7 Reasons Why Digital Marketing is Important for Startups
Startups, especially during the initial stages, struggle to gain the attention of their target audience and stay ahead of their competitors. However, these days, digital marketing is on the rise and has become a staple for startups to boost business growth. The common digital marketing strategies include having a website and active social media accounts. If you’re a growing startup wishing to make a positive change within your business, check out the major reasons why digital marketing is important for startups below:
What is digital marketing?
Similar to traditional marketing, digital marketing is a way for businesses to market their service or product using online channels. Traditional marketing involves billboards and flyers whereas digital marketing only involves online platforms such as social media or websites.
Examples of digital marketing
Digital marketing as a whole is quite wide and comprises many channels. Here are some of the top digital marketing strategies:
1. Social Media Marketing
One of the most popular digital marketing strategies would be social media marketing. Some of the common social media channels include XiaoHongShu, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. It’s one of the best ways to engage with customers, build brand awareness, and foster closer relationships through posts, direct messages, or comments.
2. Email Marketing
Email marketing includes sending targeted emails to customers or subscribers to promote their products or services. Most of the time, these emails involve promotions, offers, or new launches. This helps to build a relationship with the customers as well as encourage them to make a purchase.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves optimizing a website to rank higher on search engines such as Google or Bing. The strategies include creating SEO-friendly content, modifying the website structure, and ensuring the website speed is fast. There are several SEO tools and software that help to monitor and boost SEO performance such as Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz.
4. Content Marketing
Content marketing is the process of creating content that is valuable and informative to the target audience through various interactive ways such as images, videos, or podcasts. This type of content keeps the audience engaged and gains solutions to their enquiries. On top of that, content marketing also helps customers learn more about your brand.
5. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing involves key opinion leaders (KOLs) who are known to have a large following on their social media. They will advertise several products or services in exchange for a collaboration or a fee. Their following can take advantage of discount codes provided by the KOLs.
7 Reasons why digital marketing is important for startups
When it comes to startups, marketing is important for business growth. Digital marketing is one of the best marketing strategies for businesses to grow. If you’re curious to know more, here are the main reasons why digital marketing is important for startups:
1. Cost-effective marketing strategy
As a startup, reducing expenses or costs is one of the most important factors due to a limited budget. Thus, one of the major reasons why digital marketing is important for startups is how they can use a small budget to begin any of the digital marketing strategies.
Compared to traditional marketing, digital marketing platforms are generally cheaper and more of an ongoing strategy instead of a one-off approach. This is because digital marketing campaigns can be monitored and updated throughout the campaign without any additional cost. Startups can also decrease or increase the budget such as for social media or Google ads.
2. Easier to track the ROI
With offline marketing, it can be difficult to gauge the return on investment (ROI), which is crucial for startups during the early stages. Luckily, digital marketing provides ways for startups to measure and track their ROI easily through comprehensive platforms.
Startups can keep an eye on the ongoing digital marketing campaigns and adjust accordingly to how well they perform without having to wait until the campaigns end. That way, startups get to prevent from making any losses and gain as much profit as possible. Digital marketing platforms such as Google or Facebook also offer thorough analytics to show how many users clicked the ad or made a purchase, making it easier to identify which are the well-performing campaigns.
3. Boost online visibility and presence
One of the most important aspects of startups is to maintain a good online presence. Why? Well, most people these days tend to go online and search for a particular product or service. Startups could lose the chance of getting potential leads without any online presence.
If a startup appears online through social media channels or a fully functional website, it will more likely gain customer’s trust as it will be deemed credible. For instance, implementing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques will help startups appear at the top results of search engines. Besides that, social media channels are a great way for startups to build an online presence through interactive content.
4. Increase revenue and conversions
The main goal of any startup would be to drive revenue and boost conversions. There are plenty of ways in which startups can leverage digital marketing channels to gain potential sales and turn visiting customers into paying ones such as through paid marketing or social media ads.
A great example would be to capture qualified leads through sales funnels such as social media forms, email marketing campaigns, or website landing pages. Besides that, social media ads offer retargeting so that they can re-target the customers who didn’t purchase the first visit, increasing the chance of them taking action in the future.
5. Great for targeted advertising
Targeted advertising is a common struggle among startups as it can be difficult to identify and engage with the ideal customers within the wide market. Hence, targeted advertising is one of the reasons why digital marketing is important for startups. Digital marketing allows various ways for startups to carefully plan out their marketing campaigns and choose the kind of audience or ideal customer they wish to interact with.
Some of the digital marketing strategies such as social media ads or Google ads allow startups to re-target the same audience who visited the brand but did not turn into a converting customer. These advertising platforms also allow startups to segment the audience based on several factors such as their online behaviors or user demographics.
6. Build brand awareness
As a startup, not many people are aware of your brand since it’s still new in the industry. That is why digital marketing is important for startups since getting the word out there about your brand is important to build a steady customer base.
For instance, social media is one of the digital marketing channels where a brand can gain the attention of the target audience and create a lasting impact. Even if they don’t take action immediately, they might remember your brand next time if they require the products or services.
7. More engagement with the target audience
Digital marketing is considered one of the best ways to build a closer relationship with customers as this type of marketing offers a one-to-one approach. Startups can connect and interact with the target audience without having to meet them face-to-face.
As an example, online webinars and social media channels allow a way for startups to connect with the target audience directly. Startups are able to respond to each customer and either have a friendly conversation or simply attend to their enquiries in a prompt manner.
Can a business survive without marketing effort?
As a startup, the most important factor is to get the word out there as your brand is still new in the market. With that being said, the only way for the market or target audience to know about your brand is through marketing. Although you may have the best product or service, but if no one knows about them, then your business can’t gain revenue either. Without revenue, a business can’t survive. Therefore, marketing efforts, especially digital marketing, is crucial for a business to strive.
Getting started on digital marketing for startups
If you’re new to digital marketing as a startup, it can be pretty daunting wondering how to get started. Here are some simple digital marketing tactics you can use to start off with:
1. Create a marketing budget
First thing’s first, before you get started on any digital marketing strategy, you should identify and set aside a monthly or quarterly marketing budget. This helps to narrow down the strategies that fits within the budget, especially when the startup is still new with not much revenue yet.
2. Be active on social media
As we all know, these days, almost everyone is on social media. Your business can start with the popular social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook to promote your product or service. Ensure you keep your audience engaged by staying active on the social media platforms with useful and attractive content.
3. Implement SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website on the search engines to rank higher positions. Since customers won’t be going through beyond the top 3 pages on search engines, it’s crucial for your business to appear on the first page for relevant keywords related to your product or service.
4. Perform competitor research
Competitor research is one of the most important strategy as you should always be aware of what your competitors are up to so that you can also learn and implement them yourself. You can also learn the mistakes they’ve made so you can save time and cost. Some of the ways to do competitor research would be to ask yourself questions such as what kind of platforms are they actively using and what are their unique selling points.
Conclusion
To conclude, we can see why digital marketing is important for startups to strive and reach greater heights. In order to rise above competitors, startups need to fully maximise and make use of various digital marketing strategies. To boost your marketing strategy even more, consider learning about the importance of web design in digital marketing.