The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing for Startups

The question that gets asked a lot: what is the right way to communicate with and attract the attention of your audience, potential and existing customers? Well, there are lots of ways. Digital Marketing is certainly one of the best. But the real question is, what channels do you use to have consistently increasing brand-awareness while conveying the messages you want the audience to see?

Let’s dive into it and explore how Content Marketing, Branding, Social Media, Email Marketing and Web Analytics can achieve that – and become the foundation of your company-client relationship, from inception to the selling point and beyond – and how every step of the process can (and should!) be improved with Digital Analytics.

HubSpot, in its 2015 benchmark report, found that companies with 400+ published blog posts got 3x the number of leads over companies that have published between 0-100 blog posts.

Also, do you remember that content marketing is more cost-effective, costing up to 41% less than paid marketing?

What does it mean for your startup?

Content is the obligatory marketing foundation part for a startup that wants to get in 10% who survive during the first year of operation. You have to perform content-driven marketing to save your startup marketing budget. And to get tangible results, you are to produce the content of the highest quality and with the right approach.

What? Fundamental Content Layer for a Startup

You must create a content basis – a fundamental content lair surrounding your brand, company, and product. Even if you can’t spend a lot of time and resources on content marketing, you must make sure that your potential clients can easily understand your solution, your product, its potential, and the overall company’s goals.

How to Achieve it?

To achieve that, you should spend time creating White Paper and its shortened version Light Paper revealing the idea, meaning, and goals of your startup. Later, you can distribute this content in your blog and social media for being ranked in Google and getting more coverage of your target audience. Besides, you should make sure that the landing page(s) of your product is pretty informative to make a new visitor understand why he/she came here, what to do next, and why it matters. Eventually, it’d be good to publish 1-3 blog posts written by founders of the startup addressing different issues related to the product, its market and the problem it is going to resolve. Don’t forget to use relevant keywords from your semantic core – a list of target keywords from section 1 – while preparing the content.

All of it is needed to enable people to love your product and start believing you.

When a website visitor reads a story backed by personal experience of a startup founder facing a problem and coming up with a solution for that – this person is getting inspired and loyal to the product and the team behind it.

Content Marketing is focused on Getting FREE Organic Traffic

Having developed an appropriate semantic core for your website, you can generate a huge amount of content that will attract thousands of users to your website and product for FREE.

Of course, you will not get fast results. But if you properly develop your marketing foundation and keep following the right direction, in the course of time, it will definitely occupy, thereby, reducing your Customer Acquisition Cost, dramatically.

You will not only save money on paid ads that may not have a positive ROI but also get a constant influx of FREE target visitors (if people search topics related to your solution – it means that they’re potential clients or ambassadors) who may test your product, become your partners, subscribers and customers. This is how content marketing drives sales.

The main idea

The startup relationships with content can be defined as: “the sooner the better”. In terms of traffic, content marketing has a long payback period. Around 6-9 months. Therefore, smart founders should address content production activities in advance, at the very beginning. Even before the start of the product development.

What you’ll lose if you don’t do this?

Today, in the era of the Internet, markets and media space are overcrowded with different solutions and products in various niches. Most of them blend in with the rest of the offers available on the market. Some of them are really creative in communication that enables them to imprint in our memory after the first contact.

What’s really worth noting – people have limited attention units/slots, and it forces us to filter the information and forget the one that our brain considers useless.

What?

Aside from competition for the attention and memory of our target audience with the rivals, we also are in stiff competition with other informational sources like news, memes, music, chats with people’s friends and colleagues, etc. Therefore, it requires startup founders to make sure that their brand effectively grabs the attention of the website visitor while the subsequent marketing funnels deeply integrates a person into the project life and progress. Otherwise, your brand, offer and product would be skipped even without having been tried by a potential customer.

How to Achieve?

To achieve this, you have to do your best to imprint in the long-term memory/episodic section of a visitor (See picture below).

It can be accomplished by a custom-tailored professional branding and design made for your company and product by professionals.

Product features and deep functionality are usable and enjoyable, but the design is what really makes people differentiate and love a product! How to create a design and develop brands that are loved, for ages?

It should include items that will be used anywhere your brand will be present: social media, articles on media outlets, partnership announcements and even offline events and outdoor ads.

For that, your brand book must contain, at least, the following brand components:

What you’ll lose if you don’t do custom-tailored branding for your startup?

4 more reasons for doing fundamental social media marketing for your startup

How to start SMM for your startup?

Similarly to SEO, you are to perform an On-page optimization of your social media account before starting to push it to your target audience screens. To achieve that, you have to perform the following check-list:

1. Fill in your SM account/page with a relevant description of your company/product

This text should perfectly express the nature of your brand and its story (why did you decide to create a product and what are your current achievements?). Also, it must be as informative as possible to enable your potential buyers to understand that your product is what they need. The text should include relevant keywords. Don’t forget to place appropriate CTAs and links where it’s relevant.

