7 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Startups in 2020

Digital marketing offers an opportunity for start-ups to build awareness with a comparatively small investment compared to traditional marketing channels. Here are some options you can try.

Digital technology has transformed marketing more in the past two years than in the last 50 combined. Change in the way business is done is coming at a breakneck pace and even established businesses are struggling to keep up.

For start-ups, this new landscape creates opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, digital technology puts a range of tools at your disposal that can potentially achieve excellent results for a relatively low investment. On the downside, competition is ferocious, and most start-ups fail to understand how to use all these tools effectively. 

To give yourself the best chance, Element8 – The Top digital marketing agency in Dubai has come up with seven tips that can help you get the most out of your marketing efforts. 

• Improving your SEO 

Having a great website is not enough. The web is a competitive place and there are probably hundreds of similar companies to yours all looking for that coveted real estate at the top of page one. Ranking highly on Google will not only increase traffic to your website but it will also be considered as a sign of trust by new and potential customers. 

Search engines are constantly updating the way they crawl & rank content. While keywords are vital you need to know what phrases and questions your customers are most likely to use. To get the best results it can be worth hiring a digital marketing company like Element8 which has specialist skills in SEO marketing. 

• Social media 

This is a great channel or media which is open to everyone and won’t break the bank. It can help you build brand awareness, engage with customers, promote new offers, and improve your profile. It can also help to push traffic towards your website and is a useful tool in improving your site’s SEO performance. It’s also a good way to monitor your mentions to see how your brand is perceived. Sometimes the feedback may not be complimentary, but even this can be helpful to improve your service offering.

To build your following you need a regular stream of interesting and compelling content that your followers are going to find useful. To help you out, you can use tools such as Hubspot which will help you create content and develop a regular schedule for its release. 

• Email marketing 

According to a survey for Demand Metric, email marketing continues to deliver the goods with a 12% return on investment. It’s a great way of increasing your engagement with customers, building relationships, and increasing revenue per customer. To get the best out of it, you need a strategy which helps to engage with customers at the right point, to ensure they feel they are getting value from it. Spamming your potentials mailbox will not help. Providing a warm audience, the right value through emails is what you should be targeting.

• Content marketing 

In the digital age, brands are becoming mini media producers. By generating content, you not only build trust in your brand but you help to build brand awareness, improve SEO performance and establish yourself as a leader in your space. Content can be used to reach customers via many outlets such as email, blogs, social media, and much more. With each approach, you need to start with a clear end goal in mind; namely what do you hope this will achieve? 

For example, are you looking to drive the reader towards making a purchase or simply build awareness and strengthen your relationship with that customer? Ideally, you should have content for every part of the marketing funnel from capturing new prospects to taking them all the way to the final sale. Not sure how to come up with the right content? Approach a reliable creative agency in Dubai and they will help you come up with the right content.

• Identifying trends

Generating good ideas for content can be difficult, especially understanding which ones are more likely to generate traction. Tools such as HubSpot can help you identify trends and can also generate a collection of ideas for content that are likely to deliver results. They can also help you see what influencers are active within your industry. By engaging with them, you can dramatically increase your profile and the impact of your marketing efforts. 

• Referral marketing 

To supercharge your promotion efforts, you can encourage people to do it for you. One quick and relatively easy way to do this is through referral marketing. You can share a referral code with each of your customers and encourage them to share it in their circles. 

There are a number of tools available such as InviteReferrals which helps you generate a referral marketing scheme on social media and provides analytics on performance. 

• Viral marketing 

This is the holy grail for any content marketer and is incredibly difficult to achieve. However, if you manage it effectively it can do wonders for small startups. Examples of great viral marketing include the ‘Will it Blend’ series in which one entrepreneur promoted his new blender to a global audience. 

To succeed with viral marketing you effectively have to come up with something which is so good, so unusual and so hilarious that people will share it amongst their friends, doing all your outreach work for you. It’s incredibly difficult to achieve and there’s no magic bullet that can ensure success. However, if you strike gold, the impact can be fantastic. Don’t try to create viral content, create content that’s so good that it goes viral.

At Element8 we have skilled and experienced digital marketing experts, who can support your Startup with a complete marketing strategy. Perfect digital marketing strategy can be the miracle for Startups. We’ll work with you to make it happen. Get in touch