Why your Startup Needs Strong Roots in Marketing?
In the last couple of years, a lot of changes have been felt in the marketing industry. People were moving to technologies to market their products and services. From human emotion touching content to AI powered remarketing tools, marketing has come a long way! But, many people think that investing in marketing too early is not a good idea for startups and small businesses. Let’s discuss why every startup needs to invest in digital marketing from the early stage.
People coming door to door or getting targeted ads on their mobile applications and web platforms, most of us including you and me come across brand names when we see their advertising, videos, influencer opinions and more. But, why should a startup invest their time, money and resources into branding their company when new businesses are actually solving problems rather than just relying upon false commitments and marketing?
Here are a few reasons why every startup should invest into marketing.
Promote your products
Your products are great and your business idea has a potential to change the world. But how would people know it? Just like without having a look at a movie’s poster, you can’t judge when it would release and who is acting in it; how would someone get a dream that you are making such awesome products?
Explore the potential of marketing
Not all the organizations get the benefits to attract users from all the platforms. To know which platforms are working for your niche, you would need to start exploring the field of marketing.
Consumer service startups get great value from the social media platforms and different types of video and merchandise marketing techniques. Where service sectors rely upon more professional platforms and similar working B2B marketing practices.
To know what works for you and what against your branding and market capturing strategy, make your decision. But to know that, you would need to invest your time into marketing and gain insights.
Voice your vision
While digital and offline marketing both let you speak out how your brand and products are helping people and how you are better than your competitors, you have to make sure that your company’s vision and mission goes into the market. A positive company which is intending to grow the business while helping the community is tend to grow faster and together!
Get used to it and connect with real people
A startup grows when you connect with REAL PEOPLE. Marketing helps you to promote your product with real people in real time. So, when you get connected with people personally or through your brand’s social media.
Marketing is not there to only promote your business and product, it is a social proof for your brand.
Define your market
As we know that by trying, we understand which platform is working for us and which is not. The same way, defining the market is required. Which kind of customers you are planning to market your product, who are going to help you market your product, which kind of marketing and promotion format is working for your niche and how well would someone react to your efforts; get familiar with it.
Set your core metrics
Number of followers or number of sessions on your application? Percentage of engagement on your social media posts or number of converting by your sales team? First result on Google or consistency performance from your paid advertising? Define and set goals for your core metrics.
Nobody on the internet would be able to tell you which metrics would work best for you. Even the metrics your peers are following and trying to improve in the same market might not work for you. Define and dive into trying stuff.
Audio Video marketing
Audio and video marketing are the key change makers in the market. From all the OTT platforms to podcasting platforms, people are loving to consume audio and video content. It does not matter if you are working in a shared office startup or providing HR services, these are the platforms that you have to explore at any cost.
Show work culture
A great startup and great startup culture must go out as well. Maybe you are providing the best work life balance to people working in your team, you are providing best in class facilities and salaries, but how would more people come to know it and join your team?
A startup should also invest in marketing their working style and culture to attract more people to onboard their organization.
Importance of SEO
First three results in the search engines get 75% of the search traffic on the platform. Who does not like the organic traffic on their business platforms? Try to follow the best practices for local SEO, your target services and other link building.
Compared to the paid search results, organic traffic provides more brand authentication. So try to invest your time and effort into basic SEO as well.
Conversion tracking, measure results
Not only the traffic and your connection ratios, your customer conversion rate and customer lifetime value should also be measured against your marketing budget spent. A brand needs to identify all the metrics of getting from 1st customer to the most recent one.
The only way to measure success of marketing is to see the effectiveness of budget per customer acquisition.
Get customer feedbacks
Online reputation management is a way to give your authentication to users online. When your users, customers and clients give you genuine feedback online across platforms like Google My Business, Trustpilot and others, the top of the funnel audience would automatically grab good vibes about you and your chances of getting conversions would go high for people who are making their buying decisions on how good you are a your reviews.
Ignore numbers
Never judge about your marketing efforts and results with the number of followers you are having on your social media and the number of likes you are gaining. Think beyond!
Never try to promote your business directly with your customers, try to provide them value as much as you cam. People would never buy or go for products which are trying to convince them, people buy stuff when it solves their problems.
Generate leads
Lead generation could be the last thing for a startup, but for small businesses and new entrepreneurs, getting leads is important. Getting information of interested buyers could change the game in the marketing and most probably can define the existence for them. From classified and advertising platforms to social media groups, marketing your own organization and looking for projects posted by people would help you in the initial bling effort stage.
So, there are not one or two, there are multiple reasons a startup should invest into digital marketing from the early stage itself. At Adrixus, we started working on Digital Marketing and branding from the early stage. Now, we are connected with our audience and clients and can make data driven decisions.