Use marketing for your startup online: What you need to know
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Modern marketing is at its most powerful when it’s happening online, and for startups, this couldn’t be truer. Promoting a startup online can be incredibly hard; you’re competing with major brands that already have a loyal community of followers on Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms across the Internet. Creating an active follower base might become a serious obstacle to your brand development from the start.
Want to make sure your startup is as visible as possible online? Don’t know how to make your Instagram or Twitter followers grow and need help from professional services? From social media platform building to keeping up with search engine AI, here are our best marketing tips to ensure your digital success.
Make your website shine
To promote your startup online, you need something to promote! Having a centralized website for your business makes lead direction and conversion significantly easier. This way people will find you easier, and creating your own close community of followers will be just a matter of time. Your website should be a priority and should follow some pretty simple guidelines. It should be:
- Easy to access and fast-loading – make sure that you have a memorable domain and optimized (small and easy to process) content.
- Aesthetically pleasing and simple to navigate – hiring a website designer might be well worth it to make sure your customers are greeted by a professional-looking site with well-organized and clearly-labeled pages.
- Optimized for search engines – SEO is incredibly important for marketing online, so be sure that your site has all of the appropriate metadata to be easily searched and indexed by the AI of search engines.
- Frequently updated and maintained – make sure that your contact information and products are current and that they function how they are supposed to.
List your site with the big three
Your website won’t be found at all if it isn’t indexed with the major search engines. Make sure that you have appropriately listed your website on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You can find the processes for listing a website here, here, and here, respectively.
Signing up for Google Business and Google Places, as well as Yahoo Local, lets you add your business’s details so that they show up automatically when they match a search term, meaning you’re more likely to get conversions from search results alone. You’ll want to include contact information, images, and business hours in these profiles.
Each of these sites will also have a method for checking your website’s ranking (where it shows up in the search results) and its incoming traffic, which can help you determine if your SEO efforts are working and how to tweak them if you want more dramatic results.
Remember that you’ll want to optimize your site’s headline, meta description, and URL to get the most out of search engine results pages and that it’s best to rank in the top 10 results, as this will put you on the first page and make you significantly more visible.
Take advantage of social media
Social media is the single biggest tool a startup has for marketing online. They allow brands to connect on a personal level with their customers. Select 2-3 of the most fitting platforms and sign up for a business account on them; most social media platforms offer business accounts for free and even have additional features you can take advantage of.
- Facebook is great for sharing longer bouts of information as well as images, and for businesses with a more mature audience.
- Instagram is fantastic for visual businesses like jewelry and clothing stores, as well as food companies.
- Twitter is amazing for companies that have strong values or political messages, as well as for those who update frequently.
- TikTok is amazing for companies with dynamic products and those who appeal to younger audiences.
- LinkedIn is good for B2B communication, and for expanding your professional network.
Make sure to look into the advertising programs for each platform – Facebook and Instagram have the most intuitive and lowest cost advertising systems, though TikTok has rising power for video ads. You’ll also want to consider working with influencers – individual creators – in your industry to promote your product through sponsorships or affiliate programs.
Conclusion
Running a startup is hard, but advertising it doesn’t have to be. It may take some trial and error, but testing different online marketing strategies can lead to a major jump in your business’s success.
As long as you’ve got a solid website, great SEO practices, and a social media plan, you’ll be more than ready to take on the digital world and work online marketing to your advantage.