In the Q3 of 2019 alone 241,000 new businesses were registered in the US and in the same quarter, 226,000 businesses closed down. Could Digital Marketing have helped?
Every day, the market is flooded with new brands. However, not all the brands and companies have the power to compete with a well-established brand. In reality, the startups feel difficulty standing upright in front of millions of marketing campaigns.
With risking business complexity and marketing agendas, startups’ only hope to be successful in marketing is digital marketing.
Business startups indeed have a limited budget, which means they must make maximum profit with a limited budget to get better revenues.
With so many limitations, competitors, and limited budgets, the only way to shine for the Startups to establish their brand image are smart growth hacks and digital marketing strategies.
Why is Digital Marketing Important for Startups?
As discussed earlier, with the frequent brand launches, it is challenging to keep customer flow on-site. However, the competition is not only for themselves, and specific niches, but also with millions of marketing strategies that individuals encounter daily.
Hence, the emphasis is on the marketing operations that involve efficient technology, seamless process, and experienced individuals.
However, the Startups have a shoestring budget, so they need marketing operations to scale the business and boost customer base at the same time.
Here are some points that tell why digital marketing is so important for Startups.
Client Engagement
The most important thing to use digital marketing hacks and social media platforms for is engaging clients. The social media hacks and digital marketing allow retention of your customers.
The digital marketing tools help to build hand on hand relationships with the customers. And once this relationship is developed, with minimum efforts, you will retain your clients and drive more sales.
Use Specific Metrics to Drive Success
Audiences use mobile devices to search for products and be online. Due to huge advancements and widespread access to the internet on mobile devices, online marketing is the most effective way to compel customers.
Also, digital sales funnels, when done correctly, offer clear metrics for Startups to have a real understanding of what is happening and what are the issues at each stage of the sales process. Tools like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager, despite their increased complexity are offering useful metrics.
Develop Cohesive Digital Marketing Strategies
The Startups, due to the limited budget, must be more specific with digital marketing strategies. So, digital marketing helps to develop a cohesive strategy, including content marketing, email marketing, and advertisement.
From post generation to website design, these techniques allow you to execute advance plans for your business startup to work effectively.
Better Understanding of the Customers
Where companies research for the customers, Startups need to understand the customers better to tailor their behaviour in the long term. Here, digital marketing techniques allow you to monitor, track and interpret customer needs and behavior.
Entrepreneurs can figure out the demographics and products that work best for their Startup business. Rather than wasting millions of bucks on expensive ad campaigns, the Startup can use affordable digital marketing hacks to target its consumers.
SEO is Important
Where business individuals think that SEO is a waste of money, here for Startups, it still figures out as the essential part for ranking websites. No doubt, Google recently updated its algorithm, and as the advancement, SEO is still a ruling platform to rank your site on the search engine page.
For business Startups, it is essential to use search engine optimization tools to achieve traffic and improve sales revenues.
How to Use SEO for an Early Stage Startup?
Besides the technical mechanics of SEO-proofing content, acquiring deep understanding of a specific niche, also means becoming an expert in the problem your startup is solving for that specific audience.
There is a parallel here that implies using the “right words”, in SEO terms these words are keywords. The more you develop an understanding of your audience and the messages you need to pass, the more you perfect your “keywords set”.
This, in a way, is the learning process that will get a startup to master its SEO strategy.
Digital Marketing Strategies for Early Stage Startups
Content Marketing
With the same investment, content marketing has the power of generating leads three times better than the paid strategies. Writing Seo friendly content would be a plus point for generating long-lasting results.
Similarly, some big brands like Buffer, HubSpot, Mint, and Blue Apron skyrocketed these Startup hacks to improve sales.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the most affordable and important marketing strategy to grow the Startup business. It helps to attract customers in a personalized way to get the highest revenues. Ignoring email marketing during the early stage of Startups means ignoring potential customers. Email Marketing boosts revenue and growth twice faster.
Social Media Marketing
When we think of business Startups, the first and foremost digital marketing strategy to pay attention to is social media promotions.
Promoting your brand on these platforms has a significant power to drive more sales and Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn allow you to boost the traffic on your website and improve customer engagement.
To be more specific, choosing the right platform for social media can turn your business into a profitable niche.
Search Engine Marketing
For Startups, you need to be more specific while selecting early-stage marketing strategies. Search engine marketing allows you to get instant traffic on your site. Moreover, it helps to achieve high ranking on search engines and attract more visitors.
For search engine marketing, business Startups can create engaging content, landing pages, optimize sites to get instant results, and drive sales.
Video Marketing
Use short, impactful videos to introduce your startup, showcase your products or services, and share your brand story. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube can help you reach your audience effectively. Leverage free online video editor tools to create engaging content without breaking the bank. Focus on videos that highlight your unique value proposition and build brand awareness.
Referral Marketing
Startup businesses need more affordable strategies due to limited budgets. So, beside being a great validation tool, referral marketing will be a plus. In short, your potential buyers will be your sellers. In return for promotion, they get discounts and incentive on referrals made.
This strategy proves to be most effective in getting massive customers on your platform and getting instant results.
Massive exposure and leads are the keys to the success of Startup businesses.
Here, these effective strategies will help to promote your brand and establish a great brand image effectively.
How Do Digital Marketing Agencies Help Startups?
The problem with the Startups is not only the competitors but also the millions of digital marketing campaigns that established business individuals are spamming with.
