Best digital marketing for a startup

Content

#one. # 1. Steal traffic from your competitors

# 3. # 3. Create a blog with useful content

# 4. # 4. Invest in influencer marketing

Every business start-up at the beginning of its journey must solve two problems: the first is to create a quality product, the second is to tell consumers about their product and sell it. Today we're going to talk about how unicorn companies are tackling the second challenge in the era of internet communications dominance, which is the best digital marketing strategies for promoting startups.

# 1. Steal traffic from competitors

The first example we'll look at is Intercom. This startup has created a SaaS solution for businesses to communicate with their customers using chats and chatbots.

Intercom has gained growth in profit from 1 Million to 50 Million per year and has left behind Shopify, New Relic, Atlassian, and HubSpot in growth.

And this was done not at the expense of a bloated budget, but at the expense of several successful solutions, the most interesting of which is “stealing” traffic from competitors through alternative landing pages.

Here's what exactly Intercom's marketers did:

1. First, the startup team identified the main competitors and analyzed what queries they use on Google to get their customers.

2. Secondly, alternative landing pages were created that should convince users to use Intercom, and not another similar product, for example, chats and chatbots of their main competitor - Drift.

3. Third, Intercom ordered ads on Google, targeting those keywords where their competitors were first in organic search results.

Thus, when a user entered a keyword into Google, which was supposed to lead him to a site, for example, of the Drift company, a paid ad appeared above

the natural search results advertising the Intercom solution, or an article where Drift and Intercom solutions were compared (of course, in such an article the Intercom product looked more advantageous). This is how it looked: As a result, much of the traffic that Drift used to receive is now going to Intercom. It worked like 90% of people don't have a particular brand in mind when they use a search engine to shop online, and yet 7.5% of Google users just select the first page in the search bar, not wanting to waste time searching and comparison of different offers.

This is a great example of a marketing strategy that converts other customers into yours. But remember, the "theft" of traffic and customers is unlikely to go unnoticed. When Drift got to know about the theft of their customers, they also used the same strategy to get back their customers from the intercom on large scale.

Here's what a custom landing page looks like:

Takeaway: Research your direct competitors and come up with several ways to steal their traffic through paid ads and alternative landing pages. But remember that competitors can respond in kind to you.

# 2. Use "inbound marketing"

A second example of learning digital marketing best practices for startups is inbound marketing. This is a strategy created by HubSpot, a cloud-based marketing and sales automation solutions provider. The essence of this strategy is to create reasons why your customers will come to you, and not just send messages and advertisements over the Internet.

HubSpot divides its inbound marketing strategy into three phases:

1. It involves the creation of several Buyers Identities and content useful for the target audience. This could be blog posts, social media posts, or YouTube videos. The main thing is that this content should bring real benefits to people (teach, help earn money or save money, solve a problem, etc.). Useful content should attract people to your platform and create a sense of brand trust and usefulness.

2. It involves the use of such communication channels and tools that contribute to building long-term relationships. These can be incoming calls, correspondence on social networks or instant messengers, email newsletters, or chats on the site (with chatbots). At the same time, communication tools should be configured in such a way as to solve problems of people, and not to sell them a product/content. That is, the pop-up message does not pop up immediately as soon as the user visits the site, but after 20-30 seconds, and the text in it depends on where the user is on the site.

3. Assumes that customers will receive brand support long after they make a purchase. For example, you can help people customize a product by calling, chatbots, or listening to social media posts and testimonials where people complain about your product or are interested in how to use it.

And this will make your customers your brand ambassador and with good words of mouth they will be very useful to promote your brand in their friends and family, and their circle and social media followers.

According to the HubSpot Inbound Marketing Status Report, brands that use it pay a lower price to lead in their niche, shorten sales cycles, and increase closing rates. Not surprisingly, inbound marketing is on the rise.

Takeaway: create Buyer Persons and understand what brings them to your site, how they can benefit from you, and how to do it. Create these "benefits" and promote this very moment, not just the product or service.

# 3. Build a blog with useful content

[{(According to SevenAtoms, companies that use blogs to generate leads get 97% more leads (67% for B2B) than companies that don't. )}]

There are 97% more leads (67% for B2B) is generated by companies that use blogs to get leads than those companies that don’t use blogs.

Search Engine Journal research also indicates that blogging is one of the most effective ways to generate leads.

Also, the websites with blogs have more indexed pages up to 430%.

So, if you need the best marketing strategy for a startup, start a blog and publish there what will be interesting and useful to your target audience. This is what Intercom, HubSpot, Sales force, Simply Business, Lead Pages Single Grain, and many other leaders of their markets have done. They all publish posts that match the following qualities:

1. Relevance.

The article’s content should correspond company’s niche and users’ expectations.

