Starting your own business is difficult, especially in this digital era. The competition is stiff, and the stakes are high. To succeed, a startup must adopt intelligent marketing strategies to stand out from the rest of the pack and attract new customers.
An excellent marketing plan is essential for any business to thrive. With the right marketing strategy, a startup can make the brand more visible, encourage people to purchase the product or service, and generate a lot of buzz around it.
Great marketing strategies will also help the startup stand out from its competitors by positioning the brand or company as something unique that potential customers cannot get anywhere else. Creating a solid marketing strategy is not easy but certainly not impossible either. A startup needs to put in some time and effort in order. But how can a startup achieve that, you may ask?
Every startup has its unique selling proposition or USP. This factor makes the brand different from competitors and gives customers a reason to purchase. By understanding the USP, a startup can create marketing strategies that emphasize its strengths and makes its brand more appealing to potential customers.
For example, let’s take a startup in the bakery segment. The Bakery startup can use its location as a solid USP to attract more customers. Suppose the startup is near a big tourist attraction. In that case, it can use that to its advantage and make its bakery more visible to tourists, who may be more likely to buy from that bakery than from a bakery that is not near any tourist attractions.
Understanding the USP will help the startup create marketing strategies that put its strengths front and center and make it easier to outshine the competitors.
So far, we have learned why a startup should focus on its marketing strategies. Let’s now try to identify ways of marketing for startups that are not heavy on the pocket.
Top 7 Marketing Strategies for a Startup:
1. Create Great Content
We live in an era that is seeing enormous free content from brands. Successful brands understand the power of content because content marketing is one of the best ways to market a startup for no to little cost.
The idea behind content marketing is to create content that is relevant and valuable to the target customers. This could be in the form of articles, blogs, images, videos, podcasts, or any other type of media. All it requires is creativity.
Content marketing aims to attract new customers, engage with current customers, and build a startup’s reputation. A startup can create content in-house or hire a marketing agency to do so on its behalf.
While content marketing is a great strategy to use when starting or growing a business, it is something that a startup should continue to do even if the company is well established.
Creating great content is a long-term strategy that will continue to benefit a startup as time goes on. A startup must create valuable content that engages its audience and encourages them to purchase your product or service.
The Strategy Story itself focuses on adding value with its great content. We regularly post content on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn to strengthen our brand positioning as a thought leader in the marketing business. Check out one of our posts.
2. Use Video Marketing
Online video is one of a startup’s most effective marketing strategies. It is more engaging than other forms of content, like text or images, and is a great way to build a strong connection with the audience.
As per research attention span on social media is just 8 seconds. So, when creating any video, make sure it is short, relevant, and to the point. Don’t drag on for too long, or it could lose the audience’s attention.
You can upload your video to YouTube and share it on various social media platforms so that it is more likely to be seen by new customers. You can also use a video marketing tool or website to host and track your video to see how many views it receives.
While TikTok is mainly used as a fun application to show trends, it is just as powerful as a marketing tool. The most significant advantage of TikTok is that you don’t have to spend much time creating content. But it is proving to be a great tool to reach out and engage with potential customers quickly.
3. Social Media Engagement
Social Media is more powerful than traditional advertising methods as it allows brands to interact with potential and existing customers on a one-to-one basis. Every time a customer interacts with and brand’s social media posts, it shows they are interested in what a brand stands for.
Better social media engagement strengthens a business’s customer relationship, which builds brand loyalty and word-of-mouth referrals. It’s a must marketing strategy for startups as they are resource constrained and cannot go for expensive ways of marketing.
Do you know Tesla spends $0 on its marketing? Elon Musk himself has created such a robust engagement on social media that its target audience is made of Tesla through Elon Musk. Check out our story: What is Tesla’s Zero Dollar Budget Marketing Strategy?
So now, you may ask how to increase social media engagement? A startup should adopt a three-step approach:
- Collaborate with key stakeholders to understand the goals a startup might achieve with social media engagement. Having a clear view of goals will make tracking and measuring the ROI of actions easier.
- Post regularly. Period. We cannot stress enough on this fact. According to studies, businesses should post on social media at least once daily. Set up a content calendar to help you plan your content ahead of time.
Engage but in an exciting manner. Your target customers are already stressed in their everyday lives. They come to social media to relax and have fun. Content on Topical events is a great way to leverage the event as your audience is in a mood to read on that topic. Amul has mastered the art of topical marketing. Learn more about Topical Marketing in our story.
4. Leverage On-site Strategies
A startup can also use on-site strategies to market its services and attract more customers. A high-quality and engaging website is one of the best ways to market a business online.
The website must have high-quality content relevant to the industry and optimized with the right keywords to show up in search engine results.
A startup can also use its website to collect information from visitors. It can do this by implementing lead forms or surveys to collect information about its customers and better understand what they are looking for.
Having a great website rich in content and innovative on-site marketing strategies to market a startup will make it easier to gain new customers and keep them engaged with the brand.
5. Strengthen the PR Game
PR can be great for startups to get exposure and build credibility. However, PR strategy for startups needs to be carefully considered.
First, it’s essential to set PR goals that align with the overall business goals. Then, determine what kind of PR will most effectively achieve those goals. For example, PR can generate awareness, build thought leadership, or drive website traffic.
Once the PR goals are clear, it’s time to create a PR plan. This should include writing press releases, pitching stories to journalists, and building relationships with key influencers.
By following these steps, startups can develop a PR strategy to help them achieve their business goals.
6. Email Marketing
Email marketing can be a great way to reach your target market if you’re a startup. It’s low-cost, helps you capture information about your audience, and ensures that you can push your message far and wide.
But it’s not as simple as sending out an email. A startup needs to formulate its email marketing strategy. Imagine the number of emails you receive daily and how many you open. How easy is it to unsubscribe? Here are a few tips to get your email marketing spot on.
- Start by building a list of email subscribers. You can do this through your website sign-up forms or lead generation campaigns.
- Segment your list so that you’re sending relevant messages to different groups of people. This will help improve your open and click-through rates.
- Make sure your email content is exciting and valuable to your subscribers. Please provide them with information that they can’t get anywhere else.
- Use engaging subject lines and make it look like coming from a human.
- Use strong calls to action, so your subscribers know what you want them to do next.
- Track your results to see what’s working and what’s not. Make changes to improve your results over time.
Email marketing can be a great way to reach out to your target market and promote your startup. Following these tips can create successful email campaigns to help you achieve your business goals.
7. Run Paid Ads
Another effective marketing strategy that a startup can use to bring in new customers is paid ads. It can use paid ads to increase the brand’s visibility on social media, blogs, and other places where people go to find new and exciting content.
Paid ads can be used to advertise a product or service, bring in new customers, and drive more sales. One can choose from many types of paid ads, such as Facebook ads, Google AdWords, or Instagram ads.
A startup can also use paid ads to drive traffic to its website by creating landing pages encouraging people to purchase its products and services. Paid ads can be expensive, but they are also very effective in bringing in new customers and increasing brand visibility.
Select the paid ads that best suit startup needs (and budget) and will likely bring in new customers. A startup should only consider this marketing strategy once it feels that it has extra money to grow. It can be expensive (against a startup’s philosophy), so we have kept it as the last marketing strategy a startup should adopt.
Conclusion
Successful startups always look for new and innovative ways to market their products and services. While traditional marketing strategies are still effective, startups always look for new ways to reach their customers and drive more sales.
If a startup wants to succeed in growing its business, it needs to create a solid marketing strategy that will help it stand out from the rest of the pack and attract new customers.
