5 Digital Marketing Tips That Can Help Start-Ups Grow

Around a couple of hundred years ago, ‘marketing’ was a pretty simple matter. A person could market their service/product by simply putting a handwritten poster somewhere in the town square, or they could just stand up before a crowd and yell themselves hoarse to promote their merchandise.

But…it’s not that simple anymore.

Nowadays, marketing is a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional activity comprising different approaches and strategies. And since there are so many brands in existence nowadays (more than 500,000, according to Nielson Media Research), the marketing world is saturated with competitors.

In this atmosphere of competition, you need to know the right tricks and tips for marketing that can help your start-up grow. In this post, that is what we’re going to be helping you with.

1.   Always Plan Your Efforts

Nothing – least of all marketing – can be achieved well without a proper plan in place. Whatever strategy you want to apply, be it blogging, emailing, cold-calling, etc., you always have to plan it out first.

During the planning phase, you have to outline your course of action as well as the results you want to achieve with your efforts. If applicable, you also have to decide how much you’re going to spend on a particular endeavor.

Take blogging, for example.

Blogging is a popular content marketing strategy that is employed by a lot of brands. According to Neal Schaffer, 1/3 of all websites have a blog section.

When it comes to blogging, there are a lot of different things that you have to plan out beforehand; otherwise, your efforts won’t be…fruitful and to be a little archaic.

Some of the things that you have to plan include:

  • Your keyword strategy
  • Your content publishing schedule
  • Word length for each post

And so on.

If you do all of this beforehand, you will be able to know what you have to write and how you have to write it. The same type of planning is required for every other type of marketing effort that you make for your startup.

2.   Learn About Your Audience

Moving on, another useful marketing tip that we can proffer is to learn about your audience.

By personalizing your digital marketing efforts according to your target markets, you can increase the chances of lead generation and getting more customers to your business. According to Forbes, 91% of consumers are more motivated to make a purchase when a brand uses personalized approaches to interact with them.

At the broadest level, learning about your target audience can be as simple as finding out which region and country that they belong to. Merely focusing on a particular geographical location can help in improving the outcomes of your marketing efforts. And nowadays, this is something you can get a lot of help with using online tools. For example, in keyword research tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs, you can enter a keyword and see its global volume. In other words, you can see how much it is searched for in a particular country. Here, have a look at this screenshot below:

Now, considering the image above, we can say that a person who wants to sell melon ballers will have to focus on the U.S. market since the search volume for the keyword ‘melon baller’ is quite a few times higher there.

Obviously, as we said, this is a classification at a very broad level. There are many other segmentations that can follow this type of geographical classification. The later segmentation can include specifying the market according to gender and age etc.

3.   Use the Right Online Tools

Marketing has expanded a lot, sure, but with it, the ways and means to tackle it properly have also been revolutionized. In today’s age, there is a glut of online tools that are available for virtually every type of marketing activity, be it email marketing, telemarketing, and so on.

Using online tools can help you in executing your strategies easily and quickly. You can also track your results and/or optimize your marketing processes.

When it comes to digital marketing, there are some approaches, e.g., SEO, blogging, emails, etc., that are employed more than others due to their effectiveness. Since these types of approaches are more popular, they have quite a few online tools dedicated to them. Moving on, we will take a brief look at some popular online tools that you can use in 2023 to make your marketing efforts easier.

  • Mailchimp: Mailchimp is an iconic and popular tool that you can use for email marketing. You can use it to create your brand’s email draft and send it at once to a whole list of recipients.
  • Ahrefs: Ahrefs is an online platform that provides a range of analytical features related to SEO. You can use it for finding keywords, monitoring traffic, getting content ideas, and so on. Since SEO is a major branch of digital marketing nowadays, having this sort of tool in your arsenal can be highly worth it.
  • Prepostseo: Prepostseo comes with a whole bunch of different online tools, but it is largely popular for the content optimization utilities it provides. It is a useful platform that you can integrate into your content marketing strategy. Some of the popular tools that it provides include a plagiarism checker, paraphraser, grammar checker, and so on.

4.   Capitalize on Competitors

Keeping a close eye on the actions, plans, and strategies of your competitors is very important when it comes to marketing. You can always learn from the mistakes that your competitors make.

Another benefit of closely watching your competitors is that you can capitalize on anything that they lack. For example, if you find that a certain competitor of yours does not have a proper support system on their website (due to which their traffic is dwindling), you can capitalize on this and make your own support system impeccable. That way, you will be able to make yourself known to provide something that your competitor is failing in.

A good example of this can be seen in the pricing strategy of Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest is an online SEO analytic platform and is a competitor of sites like SEMrush and Ahrefs. SEMrush and Ahrefs are more expensive, with the latter starting at around $90 per month. Ubersuggest capitalized on the high prices offered by its competitors. Instead of charging +-$100 per month, it offered a $12 monthly plan for budget users.

5.   Always Track Your Results

Marketing is a dynamic process. With every new emerging competitor and every new policy/update rolled out by search engines etc., you have to make changes to your strategy. You can’t let your marketing approach stagnate.

Constantly tracking the outcomes and results of your marketing approach can help you understand what steps you should abandon and what steps you should perpetuate.

One of the best ways to track the success of your digital marketing efforts is to closely monitor the traffic of your website. Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Ubersuggest (mentioned above) or even Google Analytics can be used for this purpose.

If you make some changes to your strategy and then find that your traffic has risen, you can understand that change to be useful and beneficial. On the other hand, if you make some changes to your strategy and your traffic falls. As a result, you can simply revert back.

Conclusion

Marketing is, as we just mentioned, a dynamic process. You have to keep improving your strategies and approaches to maintain your foothold in the market.

In this post, we looked at some tips that you can implement during your marketing endeavors to increase their effectiveness.