Digital Marketing for Startups: How to Get Your Business Off the Ground

As a startup, if you want to get your business off the ground, then digital marking is a great help. While there can be a lot to do in digital marketing for startups, social media ads and search engine optimizations are the most effective channels. Here is more about these channels and the right ways to get better results and generate more revenue. ~ Ed.

When you’re a startup there is always a sense of urgency to get your business off the ground.

Whether you’re marketing your startup through traditional business development efforts or digital marketing, time is usually of the essence to find the most lucrative channel so you can double down on it.

The trick is you’re usually in a position where you have to stay lean and don’t have too much funding for experimentation, and in some cases none at all.

Let’s discuss some digital marketing tactics you can explore and how to do them right.

2 Channels Every Start-Up Should Consider

While digital marketing is a wide range of tactics, there are a few channels that are better than others that will give you quick market feedback and help you generate revenue.

Let’s dive into digital marketing for startups in a lean way.

Social Media Ads

While organic social media marketing may be more of a long term approach, social media ads, specifically Facebook and Instagram, can be an instant boost and exposure for your startup.

Historically, Facebook advertising (which includes Instagram) has a much better CPL than that of Google PPC ads. Probably because there are many more targeting options that don’t revolve around keywords. If done right, it can even make you viral.

Let’s talk about a few ways to get it done right.

Niche Your Targeting

When starting out a campaign, make sure not to run wild with targeting everyone. You want to hyper-focus each ad set to a few targeting options for two reasons.

On one end, you don’t want to dilute your budget; your cost per acquisition may skyrocket because you’re going after so many different types of people. Second, if it does start working and you start seeing results, you will not know what’s working and won’t be able to double down on it.

Take Time on Your Ad

I’ve seen way too many startups run their first campaign by launch it with a random stock photo and lazy call to action text. With this approach, you will be falsely convinced that social media ads do not work.

What you want to do instead is think about your target customer and brainstorm about what might entice them to take the action. Provide an incentive for them or something unique that none of your competitors are offering.

Don’t just say “here we are” but say “here is something new and exciting that you will never see again if you don’t take advantage of now.”

You also want to make sure to take advantage of the 20% of the space allowed on the image for text. It provides extra room for you to include a call to action, and in most cases, it’s the first place the visitor’s eyes will go.

Keep Your Budget Lean but Reasonable

In the beginning, you don’t want to spend all your money while you’re still testing and experimenting, but you also don’t want to set it so low that you don’t get enough data and results.

Find a happy medium between staying lean, being able to sustain the campaign and still getting meaningful results. At the minimum, I’d recommend $20 a day, 5 days a week.

Search Engine Optimization

When it comes to digital marketing, SEO is by far the leanest of all efforts out there. This is because it usually doesn’t require more than a work ethic on your part to get it going. 

SEO allows you to get organic traffic your way at no cost. The keywords that they use to find you will depend completely on what you chose to target.

If you do it correctly, it will continue to bring you that traffic and continue to be the source of that traffic for as long as you need it. If you scale that process, it will only grow from there.

Let’s get into a few tips for startup SEO.

Research the Right Keywords

When it comes to SEO, it will revolve mostly around content and links. However, before you go creating content, what you want to do is make sure that content is targeting the right keywords.

Getting traffic isn’t the only name of the game, the more important thing is to see the revenue from that traffic, as a startup, it’s the only way you will grow.

Stay away from keywords that are asking questions that aren’t ready to buy. Instead, focus on the type of traffic that will generate the largest dollar value first.

Create the Best Content

Once you got your keyword list ready it’s time to pump out the content.

When you’re writing content, one thing you want to do first is go and see what everyone else wrote about it. This way you know what you’re competing with and will focus on making it 10 times better. Make sure the content you write is more in-depth than anything else that is out there.

When creating the content you also want to make sure you focus on one keyword. Trying to rank for multiple keywords at once will have the opposite effect. You will end up ranking for none of them.

Instead, take the opportunity to focus on the topic in depth. Target one keyword per article and you will see results much faster. Stay focused on the long tail approach rather than covering general topics. They are harder to rank for and convert less.

Link to Your Website

You know those blue hyperlinks you see all over the internet? Well, they do much more than just take you to another site. For search engines, they are actually votes. Search engines view them as a recommendation from that site to yours. This helps you increase in ranking for all the content you have on your site.

This means you have to reach out to other websites and get links from them, but how? The best way to do it is to reach out and offer them some free content in exchange for you to include a small link back to your site. Most people won’t say no to good content.

Make sure that content is relevant to what you’re doing and so is the website you’re reaching out to.

Wrapping Up – Get to Growing

The only way to scale your startup is to get to work implementing these methods.

Try your hand at using these channels and these tips and sustain them for at least 6 months.

Within that time not only will you perfect those methods but will also start reaping the rewards.

Over to you

How did you get your business off the ground when you were a startup? Share your digital marketing tips and experiences in the comments.