Why Online Marketing Is Crucial for Startups
Online Marketing is one of our key competencies here at Project A , and it’s important in any stage of a company. Let’s take a look at three different phases of a startup.
At the very beginning there is an idea which needs to be proven to gain investors and raise money. Therefore it is important to generate persuasive KPIs that show the business model works and there is a promising target group. Online Marketing is ideal to create these parameters, and you can easily start with small and simple campaigns which can be optimized and expand at a later point. Even small companies can compete with the big players who have million dollar budgets for their marketing, as they only have to implement their Online Marketing strategy in a precise and effective way.
In the lifecycle of a startup it might happen that for example the model turns out to be more prosperous in the B2B market than in the B2C market as originally planned. The founders may need to adjust their business model or, in an extreme case, even pivot to another model or target group. At that stage, it’s important to act in an agile and flexible way to benefit from the actions which have been taken earlier. Online Marketing activities can be adapted much faster and more convenient than print or TV campaigns, and are also far easier to measure.
When a company grows a lot of fields need to be scaled, and among them Marketing. This is ideally suited to keep up with the growth of a startup, not only because of the advantage of flexible modifications and an easy way of measuring, but also offers the opportunity to adjust the campaigns and activities to the size and impact of a company.
Even a relatively small company at an advanced stage can run worldwide campaigns with nearly the same setup as before. Besides this, Online Marketing in general needs a lot less preparation time than print or TV campaigns and generates low cost and flexible experiences in a short time.
Always think about A/B testing your Online Marketing activities
It doesn’t matter what the stage your company, if you want to develop and evolve, you need to think about A/B testing every single step of your Online Marketing activities. Ideally you start from the beginning by testing banner ads, text ads, pricing, and placement of the products as well as the landing page, and the conversion funnel to see what performs best. Then continue with the promising activities and drop the ones that aren’t convincing. In an evolution-like process the effective approaches survive, while others are dismissed.Testing your strategies is the only way to enhance your performance in a successful and sustainable way. By A/B testing every single issue such as different prices for a product or which type of customer sees which product, your Online Marketing will be optimized over time. In a second step, the implementation of a data warehouse makes sense at a certain number of customers.
Define a test budget (and say goodbye to that money)
A testing budget should be used to identify the perfect target group for your business, to get to know what your target group likes, and to learn about conversion rates and how much you should spend on new customers. After testing these issues you have to think about what you need to change in order to improve your Online Marketing strategy. No campaign can be perfect from the start. Every campaign can potentially perform successfully, but it takes some steps to identify the “why and how”, which can only be achieved by testing. A test budget is a good way to measure the right approach without the pressure of an actual campaign. Sure, this money doesn’t automatically serve gaining new customers, but rather serves buying knowledge and experience. So say goodbye to it and start feeling like a real expert.
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