In today’s internet age, digital marketing can be your best bet when it comes to introducing your offering to your target audience. Below are the top 6 marketing strategies to help your start-up get off the ground.
1. Focus on your target audience’s interests
The key to attracting an audience’s attention towards your brand or start-up is to tailor your marketing campaign to their interests or pain points. Your brand needs to engage with them on their own terms. If your social media content is over saturated with promotional content, you run the risk of turning off potential consumers. So, the first step is to gain an accurate picture of what your broader audience actually looks like – who are they, where are they from, how old are they, what’s their gender, what do they care about, what are their likes and dislikes…the list can be as long as you want it to be. Then, look for any mutual interests that they may share with each other. Once you have this data, create content that will resonate with your chosen audience…content that they are likely to want to share with their peers. Remember, people choose to share content that is either informative, helpful, insightful or funny. A solid piece of shareable content will help get your brand’s message across and help your audiences become popular within their peer groups. Explainer videos, demo videos and animated videos are known to be amongst the formats that most audiences now prefer.
2. Partner with other brands and influencers
When planning their digital marketing initiatives, many start ups like to partner with other complementary brands which are trying to reach the same set of people. These partnerships can help increase the reach of both partners significantly and can also benefit the audience by offering them products or services they are likely to need. For example, if a hair care company partners with a cosmetics one, each brand can create special deals for the other brand’s audiences and grow their businesses exponentially. This can be a win-win because the hair care company is offering its loyal customers a great deal on a beauty product they are likely to use, the customers are getting a better price and the cosmetics company is reaching a new audience.
Partnering with an influencer whose followers are likely to use your product is also a great marketing strategy, provided you choose your influencer carefully. With the pre-existing connection and rapport that the influencer has accumulated over time, your start up’s brand can feel authentic and natural to the consumer.
3. Use effective content marketing
Content marketing is a strategy that can seem counter intuitive on a list of marketing ideas for small businesses at first. That’s because content marketing is resource intensive and the results are not immediate like they can be with digital ads. However, a strong content marketing strategy pays off over time as people begin to find your content useful and spend time engaging with it. Google recognizes that you have a piece of winning content and when users search for topics related to your keywords, your content piece is displayed organically. Your target audiences are now watching your content and the best part is that you don’t have to pay search engines to attract them. But you do have to keep producing winning content.
The success of content marketing depends on making sure that the audience views your brand as a source of authority There is a right way to do this. First, it’s important that the content remain relevant to your selected audience. There are two types of marketing content- Topical content and Evergreen content. Topical content is appealing to people who like trendy and new content, while evergreen content is for those who prefer consistent and always relevant content. Once you strike a balance between these two types of content, your start up has a good chance of winning the content marketing game and attracting the right audiences to help grow your business.
4. Leverage Search Engine Optimization and Marketing
You can never go wrong with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Both are great ways to digitally market any start-up and increase exposure and sales. While SEO takes longer to kick in, it’s much cheaper and more effective than SEM. Audiences trust organic results more than they trust sponsored results. SEM is a good option when you want to reach your target audiences quickly and have high advertising budgets. For both SEO and SEM, make sure you target the right set of keywords, create good content, build a compelling website or landing page and have a strong call to action.
5. Advertise using print media
Print media continues to be a valued form of marketing for many start-up. A newspaper with a sound reputation can reach large audiences, from varying socio-economic backgrounds. Interesting advertisements are likely to draw the attention of those who rely on print media as a source of news. Since print advertisement rates have gradually declined over the last few years, combining a digital marketing strategy with print media can help your start-up to become established and well known.
6. Repurpose existing marketing content
This strategy can breathe new life into your start-ups existing content. Over time, older marketing content can become outdated. The solution? Identify the pieces of content that have done well and redesign or repackage them to generate new traffic. For example, you can add some new statistics, cite recent examples within the old content, add links or change imagery. Some of the best explainer video companies in Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai can help make your existing marketing content more immersive by converting it to video. Look at your start up’s FAQ’s and blogs and choose the most popular queries and topics. These can lead to ideas for a new set of marketing videos.
If you need animated explainer videos that drives results for your start up, get in touch with us at Ripple Animation and fill out the form below.