Starting a company can be exhausting – it takes a lot of money, years of hard work, and quite a bit of luck just to get started, and even once everything’s in place, you have to deal with a ton of competition. According to Kauffman research, last year, more than 530,000 new businesses were started every month in the United States. While not everybody will compete in the same niche as you, you can easily expect quite a large competition, no matter what field your business is in.
In order to differentiate yourself from the competition, you have put in some more effort into your marketing plans. But marketing a virtually-unknown new company is definitely a unique challenge. Seeing how, most startups are working on a tight budget, you have to make sure that every effort – no matter how small – is thought-out completely, and executed perfectly. Let’ face it, in today’s world, having a sound online marketing strategy will ensure the best chances of success for your startup.
Mobile
No matter how tech-savvy you are or aren’t, you surely know how much of an impact mobile devices have on our lives and last year, mobile traffic exceeded desktop traffic for the first time history. And according to the “US Digital Users” report, almost 12% of users will go online exclusively through a smartphone. And since Google recently announced that mobile usability is a big factor for search engine rankings, mobile optimization has to be an integral part of your website design.
Social Media
Chances are, nearly everyone you know has at least one social media account. For instance, according to last year’s Pew Research Center report, more than 70% of adult web users in the United States use Facebook on a regular basis. This also means that social media world is really crowded – billions of users already follow hundreds of different companies, entertainers and accounts. So if you want to stand out, you have to keep in mind that users today prefer hyper-relevant content to retrospective posts and regurgitated updates. Quality has always been preferable than quantity, and today’s users especially favor fewer but better posts.
Affiliate and Associate Programs
While affiliate and associate programs don’t really make sense for every business out there, if you start using them, you can see your marketing efforts improve in a short time, without actually needing to do much yourself. If you learn how to properly utilize an affiliate program, you’ll have a number of people who believe in your business, that will share your information and naturally grow your market on a commission-based platform. If you want to learn more about affiliate programs, you can find everything you need here, to help you get started on the right foot.
Maintain a Blog
Building and maintaining a blog can be great for your business for a number of different reasons, but most importantly, it helps drive traffic to your site in a natural way. Also, it saves you a ton of money, you would otherwise spend on paid ads. But let’s get back to the traffic, you see, every time you write a post, it is one more indexed page on your site. And this means it is one more opportunity for your business to show up on Google’s first page and drive traffic to you in organic search. In addition, a recent HubSpot study that analyzed over 1,400 companies around the world has revealed that businesses with more indexed pages naturally generate more leads.
Search Engine Optimization
On-page SEO refers to a set of page optimization practices that you can apply to the pages of your company’s site in order to improve their ranking. According to Searchmetrics’ Ranking Factors report, most important on-page ranking factors include internal links, keywords within content, word count (Google prefers longer content – 1,140 to 1,285 words) and especially website design. Good web design agencies, like Lidyr, make life easier for you as they are aware of the importance of on-site SEO and implement it from the start.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to marketing your startup, there are only two things you have to be aware of. The first one is that offering a good product or a service is simply not enough for you to succeed. And the second one is that no matter how much time you devote to your marketing campaign, or how much money you invest in it, if your product is bad, or even mediocre, it will unlikely reach a worldwide audience and gain mainstream acceptance. Therefore, you have to make sure that you concentrate on both of these things equally, just because a successful marketing effort necessitates both an excellent product/service and an excellent campaign.
