Digital marketing tips for start-ups | Start up marketing success

The success of a startup depends on several things, one of which is a solid marketing strategy. Having a digital marketing plan that aligns with your overall marketing strategy is essential for any start-up in any industry. Very few, if any, marketing channels can provide the targeted reach and scale in a cost-effective manner that digital marketing offers.

Let us list some of the key things to consider as part of your start-ups digital marketing efforts. While these are quite elementary and some of you might find them too obvious, we have found from our experience of working with numerous start-ups across diverse sectors that basics do tend to get overlooked.

Build a strong digital presence

A professional business website is a basic first step to establishing your digital presence. Some start ups don’t deem this necessary enough and consider listings or profiles created on third-party platforms (for example, social media handles) as being good enough. However, having your own website, preferably with a domain name that is simple to remember, goes a long to help build credibility for your start-up. Equally importantly, your website is your opportunity to showcase your business and your value propositions to your prospective customers/ clients.

Your website does not have to flashy or fancy. A simple, accurate and responsive website with a good site structure is all you need to start with. You can invest more on your website as your business grows. (If you need help with website development for your start-up, get in touch with us)

Ensure that your website URL gets mentioned in all your external messaging- be it in e-mails, or online/ offline marketing collateral.

Of course, a strong digital presence will include how you present yourself on other digital channels, such as social media platforms, YouTube, Local Business directories, industry, or sector-specific business directories, etc. Each of these channels require special effort to get the optimum results – and we will cover optimisation tips for each of these in subsequent articles. Suffice to say, build a ‘Digital Presence Optimisation’ mindset right from the outset.

Make Search Engine Marketing integral to your marketing strategy

Some start up founders, especially of mobile app-based businesses, seem to think that search engine marketing is not appropriate and beneficial to them. We think it is an opportunity missed – as search engines, especially Google, continue to be one of the most used on the Internet.

In most cases, we recommend that you should consider both organic – Search engine optimization (SEO)– and paid search engine advertising (typically referred to as SEM) to reach your target audience from the very beginning. While SEM gives you instant visibility, consistent effort on SEO will reap rich rewards in the medium to long term. The issue with SEO though is that the longer you defer working on it, the more difficult it becomes to achieve positive outcomes.

In short, pencil in SEO and SEM as integral to the digital marketing strategy for your start-up.

Pick and choose your social media platforms carefully

Having a presence on all the major social media platforms i.e. Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly, Twitter), Linkedin may make sense from an overall digital presence perspective. However, some platforms will be more appropriate for your start-up than others, depending on your business and the audience you are targeting.

Every business can benefit differently from each platform. What might work for one business, might not work for another. For example, it is possible that your digital marketing strategy works great with LinkedIn, for instance, and does not manage to get satisfactory results from Facebook and Instagram. So choose and invest in social media platforms wisely.

You can also set your goals and expected outcomes from each platform based on the audience profile on each of these platforms and tailor your marketing messages accordingly. Invest your time and effort strategically on the ones that prove most helpful to your startup.

Think and act like a publisher/ content creator

The ability to create and distribute high-quality content useful and shareable – appropriate for different platforms- is increasingly a critical success factor for start-ups.

The challenge that start-ups often face is being able to continuously churn out interesting and relevant content to fuel their inbound marketing efforts. Though the advent of generative AI tools- text, graphic and video- have made it considerably easier to create content, start-ups till need to first build a publisher/content creator mindset.

Focus on getting key contact details

Capturing important user information such as e-mail address and mobile phone number should be an imperative for a start-up. Having these details will enable you to use that in a number of effective ways, be it e-mail marketing, mobile marketing (SMS/ WhatsApp messages), or re-marketing/ re-targeting using various advertising platforms including Google Ads and Meta (Facebook/ Instagram) Ads.

It is important, however, for a start-up to take necessary steps for compliance with data protection and privacy rules in the country you are operating in/ targeting.

Measure your marketing efforts

One of the great features of digital platforms is that you can almost instantly get insights into the demographics and psychographics of your target audience. Use analytics to know more about your audience’s behaviour. You might be surprised that a market that you might have never considered finds your product/services interesting or discover that a certain demographic/platform you preferred isn’t giving you the results that you expected. So do not ignore these features of digital marketing platforms and spend some time in studying and benefiting from the insights and analytics of your campaigns.

You must constantly monitor the performance of your digital marketing plan across platforms to see what works and doesn’t work for your startup. Accordingly, edit your approach/campaigns on various platforms to get the best results.

If you are looking for a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your start-up, contact us now. Our founder and well-known content & digital marketing strategist, Manoj Aravindakshan, will work with you closely to create and help execute an effective start-up marketing strategy. You can also e-mail: sales@ontarget-media.com or call: +65-9026 1492.