2. Branding of your SM account

As I’ve already described in the 5th section of this white paper, it’s a must-do step for your startup to stand out among the mass of other projects and events in the information space of your potential followers and clients. It means using a branded avatar, covers, animations, gifs, and visual materials for each post. Informational video materials should also be adjusted to your brand identity.

3. Report all your news and content to SM

You can create an absolutely perfect content with outstanding design, but it’d be worthless without showing it to an appreciable number of users, analyzing their engagement, and getting their feedback on it. Social Media serves as an effective channel for bringing traffic to your content and landing pages. To make a good post that will bring the right people to your content piece, you should do the following:

– write down a selling caption text
– design an attention-grabbing visual item
– insert an appropriate link with UTM mark
– publicize the post with the use of appropriate hashtags, mentions, and keywords.

Look at an example below.

How to use Social Media for generating leads and clients/users?

In spite of SMM being a proven tool to get B2C clients, here at RGray we learned how to apply Social Media for our B2B lead generation and Search Engine Optimization. At the moment, 17% of our leads come from organic social media traffic. And 26% more from the paid social traffic.

So, SMM is a really advantageous channel even for b2b marketing in terms of ROMI.

Our SMM efficiency is based on 4 main pillars:

What you’ll lose if you don’t do social media marketing for your startup?

After you begin your digital marketing activity, your website will start getting new visitors from different sources, like active ones (Paid and Direct), as well as passive ones (Referral, Social and Organic). It means that each day, your website will be visited by your target audience, their friends and other strangers. Undoubtedly, it’s a good sign. But when you are building a new network for a small startup, the main questions are “What’s next?” and “How to contact them?”

Sure. The main conversion goal of the majority of startups is “sign up to early access” or “get free trial”. However, there also might be people who are not ready to start the interaction with your product right now. They would rather stay aside your project and observe your progress and behaviour. Also, there may be visitors who are not your target audience but they can still be beneficial for you. For instance, representatives of similar or related products or media representatives who in the course of time can provide your company with value by experience exchange, cross-promotion or addressing other helpful queries.

And the main target conversion for them should be “Subscribe to Updates”.

Such people will form one of the most important resources for your company – Lead Base, which can be gradually transformed into customers, partners, and the community around your brand. However, you have to work and communicate with this lead base on a regular basis, along with inactive existing users who already signed up or got Free Trial.

The first question you may ask is “How to treat these people?” But the proper question is “How to process and convert these types of traffic into clients, partners, and associates?”.

What?

The answer is simple. You should setup up a basic Inbound Email Marketing activity, which includes the following:

There are a significant number of tools for Email Marketing. Undoubtedly, the top email marketing tools for startups are MailChimp and GetResponse. They are affordable and have flexible functionality.

How to design an email marketing strategy for startups?

First of all, you have to design an overall digital marketing funnel/lead processing workflow clearly depicting where and how your leads are coming to your website, how you segment them, how are you going to convert them into users, and how you are going to remarket them to stir up ineffective ones and what is the final goal your overall funnel? Is it selling a paid subscription for one month? Or Year? Or even guarantee of 3 main conversions by one user (subscription for 1 year, to newsletter and referral program?)

Remember BitQuant? Let’s review this case one more time to get a deeper understanding of what the digital marketing funnel means and how it works. Look at the example of the funnel below.

Under “1”, you can see the list of external channels used by the marketing team: Ads in Google Display Network (GDN), Social Media, Telegram, Industry Media, etc. This list is wide, but there is no Organic Source as a traffic channel, which must be the above all focus for the early-stage startup. It’s due to the fact that the BitQuant team had to show the result within a limited amount of time.

Under “2”, you can see the well-designed conversion funnel leading leads directly to the target conversion – registration in the white list and joining the referral program. The flow of leads to the conversion is ensured by the customized marketing workflow in the email marketing tool. If some of them fall off, the automated-funnel put them in a certain segment that is addressed by the marketing team then. Paid traffic specialist gets fallen off leads back and encourages them to proceed the funnel by showing them custom-tailored messages (f.e. Gift offer or reminder) through the remarketing ads in Social Media (Twitter & Facebook) and Google Display Network.

Here is how customization of marketing workflow (sequences) looks like in the Get Response email tool.

Hint: It would be good to add two more email reminders at the “White List Shared?” stage to move forward leads that stuck at this funnel stage directly through email. However, if you overdo with a number of emails and frequency, there is a risk of unsubscription and getting into spam. That’s a reason why the marketing team of BitQuant kicked back that idea. They did not have a right for mistakes due to the tight deadlines for reaching the goal. But if you have enough time, this move would be really helpful in facilitating the conversion.