Stories of failed Startups’ already exceed the successful ones. However, the startups’ significant challenge is low budget and highly efficient marketing strategies that they can’t afford.
Thus, to get a headstart, show online presence, and attract organic traffic, some digital marketing agencies will execute affordable digital marketing strategies to achieve the best results. The most important aspect to understand is that agencies will execute your plans, but they won’t necessarily have the marketing and business understanding of your niche.
This is the reason behind the statistics that are mentioning that 90-97% of startups fail. It is like saying that it isn’t too obvious connecting the dots between service/products, technology, and market.
From our point of view connecting the dots is an exploration that into a new business territory and often, regardless if you are doing it with a mentor or not, it is a learning and discovery process of the intrinsic values and mechanism of your business.
Along with the approaches mentioned above, we have our participants getting more traction for their websites with designing and executing:
- Seo optimization
- Website design
- Content writing
- Research & Analysis
- Improve conversion rates
- Referral marketing
- Influence marketing
- Search engine marketing
What Are Some Examples of Successful Growth Hacks for Startups?
The low budget might be a limit for the Startups, but not anymore. Here, we have some best growth hacks for Startups that project a good image and increase chances of succeeding.
Here, we have arranged some of the best Startup growth hacking tips to improve your marketing efforts and ingenuity. In simple terms, these are the strategies that can be implemented as non-traditional strategies to get instant results to improve sales.
So let’s pay some attention to these strategic hacks to improve visibility and gain sales.
YouTube Strategy
Even though producing video content may not be the easiest for early stage companies, it is the best growth hack for Startups to grow your business on YouTube strategically. It gives you a platform to post valuable content on YouTube and improve ROI.
This helps boost online presence, build a reputation, and trigger trust, which benefits your Startup business. For example, GoPro’s cornerstone strategy is YouTube, which improves the brand image and effectively showcases the products.
GoPro back in 2013 published successfully user-generated content on its YouTube channel.
GoPro founders had a pretty precise idea of the market they wanted to go after. So they hired extreme athletes to demonstrate the hi-rez and easy to use popular cameras.
In 2014 GoPro was the top brand on Youtube
Airbnb – Craigslist Growth Hack
Airbnb – Craigslist is one of the famous growth hacks that help with product integration. It is one of the smart ways to score more affordable marketing plans.
Airbnb put this in place only around 2010, so it wasn’t the first growth hacking attempts executed by the famous startup.
A brief recap of Airbnb growth.
- In 2008 the startup launched its services on the occasion of the Democratic National Convention. The three co-founders knew their market and also that 80,000 people were expected to attend the historic last night of the convention, but the city had only 28,000 hotel rooms.
Airbnb was able to sign up 800 people and host 80 guests. - In 2009 Airbnb received $20,000 from Y Combinator and it is looking for faster growth.
The team at Airbnb knew that Craigslist had a huge user base of people looking for a not so standard experience offered by hotels. Among them, there were also Airbnb’s potential customers. - In 2010, Airbnb created a script that allowed Airbnb users to semi-automatically post Airbnb offerings into Craigslist listings.
The rest is history.
Dollar Shave Club Growth Video Hack
Being business individuals, we understand the value of video marketing. This is a great marketing technique to show your presence across social media.
By the time Dollar Shave published the video, the founders did already their homework creating a great value proposition and planning the video campaign. The very low budget video launch was fundamental for the CEO Micheal Dubin to move to the next stage, that was the only full-time person in the company at that time.
More recently, a similar very approach has been followed by Dr. Squatch Soap Company with a more expensive video ad.
Quora helps your SEO
Do you have a strong proposition? Can you answer the question “ What is the problem your business is solving?“.
If so, you may be ready for this hack. We are getting a little geek in this one.
These hacks may not work for all businesses, but if you know (as you should do) your target market very well, you may know where they hang out. If your targets use Quora.com, this should work for you.
Choose 2-3 keywords around the problem or problems your business is solving. There are many strategies to do this, in this article we are not going in detail.
From Google, search-related meaningful questions on Quora.com for example you can type on the search bar something like:
inurl:quora.com all-natural soap men
Take the questions on Quora that show up on the first page of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
Write an article for your blog using those questions as titles for your sections.
If you apply proper SEO strategy in an article built in such a way you would be improving tremendously the ranking for your article and website.
Final Thoughts
It’s challenging for startups to stand amongst the established brands that have a strong presence and have to use various digital marketing hacks for their business.
However, in this vast competitive world, chances are still there to get the top place on search engines if you do identify your market, find the right messages that resonate with your audience and follow some functional strategies.
Most time Startups are struggling with SEO strategies mainly because of the work that was supposed to be done before the execution isn’t complete.
Not sure about it? Challenge us to work with you on getting business clarity and designing the best strategy for your company, we’ll get you to the next level!
About Us
At M Accelerator, we offer tracks for ideation, early-stage, and later-stage startups guiding founders through creating or perfecting a business strategy and executing go-to-market plans.
Most of our startups are looking for fundraising, others work with us to improve their sales strategies and boost revenue.
M Accelerator gives to its participants $1,000,000 in marketing tools credits to its participants.
At M Accelerator we started in 2017, we have trained 250 founders from more than 20 countries (Virtual and in Los Angeles) and we have helped them bootstrap, launch, scale up and raise more than $16M for their startups.
We are also building our first fund: M Accelerator Venture I will invest in M Accelerator best companies.