For example, if you are engaged in web development, then your blog should have posted about web development and everything that is closely related to it, and not texts about politics, ecology, or cooking. It is also best not to publish humorous or entertaining articles on your blog, even if they are about your business or industry, as your site should be “expert”, not entertaining. Memes and gags are best left to social media.

2. Honesty and Accuracy. Usually, users look at 3-5 pages in a blog before making the final choice about cooperation with a brand, and, as statistics show, the more truthful and accurate the article is, the more likely a positive decision is. Honesty markers: self-criticism, the presence of references to sources (data, studies, polls, etc.), justification of conclusions (this is so, because ...), and mention of authorities.

3. Videos and pictures. Visual information is much better perceived, so it is not surprising that articles with useful images and videos have a better response from visitors ( + 94% to views ). At the same time, most people are attracted by live photos and videos, while people usually ignore stock images (perhaps they are perceived as banners, and therefore fall under the effect of " banner blindness ").

Two other important things to keep in mind when starting a blog are the presence and location of a call to action (buy, subscribe, point, navigate, etc.). As the experience of Intercom, HubSpot, and other popular blogs shows, you shouldn't embed a call to action in every text. Calls are best used where contextually appropriate. And at the same time, they need to be inserted within the first quarter of the text, and not at the very beginning.

Important: even if your startup is still at the very beginning of the journey, create a blog and use it to create a platform for discussing both your product and everything related to it. Thus, at the time the project goes to market, you will already have a loyal community, whose members will be your promoters.

# 4. Invest in influencer marketing

Another great marketing strategy for promoting startups is referring to influencers.

What are the popular pages on social media but not celebrities’ actors, players, politicians, etc.?

Based on the number of subscribers, these pages are divided into 4 groups.

1. Mega Influences are superstars with over 1 million followers.

These are international celebrities just, as Cristiano Ronaldo with 300 million, Kim Kardashian with 200 million, etc

Or politicians - Trump has 68 million Twitter followers. The price of one post is from 1,000 to 1 million dollars.

2. Macro influencers - Pages with 100,000 to 1 million followers. There are a lot of such people, and usually, they are regional or niche celebrities (video game streamers, reviewers of something, or local actors, artists, and politicians). The price of posts is from 400 to 1000 dollars.

3. Micro-influencers are those with 1,000 to 100,000 followers. Oddly enough, marketers are now betting on these not particularly polar people, since the conversion in their posts is higher than that of world-class celebrities: 6-10% versus 1.5%, respectively. The cost of a post is from $ 100 to $ 400.

4. Influences - Pages with less than 1000 followers. Their influence on followers is even greater, as their followers are relatives, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. The price of posts is up to $ 100.

When using influencer marketing, you need to create a specific Buyer Identity, where, in addition to the usual socio-demographic characteristics, you should also indicate the pages that are popular in your target audience.

That will help to bet on accounts on social media (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) and the type of content (text, photo, video, gifs, comics, podcast, etc.).

Important: Remember, often among influencers, followers on one platform and followers on another platform are the same people. In addition, there can be a fairly large number of bots (fake accounts). All of this must be considered when choosing influencers to promote your startup.

# 5. Train your customers

The latest marketing strategy for promoting a startup involves creating educational materials that will automatically promote your brand. This is a great approach to take even if you don't have a finished product yet. Here are some examples:

1. STR Software. An ERP systems development company has created a BI Publisher University course and blog to educate everyone on how to use ERP for their own or someone else's business. Thanks to this and a few other things, STR Software increased their form conversions by 10%, web traffic + 57%, and long-term page views + 67%.

2. Simply Business. The largest insurance broker in the UK has focused on creating content that is useful to their clients - from business blogging rules to instructions for installing themes and plugins in WordPress. Which increased their website's ranking for main keywords and a significant increase in organic traffic.

3. This platform for finding and hiring authors for a wide variety of tasks has also focused on educational content: blogs, podcasts, webinars, case studies, and how-tos. This increased the flow of new customers through blog forms by 46% and reduced the number of bounces on them to a minimum (three times less than those of competitors).to

In addition to these examples, Salesforce, SAP, SecureWorks, CB Insights, Next View Ventures, Velcro, and many other startups have also chosen the learning strategy.

ALL of them decided to use content that was helpful for their audience and got benefit from this as people searched it thereby source of content got popularity.

In addition, the level of trust in the "teacher" is always higher than the level of trust in the "seller", which is important for increasing conversion and loyalty of people.

Important: Teach people what you yourself know how to do, not everything. When doing this, rely on research, statistics and practice, not personal experience or generally accepted practices. And do not forget about the negative, even in relation to your actions and cases - people trust those who admit their mistakes, and not those who say that they are never wrong.