A Thorough Guide to Digital Marketing for New Startup Founders
Lately, I have come across several founders who have registered their companies, and now they look forward to building their digital presence. I have met several of them though UPWORK and a few through the good old word-of-mouth. I observed a few common questions that plague these founders. So, in this article, I answer them all.
If there be still any questions, use the contact form.
1. What is Digital Marketing?
Gone are the days when people wanted something they would go to a market and buy. Instead, they go online, check and compare the product/service they need, read reviews, and then finally go for the best. Not only as individuals, businesses too operate in the same way.
What individuals and businesses eventually decide is the outcome strategized by a digital marketer. The entire activity of placing your product/service online for a potential buyer to purchase your offer over other potent offers is digital marketing.
2. Where Do I Get Started with Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is a vast subject. So, I will keep things very simple and to the point so that busy founders waste no time in understanding the subject as fast as possible.
2.1- Website
The very first thing to get started with your digital marketing is to have a website with exceptional user-experience, look, and feel. Your website is virtual office; keep it clean, precise, and functional. Your website should include a few essential sections that satisfy your visitor's query in no time. About, Contact, Products/Services, Glossary, and the main engine to set wheels to your website, the Blog.
2.2- Create your Google Properties
How do you know that everything you have put up on the Blog is making sense to the world? You need analytics to measure that. Digital marketing without analytics and creativity is non-existent. So, register for Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, and Google Ads. You may use Adsense if it is not a Business to Business (B2B) but Individual to Business or Business to Customers (B2C).
2.3- Register your Social Media Properties
Social Media is the modern marketplace depending on the kind of product/services you offer. You use this audience either for branding or for sales or both. If yours is a B2B venture, you must create your company profile and showcase on LinkedIn. You then create accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Medium. These properties give you a solid landing. If yours is a B2C venture, the order of priority should be TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit.
2.4- Content Marketing Tools
Here are two things. Give it a think; social media accounts help you market your content, but how do you even create your content? Search queries are essential nutrients for your content consumption. How do you harvest those queries? Later, you have so much content to be scheduled across so many platforms according to traffic hours, how do you do that? Here's you need a subscription to SEO (will explain below) tools such as HubSpot, SEMRush, Sprout Social etc. These tools come for a price, but they bill you for a reason, and that is the value they add in fortifying a solid content marketing strategy.
So, you go the website, the web content and e blogs; you got the resources to grow your Blog and resources to market them. End of it, you also have a fully armed Google to analyze, implement, and measure your impact and give your website a solid start to digital marketing.
3. Why is it Important to Have a Great Website?
I continue from 2.1 that introduces the role of a website in Digital Marketing. Here, let me explain why your website has to be a great website and its qualifying parameters.
If your iPad crashes, would you go to a small roadside stall that's pretty dark and doesn't illustrate its capabilities to fix an iPad the desired way? Or, would you choose to go to a well-lit shop, with great ads running on indoor digital display busy with professionals in crisply ironed tees?
You may believe in merit, but you know it in your heart that the shop is where you'll go over the roadside fix-shop. If that's the case, it is the same with having a "great" website. A great website is the one where visitors should exactly know where to find what; how to navigate, how to sign up for newsletters, send business queries, browse through your content, and understand the ethos of your existence. A great website should have clear and comprehensive communication that is distinctly different from the competition commanding excellent thought-leadership and steadily acquired domain authorship.
The technical aspects include a wireframe with a distinct main menu, sub-menu, categories, call-to-action, a site-map, display banners and company details. Big, bold graphics that easily slip into one's head with attractive creative elements lubricate reception of your website content.
4. What is a Blog? What is Blog Marketing
4.1- Blog
A blog is the pilot's cabin—the central digital marketing engine of your website. You drive content about our product, services, wins, case studies, testimonials, and talk about your distinct social ventures to stay relevant to the broader world.
Example: As a startup founder, I am sure that you are aware of Medium. I refer to Medium to allude to the nature of content that you should have on your Blog; i.e., your company's Blog.
4.2 - Nature of Blogs & Intention
The kind of content that you should begin with for at least the first 6-8 months shouldn't be jargon driven and yet must deliver on the topics. They should be easy to read as the primary goal is to build website authority through high-traffic, backlinking, and SEO, to spread the net in a way that from an entry-level executive to the C-suite executives, all can consume it.
4.3- Blog Marketing & Preparation of an Audience
First of all, your blogs should be potent enough to fetch the audience. Secondly, they should prepare the audience through engaging, informative, and delightful content. It is no different for either B2B or B2C when you leverage the Business to Human sentiment.
Market your blogs through Social Media, Emails, and other content platforms to build desire audience. Remember that this is an ongoing process audience. Later, with time, you take up more responsibilities for your teams.
Once you have built that authority evidenced by your Google Analytics, you have an audience to receive more crucial information about your products and services to push them toward the middle of the funnel where you can intensify
At this junction, you introduce other content marketing assets (I've explained it below) to convert this audience into your sales lead.
5. What are SEO, SEM, & SMM? How are they Helpful?
5.1- SEO is Search Engine Optimization
While it is always Ecosia on the top of my mind, Google is our primary search engine followed by Bing. Optimizing content for search engine means to make your content suitable for search engine parties. :) Technically, SEO is the process of fetching quality traffic to your website by improving its visibility. SEO is an organic effort to increase your web traffic. It is not suitable for quick results or website promotion when you have just launched your business. Here, you'll need an experienced SEO professional to catch the trending keywords to cook delightful content.
5.2- SEM is Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing fetches results that are specific to SEO, but this time, you have to pay for it instead of waiting for your luck to shine someday. New businesses are recommended to consider both SEO and SEM to market to promote their websites and increase the visibility without delay. It is almost like if you take the last minute flight for the earliest arrival, you have to pay for the extra convenience. For Google to prioritize your request over the pending ones, you have to leverage SEM through paid advertisement.
5.3- SMM is Social Media Marketing
SMM or Social Media Marketing refers to the marketing done through the various social media platforms listed above in 2.3. SEO is helpful not only for your Blog but for anything. Does this intrigue you a little? Use the contact form and reach out to me; I'll explain it. Anyway, so starting from web content to blog content, to content on social media platforms, SEO is a beast for the best everywhere. Good SEO punched with SEM, is a heady mix for SMM. For example, if you use any social media platform, borrow its pulse to tell a story that intelligently anchors your blog article, and also do a paid promotion, imagine the results. Can't you? It's going to be astounding, I say.
6. What Skills should a Content Writer have?
It is very evident that at this stage you got to be very careful with selecting your support system. Content writing has been downplayed for a very long time, but today it is everything. It starts from defining your products to wording your mission and vision to marketing your business. Selecting the right content writer is tougher than choosing a life partner, and I am not joking, mean 100% business.
Content writing, I tell you, is playing the chess both as a player and the opponent. Anyway, it is essential to find a writer who can see thorough what your potential customer is seeking and then write accordingly to answer to that demand. Listen, everyone can read, write, and speak in English, not a big deal, at all. But, a successful writer is a salesperson under their skin; they should be able to pack your shit and sell it with a winning story. Excuse me, I know that is not shit, I am referring to the preparedness you should seek in a writer. :P
In addition to all that, here are a few more to expect both from yourself and your potential content partner.
A voracious reader (a reader is always learning)
A thinker who can challenge practices (than lamely accepting conventions)
Someone who has the guts to prove you wrong (yes, you should expect this)
A person who advocates the romance of Content and SEO (with reasons backed by research)
Someone nimble to switch from an ad copy to a 1500 word article to a whitepaper and back to writing kickass social media content (trust me, you aren't expecting too much)
Someone who will take it on their stride to maintain a standard brand voice that's susceptible to the changes of the world and echoes empathy through Industry 4.0 jargons (of course, someone who doesn't have to use jargons for public display of intelligence. )
7. What Kind of Resource Allocation and Budget is required to Start Digital Marketing?
You need an army of a minimum of six people to get started with your digital marketing for optimum results. You need a writer, a designer, an advertiser, an analyst, and a marketer, and someone to supervise them all and manage the projects. It is on you to believe that I am very considerate of the limited funds available to you as a startup. Organizations go on to hire entire agencies and at times, a couple of them for each of the above activities.
I know that you are waiting to see that startling figure to jump off this article and think of alternatives immediately. Let me tell you that I am sorry if you think you can run your business without digital marketing as outlined in this article. So, what is your wild guess about how much you have to invest? Here, I turn the table and ask you to think about how much you would like to be paid for everything we have discussed so far? End of the day, this should be gainful, allow you to live a life of comfort and dignity, right?
Well, that's how much you should be ready with, not a dime less or more. Okay, be honest when you play this card :)
Just one more thing to keep in mind when you negotiate, you get as much as you invest it you get as much as you buy. Intrigued? Email me here, and I will explain
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