Under “3”, you can see segmentation of all 30,956 BitQuant leads according to their activity, interest and funnel stage. This is needed to find the appropriate approach to each type of leads and ensure the maximum result of processing the user base. It’d be wrong not to ask a blogger or Twitter influencer about help in spreading the word about the BitQuant product in exchange for a reward. Wouldn’t it?

By the way, here is how basic lead segmentation looks like in MailChimp, one of the best and most convenient tools for startup lead storing and email marketing.

The main reason why you MUST customize inbound email marketing funnel is the economic necessity to convert incoming traffic into leads and then users of your product. It’s an automated system that will provide your business with value straight after the setup and first customization.
The main goal of this activity and such automated systems is the proper processing and segmentation of incoming leads to provide the right people with the right content/message – connect the dots. According to McKinsey, email is almost 40 times more effective than Facebook, and Twitter combined in helping your business acquire new customers.

What you’ll lose if you don’t perform inbound email marketing on your website?

Do you remember I told you about the determination of your startup’s success in the 3rd section?

To start moving the process of accomplishing your success, you have to measure what is the outcome of all the actions you take for the promotion of a startup product and getting new users. It signifies performing analysis of different marketing channels and content items you use there.

According to Jayson Demers, founder, and CEO of AudienceBloom “You don’t know what marketing platforms and strategies work best because you haven’t had the opportunity to test them. You’re essentially gambling on what you think might work in your favor.”

Also, remember the main rule of lean analytics: “use data to build a better startup faster”.

The “What”

For that purpose, there are a lot of various digital marketing analytics tools on the market. But the application of all of them is not needed at the beginning. There are three fundamental ones without which your startup cannot perform efficient digital marketing. The usage of these three tools would be enough for the early development stages.
MUST-HAVE startup analytics tools are:

The utilization of these 3 tools enables your team to assess the current state of your startup’s digital performance. So, with these tools, you can analyze changes in main performance metrics of your company caused by any of your marketing and development activities each day/month/weak. Such precise attention to details and data will make you understand which of your actions and tactics worked well and which don’t. Subsequently, it will help your marketing team avoid redundant expenses on unprofitable channels and useless activities. Moreover, it allows you to define an effective stack of activities and invest only in working marketing channels to scale your results.

So, How do I Achieve the Results?

To understand outcomes of your marketing and product performance, your team should track a set of success metrics in digital analytics on a regular basis. This variety includes the following:

As a startup founder, you’re not limited to these indicators. You should base your success measurement process on some of them, but you can choose your own.
When you determine them, you should keep these metrics in mind and use them as a baseline. Success Metrics (KPI) can differ from one startup to the next based on business goals and marketing strategies. Though, as a rule of thumb, they must always be linked to business objectives including user growth, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), annual growth rate, etc.

Digital Marketing Analytics Application Case Study:

Here is how it works. Let’s address the analytics of BitQuant – a FinTech startup seeking the early-stage traction for its product – to analyze the performance and understand the importance of the data gathered via Google Analytics. During the two months (Spt-Oct), the goal was to collect 1000 users desiring to get early access to the crypto exchange in the white list. Eventually, the marketing team managed to exceed that goal, having collected 30 times more users (30,956). Do you want to know how? Let’s go to the analytics tool.

Here is a screenshot of the Google Analytics overview for the given period.

As can be seen, the marketing team used all possible channels, such as Referral, Social, Organic, etc., to accomplish the marketing goal during the period. Each of the channels brought different amounts of traffic and has various conversion rates and Customer Acquisition Cost (CaC).

For example, Direct channel brought 21,100 users to the website with the lowest Bounce Rate (BR) – 29.77% and the highest Goal Conversion Rate (CR) – 81.36%.

At the same time, Email (862 visitors) has almost the highest BR (64.46%) and the lowest CR (15.29%) that can be considered as a bad performance. But notably, that the Email channel was used to convert users that did not pass the funnel for the first time, but who left some data: name and email. Therefore, by utilizing this channel, the team just optimized the existing budget spendings and increased ROMI.

In turn,158 users obtained through Organic Search with BR 51.28% and CR 28.45% were completely cost-free for the company. Mind that initial goal was to get 1000 users.

Amazing, isn’t it?

In addition, from this success measurement data, it’s evident that during the first 15 days of September, the results were not so good. It means that the marketing strategy and tactics used during that time were not so effective as they’ve applied at the end of September and October. We call such intervals hypothesis testing – a period of time when the marketing team examined the different marketing channels, along with stacks of promotional messages and content items that can reach the highest number of people form the target audience and achieve the best conversion rate and ROMI. Then, when the team found this winning stack of marketing items, they invested all remaining budget to get the maximum. And here we go. They got 30,956 users instead of 1,000 within the same budget.

READ MORE ABOUT THAT CASE HERE

What you’ll lose if you don’t track your performance via digital analytics?

Based on the data gathered during this marketing campaign, the team now can say with confidence: