If you’re looking into how to start a business, no doubt you will get a lot of information on investments and business structures, but once you have your feet on the ground, it will be important to get eyes on your business in order for it to progress. The sooner you get started on this, the better.
Digital marketing is cheaper, more accessible, and far more effective than traditional media marketing. You just have to know what you are doing to use it to its full potential. If you’re interested in how to get your online marketing right, read our helpful guide.
Build your social media presence
Social media is becoming a hub for marketing. For startups, the obvious place to start advertising is on Instagram, where influencers gave way to artists and there is a user story category, who gave way to tech innovators, and before you know it everyone is on Instagram trying to show off their business.
And that is a good choice. People interested in your product will find you via the hashtags and your profile will provide a succinct log of the advancement of your business, but there are other options you can use to keep people engaged.
Twitter is the first point of contact for most customers. Today, customers are more aware of who they are buying from and will do their research into the brand via social media, so not only is Twitter the first stop to get basic information like website links and contact details, but it tells your customers what you stand for.
Video content comes down to three different forms over three prominent platforms: short-form content on TikTok, long-form content on YouTube, and live streaming on Twitch. Here, you have a few options in terms of content. If you have the time and dedication, you can make long-form video content tailored to YouTube and post clips of it to TikTok or create short-form content for TikTok and other social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram and leave the long-form content for further down the line. And you can live-stream as a supplement on most platforms, but if you intend to do it a lot, Twitch is the best option.
If you think you don’t have anything to post, you’re wrong. You can post content demonstrating your product or service, offering reviews, uses, how it’s made/done, etc. You can also tap into trends, like the oddly satisfying trend, which is especially useful to cleaning services and products.
Make your website
Every business today needs a website. As much as posting content on social media is useful for grabbing attention, you keep attention, offer information, and give a means to sell via your website.
However, in the same way that having a website ensures professionalism to a customer, the state of the website also portrays professionalism. A website has to look as polished as possible, as it will reflect the state of your business. At best a website that is not professional looking will appear like an unprofessional business, but at worst, it might be mistaken for a scam site.
Plus, not only will a dodgy looking site put customers off, but you will have to make sure everything functions as it should. Customers are impatient and fickle creatures who won’t stand for long loading screens or bugs in the system. You won’t want a glitch in the path between product and payment causing a customer to click off.
Luckily, a lot of this stress can be lifted even if you aren’t a website developer. You can build your own website from scratch with WIX, which offers templates for just about every situation. No matter the business venture you are off on, you will find a template that suits you. Even if your business is niche or a cross of genres, you can customize the templates as you wish to put across the impression you are looking to promote.
Don’t forget the data
Unfortunately, a big part of digital marketing is analytics. As much as people can handle their marketing on their own terms, they will not exploit its full potential without looking at and understanding the data around it.
Digital marketing allows brands to see where their customers are coming from, what content they are engaging in, what is prompting them to action, what they are buying, etc. With knowing all that, you can adjust your content and marketing accordingly.
There are a lot of guides online that will outline the data side of marketing to you, but if you feel you need some dedicated study, you can look into subscription-based online courses, like LinkedIn Learning. They can offer you information on SEO, affiliate marketing, keyword research, reaching demographics and more.
A lot of platforms offer dashboards of analytics on the creator’s end, like YouTube and Google, which offer analytics on everything from viewers to money to where you stand on the Google search results.
