No matter what your industry or company size is, digital marketing is a surefire way to grow your business. If you’re a startup business on a small budget, you should have a robust digital marketing strategy in place to create a strong presence in the marketplace.
We can all agree that 2020 was a tough year for startups due to the coronavirus pandemic. Even companies in the most agile and dynamic business sectors filed for liquidation or dissolution.
Despite all these challenges, digital marketing grew by 13% in 2020, and there are no signs of things slowing down.
Here are five digital marketing strategies you can use to grow your startup in 2021 and beyond.
1. Keep Your Blog up to Date with New Content
If you want to stay ahead of the competition you should stay on top of the latest digital marketing trends. But one of the oldest and most robust digital marketing tactics that never fails and only seems to become more relevant each year is blogging.
You have probably developed a routine when it comes to blogging for your startup, but to see solid growth month by month you have to create new content consistently.
You must research new topics and come up with strategies for promoting new blog posts. There are many benefits to keeping your blog up to date. Google wants to serve users with great content, so blogging is your opportunity to feed Google with what it wants and generate leads for your business.
If you want to rank high on search engines, you should ensure your content is fresh and serves your readers with good information and tips. If your blog posts drop in rankings, it’s probably because your content is out of date and something better has come along to compete with it and outrank it in the search engines.
To come up with high-quality posts, you need to put in a decent amount of work. If you don’t have time to update your existing posts, you should focus your time on publishing new ones to keep your blog relevant.
If you don’t have the time to create new blog content, then you should consider outsourcing it. It is better to hire some high-quality writers than to fall behind on your publishing schedule and miss out on the benefits that blogging has to offer.
If you’re a beginner, you should focus your efforts on coming up with evergreen content. In addition to that, you should focus on solving other people’s problems and providing value.
2. Reach out to Bloggers and Write Guest Posts
If you want your business to excel in the digital space, you should explore blogger outreach and guest blogging. There are so many platforms out there to communicate with potential customers, and you can use these same platforms to reach out to bloggers too.
Guest posting requires niche-related content to be written and then pitched to target blogs in your niche. Before you start writing guest posts, you should do some research for ideas on what to write about.
Your goal should be to craft high-quality blog posts which will wow the readers of the blogs they are placed on. This not only makes you look like an authority in the marketplace to potential customers, it also tells Google the same and can be a very effective link building strategy.
If you have a long list of guest posting opportunities, you should review them and choose the most relevant sites for publishing your content. To ensure you reach your target customers, you should also choose blogs which have readers who would potentially be interested in the products and services you have to offer.
You should research what content is out there and prioritize posts with more engagement and comments from readers. This tells you that people are actively seeking answers to questions which can be addressed in the blog posts.
3. Optimize Existing Content for Search Engines
You have built an awesome website and created your product/service pages. If you think visitors will just come to your website, you are mistaken. For startups, SEO is a must. This will not only boost traffic but also helps customers build trust with your brand.
But search engine optimization is not a one-off thing – it’s an ongoing process. You should conduct keyword research and monitor what your competitors are doing to beat them in the SERPS.
If you have existing content, you should optimize it around a target keyword. The quickest way to improve SEO content is to use an on-page SEO checker like Yoast SEO. That way, you will have an idea of whether you’ve placed the keyword in the right place or not.
It’s hard to predict the keywords that will bring the most traffic. Your results will depend on competition, popularity, relevance, and how authoritative the site is. Once you choose the right keywords, there are a few questions you should ask yourself.
- Are you getting any clicks on it?
- Do the keywords have a significant number of impressions?
Finally, you should dig deeper into the popularity of the keywords and be on the lookout for the potential boost you might get.
4. Reaching out to Potential Customers on Social Media
One way to gain exposure for your startup business is to leverage social media. It’s a low-cost marketing technique for turning your brand into a profitable business. Some of the benefits of social media platforms include increasing exposure and traffic, improving search rankings, and generating more leads.
To build your authority on social media, you should create content for platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You should schedule your posts to ensure a consistent flow of content. Don’t forget to monitor social media mentions.
As a new business, you should create content regularly, use visuals (images, videos), and share relevant content from your blog. If you want to reach a wider audience, you can invest in paid advertisements.
5. Creating an Email Marketing Funnel
Email marketing is still one of the most cost-effective strategies to grow a startup business. In 2020, 72% of email marketers saw an increase in customer engagement, and this number is bound to increase in 2021.
When well-executed, your email marketing funnel can deliver 3,800% ROI. This means that when you invest $1, you expect to get $38 back. If you haven’t yet launched your product, you should collect emails of the interested prospects and notify them when you launch.
When you create an email marketing funnel, you should use attractive and catchy titles. Another strategy for increasing the open rate is using simple language. If you want to keep the subscribers engaged, you should post helpful content before you try to close a sale.
Be careful about how many times you send emails to your prospects – avoid too many. Lastly, you should break the content into small paragraphs and subheadings to improve readability.
If you don’t have a strategic plan, it can be challenging to move leads into the next phase. Even worse, they may not reach the next phase. This is where email marketing funnel comes in.
For effective email funnels, you should anticipate the subscribers’ needs and send your emails at the right time. Your email funnel should demonstrate the four-stage lifecycle: engagement, discovery, purchase, and retention.
Make sure you understand the actions your subscribers can take. Of course, the end goal of your campaign is to convert visitors into loyal customers.
Final Thoughts
While starting a successful business may look like an uphill battle. If you’re on a small budget, you can use the above strategies to stand out from the crowd. Whether you are looking to increase sales or revenue, digital marketing is a sure bet.
Now go out there and start to apply these strategies and make 2021 your best year yet!
