Online marketing is synonymous with success in the era of digital business. If you are going to make it in 2019 and beyond, your start-up needs to have some sort of online marketing strategy in place and ongoing. Those companies that learn to master online marketing are the ones that typically lead their industries. To that end, here are, in our opinion, the 10 best online marketing tips for your new start-up:
1. Embrace White Hat SEO
Far too many start-up owners fail to realise that online marketing begins with websites and social media development. Ask yourself this simple but critical question: how will potential customers find my business if they cannot find it online?
SEO is a collection of strategies and methodologies for ensuring a website appears near the top of the organic results for given words and phrases. White hat SEO involves those strategies and methodologies approved by the big search engines, like Google. Your start-up needs to embrace white hat SEO as the foundation of any online marketing strategy.
2. Establish a Dedicated Budget
Online marketing costs money, at least if you’re doing it right. Therefore, it is essential to establish a dedicated budget with monies devoted exclusively to marketing. That money will come from business startup loans initially. But after your start-up begins generating revenues, a certain portion of those revenues can be set aside for marketing. Note that without a dedicated budget, you might find marketing gradually falls on your list of financial priorities.
3. Choose the Right Channels
If your start-up is like most others, you will not have the time or resources to spend on marketing through every available online channel. That is both normal and okay. The goal is to identify those channels that will be most profitable in the here and now and devote yourself to them. You can add more channels as your business and resources grow.
It might be worth it to hire a digital marketing specialist during the initial stages of your start-up. The specialist can help you identify the most appropriate channels and how to access them effectively.
4. Control Your Online Reputation
The reputation your start-up enjoys online will have a major influence on all of your marketing efforts. It is no different than the local reputation a business has within its own community. A business with a bad reputation will be lacking for customers while a business with a good reputation will be winning customers. It’s your choice.
Understand that your online reputation will affect search engine rankings and social media references. Thus, a big part of your online marketing strategy should be reputation management. Control your online reputation by being responsive, answering questions, dealing with complaints, and correcting known issues.
5. Embrace Social Media
Social media is a lot like going to the dentist. We complain about how inconvenient and uncomfortable it is, but it serves a valuable purpose that should never be ignored. Successful online marketing in the digital era requires embracing social media channels. Facebook is obviously number one, followed by channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
6. Market to People
Marketing directly to customers may seem like a no-brainer, but marketing to people has taken on an entirely new meaning in the digital era. Today’s online culture has come to assume that everything they want or need can be custom tailored directly to them. Indeed, ‘there’s an app for that’ has become a ubiquitous phrase that explains just how customised the modern world has become.
Successful online marketing requires the same kind of mindset. Instead of just marketing to millennials for example, market to those specific millennials most likely to need your services or products. This can be accomplished through the use of personas – fictional customers the marketing department creates in order to develop strategies to reach them.
7. Build Your Brand
Building a brand has always been an important part of business success. In online marketing, brand building is all about making your business memorable and easily recognised. Branding should be consistent across all online channels so as to create a cohesive message. Branding should also be the number one consideration for every message your start-up wants to send – before it is sent.
8. Market with Content
The era ushered in by the commercial availability of the internet has come to be known as the ‘information age’. Indeed, there has never been another time in history in which so many people had so much access to so much information. This is good in the sense that you can successfully market to people who are hungry for more information by producing content that speaks to them.
In the old days, online marketing was all about keywords. You could produce an entire page of online blather that said absolutely nothing, as long as it contained the right keywords and phrases to cause your page to show up in organic searches. Those days are gone. Today’s sophisticated internet users are looking for information rich content.
9. Educate Rather Than Sell
As long as we are talking about marketing with content, one of the best things you can do with your content from a marketing standpoint is to educate your customers rather than sell to them. It isn’t the 1950s any more. Naff advertising slogans and over-the-top promotions do not cut it any more.
Today’s consumers don’t want to know that they should buy your product or service. They want to know why what you are selling is better than what your competitors are selling. They want to know what makes your company special. They want to know that you are an expert in what you do. So rather than ‘sell’ to them, educate them instead.
10. Look to the Video
Have you ever heard of a blog post or news article going viral? No, and there is a good reason for that. Videos go viral because they get the point across quickly without a whole lot of work required on the viewer’s part. Written content, on the other hand, requires more participation on the readers end.
Keep producing written content for the purposes of educating your audience. But put just as much time into producing videos, too. We live in a very visual culture where video-based information is often better received than written text. If you can find just the right balance between the two, your online marketing strategy should do very well.
There is no black and white means of marketing that works for every start-up. What works for some start-ups will not work for others. But if you are willing to employ as many of these tips as possible, your marketing strategy should produce the kinds of results you want.