media accounts. You may employ a professional designer to go over your website to make it appear more professional. You must have a blog for your website if you want to do content marketing and increase organic traffic. You may establish an online presence through blogs and articles to provide your consumers an impression of your services and products.
You may also place prominent connections to your website in several directories to increase traffic. You may also hire professionals in the area to help you with your digital marketing strategy. These professionals may advise you on what will and will not work in your situation. You will have a greater chance of success if you incorporate these in your digital marketing strategy.
It’s important to know what you’ve already done, even if it’s almost nothing. This phase will assist you in determining what you should concentrate on in order to attain your present objectives.
To begin, you must first comprehend your primary marketing channels:
- Your internet site is excellent.
- Use of social media
- Marketing via email
- SEO/content marketing
- Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing
Which of them is bringing you the most traffic and leads? From most effective to least effective, rank each channel and specific media (thus far).
3. Identify and Understand the Digital Sales Funnel
The arc of your buyer’s journey from stranger to repeat or long-term client is represented by the digital sales funnel. The funnel may help a business with a strong digital presence reach its digital marketing objectives. How? By using the right digital marketing tools at each stage of the funnel.
Understanding the digital sales funnel necessitates an understanding of each stage of the funnel as well as the digital technologies that support it.
Some of the Digital Sales Funnel Responses are:
- Awareness: Make sure that potential customers are aware of your existence. For example, through social media advertisements or a high search engine rating.
- Interest: Inspire people to learn more about your startup. Who are you, and what distinguishes you from your competitors? Features about your business in digital magazines and videos are two popular digital tactics at this level.
- Engage: Make your connections stronger. Sponsored social media postings that answer potential customer issues or encourage them to ask inquiries are an excellent strategy for this stage.
- Action: Make a deal with the customer. Implementing calls-to-action for the client to make a purchase is a tool for this stage. Incentivizing a purchase, for example, by giving discounts in advertising or emails to the customer.
4. Create Buyer Personas
Before you can successfully reach out to your target audience, you must first understand who they are. So, how do you figure out who your target market is?
Put yourself in the shoes of your consumer. Once you have a good idea of who a person is, you can make some educated guesses about what would appeal to them.
Creating personas helps you to produce content and marketing that appeals to your target audience at the most fundamental level. It also allows you to customize or target your marketing to different parts of your audience.
Buyer personas also help you to plan out and produce highly targeted content when paired with the lifecycle stage (i.e. how far along someone is in your sales cycle).
Some critical techniques for obtaining the data you’ll need to create personas are:
- Examine your contacts database for patterns in how specific leads or customers discover and consume your content.
- When developing forms for your website, provide form fields that capture crucial persona information. If all of your personas differ in terms of firm size, for example, ask each lead for this information on your forms.
- Make an effort to be specific. What exactly do the customers require? What are their inclinations? What can you do to satisfy (or perhaps exceed) their expectations?
- Take into account what your sales staff has to say about the leads they’re dealing with the most. What generalizations can they draw about the various sorts of clients you best serve?
- Customers and prospects should be interviewed to learn what they enjoy about your product or service.
5. Figure Out Where Your Customers Are In The Funnel
After that, you must discover your clients at various phases of the funnel. Customers that are receptive to engaging with you will most likely be found at all levels of the funnel.
For example, let’s say your product is a plant-based protein supplement. Your prospective customer may be:
- Someone who searches for a plant-based protein supplement on Google and finds up reading an article about you.
- Someone who sees your sponsored Facebook post about how your supplement is made of organic power sources and is looking to buy a plant-based supplement with no chemicals added.
- Someone who has already purchased your plant-based protein supplement and is now being included in an email campaign offering a discounted price on the supplement.
Once you have this data, you can start targeting different categories of clients through various channels.
6. Developing a Content Plan
You will design a distinct marketing plan for each channel that attracts your clients at this point. What kind of content do you need for each of these channels to meet your digital marketing objectives?
A succession of activities will make up your digital marketing strategy, each of which will respond to a certain aim. It will also provide a detailed timeframe so that the actions may be measured.
Some tips to create a content plan are:
- Creating a keyword strategy entails finding significant keywords in order to boost SEO.
- Creating a content calendar that allows you to set long-term goals that are easy to track. Your editorial calendar will be quite detailed. Author, publishing date, keywords, topic, and possible tags will all be included in each actionable item.
- Each month on the calendar should have a digital marketing target. Starting in January, for example, you’ll have bi-weekly postings on a certain subject on your site.
- Posting on social media: Use the research you’ve done to figure out what kind of material to publish on which social media platforms and how often to do so.
- Including CTAs and widgets in your digital marketing material is critical for allowing customers to quickly connect with you and your items.
- Marketing automation tools: Once you’ve nailed down your content strategy, these tools can help you save time and be more productive.
7. Incorporate Email Marketing
The most efficient approach to advertise your company is through email marketing. You’ll need to collect their email addresses in order to create an email list of potential consumers. It’s just a question of recognizing where to look for an email address and getting it properly the first time.
Going online and researching what other people are doing is a good approach to get started with marketing. Knowing which approaches are effective may assist you in getting started as well as provide you with excellent suggestions for how to construct your list.
You simply must avoid mailing to those who are uninterested in your goods or service. If you want your list to last, make sure the people on it are interested in your product or service.
8. Emphasize User Experience
Your audience is crucial to you now that the marketing focus has moved from profit maximization to improving customer happiness. Maintaining their happiness and satisfaction will guarantee that you remain competitive in the long run. As a result, all of your Digital Marketing strategies should be created with your target audience’s interests, wants, and pain points in mind.
To do this, you must devote time and effort to research. Find out what kind of material your target audience responds to the most, what products/services can best solve their problems, where they spend the majority of their online time, what they’re saying about your brand and products/services on social media, and so on. This type of in-depth research can assist you in better understanding your target audience and creating a unique and tailored user experience for them.
Here are some examples of how you may provide your consumers a pleasant user experience:
- Customer service that is available in real-time.
- Content that is concise, relevant, and instructive.
- Chatbots for communication and help.
- Website design and navigation options that are easy to understand.
- The website/web pages load quickly.
9. Results Analysis
After you’ve established a plan, repeat this step at regular intervals (add it to your calendar). How are your consumers reacting to the information you’re providing with them? How are you doing in terms of achieving your objectives? These statistics can assist you in correcting your path and learning from things that did not go as intended.
You may track your progress at various phases of the funnel utilizing analytics tools. The tools can assist you to know about:
- If your clicks are converting into sales. Is there any movement in the funnel? Why do you think that is?
- If you reach a point when you’re losing consumer engagement. What’s the problem, and what can you do about it?
- What is working and what isn’t.
Keep up with the most recent digital marketing tools; there may be something new on the market that precisely meets your analysis requirements.
With the information you’ve gathered, you may use data visualization tools to generate visuals that will aid in comparisons, goal monitoring, and presentations.
Conclusion
You may have observed that there are two essential phrases you must live by in order to build a solid foundation for a successful digital marketing strategy for startups: objectives and specifics. Make precise goals and then define the actions you’ll need to get there—the more detailed, the better!
The bottom line is that a well-rounded digital marketing strategy for startups can assist you in achieving two key business objectives: increasing brand recognition and attracting the proper sort of consumers. Your committed digital marketing tactics will help you build a lasting relationship with your consumers through time, ensuring your survival in an ever-changing industry.