Starting a business is difficult! If you are an entrepreneur, then you likely already know that. But, after your business is established and you’ve got your first few clients, where do you go from there? The next step is to dip your toes into the world of digital marketing. As it currently stands, digital marketing can be a confusing and crowded market. However, there are a few surefire strategies that you can use to set yourself apart from your competitors, cultivate brand loyalty, and reach new target audiences.
If you are interested in learning how you can grow your business — keep reading! We’re covering everything from determining your unique value proposition to how to send mass emails.
Let’s get started, shall we?
1. Start By Establishing a Digital Marketing Strategy.
Before you can start social media marketing or searching for a Gmail extension for mass email, you need to start with your strategy.
In order to properly market your business, you need to do a bit of work on the backend and ask some important questions before getting started. The first thing you need to do is define your brand. Your brand includes your logo, your location (if you have one), your product, and your mission. We could go on forever — even the colors you use on your website can be considered part of your company brand.
You should also think about how you want consumers to feel when they interact with your product or service. What kinds of emotions do you want to elicit from your target audience? Asking these questions will help you get close to the emotion that you want to convey in your branding.
The next thing you need to consider before you can really get started is your business’ unique value proposition (UVP). Your UVP is what makes your product or service unique from all of your competitors. Your marketing strategy should be structured around your UVP so that potential customers can clearly understand why your product or service is beneficial.
The last thing you need to iron out before you can start your digital marketing campaign is your target audience. While it would be wonderful if everyone was interested in your product, that is not likely the case. The best way to start your digital marketing strategy is to choose a specific target audience you want to appeal to and use that to inform your marketing campaign. It often helps to imagine a target audience as a single individual as a brainstorming exercise. What does this person look like? Where do they shop? How old are they? What motivates them? By answering these questions on behalf of your imagined ideal customer, you’ll begin to understand how to start marketing your business and which channels to use.
2. Content & Email Marketing Strategies.
Now that you have established your brand mission, it’s time to take a look at a few strategies you’ll need to get the word out about your business.
One of the most cost-effective digital marketing strategies is content marketing. Content marketing is a big umbrella term that encompasses a few different strategies. Most commonly you will encounter email marketing and blogs. Email marketing is possibly the lowest cost digital marketing strategy out there since sending out emails is free — unlike paid advertisement. Email marketing is not only affordable, it creates real results that you can monitor using a Gmail extension.
Your Gmail extension is the key to sending out batches of professional-looking marketing emails. A Gmail extension, also known as a mass email plugin or mass email service, helps you send mass emails without causing any accidental errors. Gmail plugins are integrated right into your Gmail account, making it easy to access. The mass email services are also easy to use as they help users import their address list, create professional messages, and make sure that the daily send limit is not exceeded. If you are trying to start a mass email campaign without a Gmail plugin on your side, there is a high chance that you will run into problems. These plugins are also affordable no matter the size of your startup — ranging anywhere from $10 to $40 per month.
The other main form of content marketing is blogging. You may think of blogging as something that was left behind in the early 2000s, but in reality it is an effective way to drive traffic to your website. Creating content isn’t exactly easy, but if you create the right kind of content you can grow your reach and improve your search engine placement. The first thing you need to do before you begin creating blog content is conduct keyword research. Keyword research helps you decide which keywords are the most lucrative for your SEO campaign.
After that, you should brainstorm a few subjects to write about. Consider problems that your target audience may experience on a daily basis that would cause them to search for your product or service. For example — if you are creating a mobile application to help people find dog walkers — you want to write blogs about dog walking and other related subjects. The subject matter doesn’t always have to be about your product or service exactly, but it should be informative and fit within your industry.
3. Social Media Marketing Strategies.
Now that you have a few ideas for content marketing, it’s time to explore the world of social media marketing.
Even though having a visually appealing site with SEO optimized content is an excellent start to your marketing plan, you will still need to expand your strategy beyond your site. A great way to maximize your marketing reach is by using social media advertisements. The first step you need to take to get started with social media marketing is to establish a plan. First, you need to decide which channels you will be using to run your social media advertisements. The most commonly used channels are Google Ads and Facebook Ads. These two platforms have the biggest reach and can create the most site visits and conversions.
Next, you need to decide what kind of content you want to create. Consider what parts of your business you want to highlight. Is it a new product launch? Is it a discount on services? Is it an endorsement? All of these are excellent starting points for designing social media ads.
If you aren’t ready to run ads yet, creating compelling content is sometimes enough to get the word out about your business. Just remember that shareability is key for posts on your own social media account. You want to create content that people authentically want to share with their friends. If your content isn’t engaging or sharable, it likely won’t go very far.
If you are running a startup, then you need to find the most effective way to make potential consumers aware of your product or service. You can start by implementing one of the strategies we’ve discussed or create a comprehensive plan to tackle all of the different marketing channels at once. We recommend trying the strategies one at a time and assessing the results of each before proceeding full steam ahead with any specific strategy. Depending on your industry, some methods will work better than others.
