Because of the increased Internet penetration today, more and more people shop online than ever. In fact, a recent GE Capital Retail Bank study found that over 80% of consumers shop online before they can make a purchase decision. Most people prefer to shop and buy products and services online because it offers a lot of conveniences, enables them to compare prices to get the best deal, allows them to buy products and services beyond borders and enables them to read reviews from other customers who have purchased and used the product and service to make informed buying decisions. Therefore, if you are a startup looking to grow quickly, digital marketing must be an integral part of your marketing strategy.
Here are the ways digital marketing can help skyrocket your startup:
1. Helps create brand awareness and enhance the visibility of your startup quickly
You might offer the best products and services in the market, but if potential customers don’t know about your business, you won’t make any sale. Digital marketing can help create awareness for your startup and enhance its visibility quickly. A great example of a digital marketing strategy that can help to create brand awareness and increase the visibility of your startup is social media marketing.
Social media marketing includes marketing tactics directed to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Over 2.7 billion people use social media today, making it the most effective platform for creating awareness and increasing visibility for your brand.
Facebook is the largest social media platform and it’s ideal for startups looking to share top-quality content, grow their audiences and build up a community of loyal customers. You can create your Facebook business page to directly connect and interact with your potential customers. The good thing about Facebook is that it has groups that connect people with similar characteristics. Therefore, it’s easy to know where your target customers are You can share your Facebook business page content to those groups to harness more potential customers.
Twitter is a great platform to create awareness and visibility for your band because it’s created to generate discussions and encourage conversations. Therefore, you can use it to connect with potential customers, other brands and influencers to increases awareness for your startup.
Pinterest can help you create awareness for your brand via links and images. You can use links and images to direct traffic to your online business.
Instagram can help you increase your brand awareness through images and videos. You can create image-based stories and videos and share them with your followers through your Instagram’s business account.
LinkedIn can help you enhance your brand awareness because it allows you to share your business news, talk about business trends and connect with experts in the domain.
2. Helps Increase traffic to your business
Traffic is the currency in the online business world. That’s why you must include traffic generation in your startup’s digital marketing strategies. Good digital marketing efforts can help build quality traffic to your website. Quality traffic means more conversions and sales for your startup. The best digital marketing strategy to increase quality traffic to your website is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO experts uses various techniques to bring organic traffic to your business website. Organic traffic is more likely to convert than other kinds of traffic.
To get organic traffic, your business website must rank higher on search engines. That means optimizing it for SEO. The most effective ways to optimize your business website for SEO) include using the right keywords in your content, building numerous backlinks, including video on your website (videos rank higher on search engines these days), using SEO friendly URLs, optimizing your website for mobile, using responsive design, and including Meta description for your pages.
You can also use off-line SEO/ techniques to drive traffic to your websites, such as social media marketing, blogging, email marketing, and creating top quality and sharable content for your website. All these SEO campaigns can bring a ton of traffic to your business website, increase your rate of conversion and help your startup grow quickly.
3. Helps you connect with your target audience
The business landscape has changed tremendously over the past few years. Digital marketing now goes beyond promoting products and services. It also involves building relationships with your target audience, which is the most important aspect of digital marketing today. In fact, businesses that build strong and meaningful relationships with their target audience grow quicker than those that don’t. And the fact that the online space is a jungle and competition is stiffer, businesses need to create strong relationships with existing and potential customers to remain competitive.
Digital marketing can help you create strong and meaningful relationships with your target audience. For instance, content marketing is a powerful strategy to increase customer engagement and loyalty today. Content can bring value to your potential and existing customers by informing, educating and entertaining them. If customers get informed, educated and entertained through your content, they can easily become loyal to your brand. They will also spread the word about your brand and this will help increase your sales and grow your startup quickly.
4. Helps skyrocket your sales
The main aim of starting a business is to generate profits. That cannot happen without sales. Therefore, when starting an online business, it’s important that you offer products and services that customers want. But first, you must attract those customers to your business to make a sale. Without digital marketing, you can’t attract potential customers to your business and convince them to buy.
Digital marketing techniques like social media marketing, email marketing, and Pay-per-click help present your products or services to customers in the most appealing way. With digital marketing, you can present the benefits and real value of your products or services conveniently and cost-effectively. Also, digital marketing helps you reach more customers and skyrocket your sales.
For, example, with digital marketing, you can advertise your products and services all over the words in a matter of minutes and gain new customers.
For startups operating in today’s environment, digital marketing has become an integral part of their marketing strategy. It has created a level playing field to compete with established businesses without spending a ton of money.