This article was originally published on Maddyness here.
When starting a business, resources are often limited. It is often said — wrongly — that the impact of digital marketing actions is proportional to the investment made. Here are 5 tips to get started on the right foot.
Are you launching your startup and looking to promote it intelligently? Several tools allow you to lay the groundwork and introduce your digital marketing strategy. While this is not about hardcore growth hacking, you'll find a few simple tips here to build up your visibility.
You Have a Website? Find Out What's Happening on It!
The first step when launching a website is generally measuring what's going on. The goal is to obtain basic data like the number of visitors, average time on site, most visited pages, bounce rate, and so on. It's also useful for measuring strategic actions and identifying the most valuable visitors. For example, a retailer will care about cart additions, while other startups may focus on newsletter sign-ups.
All of this valuable information about your website's audience is easily accessible through free tools. The most well-known is Google Analytics, which provides easy reading of your stats. Though widely used, this platform has many competitors that perform just as well, such as Adobe Analytics, Mixpanel, or Leadfeeder.
Implementing these tools mainly comes down to installing a piece of code on your website. And if you're using a website builder like WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, or PrestaShop, dedicated modules simplify the installation. It's critical to install this type of tool before engaging in any online marketing activity, so you can accurately measure its profitability.
Study Your Market and Competition
Once you're able to read the main stats for your website, you need to look at your market and what your competitors are doing online. Google Trends is a solid starting point for getting data on Google search trends. For example, it's useful to look at the seasonal trends for your flagship product to anticipate activity fluctuations. Similarly, you can gauge your competitors' brand awareness by observing the search trends for their name on Google.
If you want to do more in-depth analysis of search terms, SEMrush is the most comprehensive tool available. In addition to search trends, you'll be able to see related searches or average cost per click (useful if you're considering paid search). A paid version of SEMrush also exists, with more advanced analysis. Competitors like SimilarWeb and Alexa provide stats on sites of your choosing — just type in a competitor's URL to find out how many monthly visitors they get or where their traffic comes from.
Finally, another way to learn more about your competitors is to analyze their active ads. To that end, many ad networks have adopted notable transparency around companies' active campaigns. For example, Facebook created the Facebook Ad Library, where you can see the ads of any company you choose. This is also possible on the Instagram app or on a company's LinkedIn page.
Adopt a Content Strategy
To get people talking about your startup and gain more visibility, it's smart to adopt a "content strategy." In other words, you need to attract visitors through the quality (and sometimes quantity) of the content you offer. In addition to building credibility and a habit among your readers, this strategy will help you improve your SEO. It's admittedly a time-consuming approach, but one that will pay off over the long term.
Some great examples of this practice include Qonto and Alan, which produce a lot of quality content around their services. The Comet team, for their part, shares many of the tools they use internally, which attracts a wide range of interested readers and builds their brand awareness.
Prioritize the Channels Best Suited to Your Business
If you can allocate a dedicated budget for online ad campaigns, you need to bet on the right horses to avoid wasting your investment. Depending on your target audience and your industry, some marketing channels will be more appropriate than others. For example, if your offer is B2B, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is worth considering (despite its relatively high cost per click). Bing Ads is equally worth exploring for your B2B audience, who often use a Microsoft computer at work.
On the other hand, if you have an innovative B2C product that can easily be showcased in video, paid social can be a powerful tool for communicating the added value of your offer. Finally, Google Ads remains an intent-based channel: your ads appear after a user searches for your service or product on Google. It's therefore a lever that can work for many startups. To help with keyword research, try tools like Keywords Everywhere or AnswerThePublic.
It's advisable to take stock of the different marketing tools available and prioritize the most relevant ones for your business in order to maximize campaign profitability. You can also draw inspiration from what your competitors are doing in this space using the tools described above in tip #2.
Build Brand Ambassadors
Finally, to attract your audience's attention, other people need to talk about your brand for you. The first place to turn is the testimonials of your existing customers, which you should absolutely collect on a regular basis. Lunchr, for example, is a startup whose customers are naturally strong ambassadors — thanks in particular to a remarkable user experience and an innovative marketing positioning.
Beyond your customers, think about external ambassadors like influencers, who will amplify the reach of your message. Not sure how to contact them? Browser extensions like Kaspr.io, Hunter, or Lusha are powerful ways to find someone's email address from their LinkedIn profile — which can also help with your sales outreach!
Your employees can also be excellent advocates, sharing an inside perspective on your company. Finally, you can also go the traditional route by reaching out to the trade press and trying to get coverage. In that case, a PR agency can be a worthwhile investment.
While other digital marketing tips could complement these, they form a solid first foundation. Take stock of your resources and choose the approaches that will deliver the best return on your time and investment relative to the visibility gained.
Want expert guidance on your digital marketing strategy? Feel free to reach out.
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