We’re sure you’re aware that marketing is important for an enterprise, but it’s even more essential for startups and SMEs. Unless consumers know about your business and its offerings, they probably won’t be able to find your brand, let alone purchase your products and services. 

Startup success rates are often pretty dismal, with a report by Forbes showing that up to 90 percent of startups fail. As a founder, this cold statistic should worry you, but you don’t necessarily have to belong to this club. While the economic landscape has not been designed to spur startup growth with large companies using their financial muscle to push the small firms out of the way, there’s one way you can make it out alive. 

With the right digital marketing strategy, you will be able to improve your brand’s visibility and bring more customers your way. Read on to discover 11 transforming online marketing strategies you can start using today.

1. Understand your audience

Identifying your buyer personas will help you determine your brand’s target audience. This will let you know where to focus your marketing efforts, and help you efficiently use your marketing funds and more buyers for your products because of better targeting.

Get as detailed as possible when analyzing your target customers to understand important issues such as their demographic, where they live, the online services they use, and how they look for your products/services. If you have a broad target audience, try and segment it carefully to ensure you are reaching each target user group properly with your marketing messages.

Analyzing your competitors will also help you understand your audience and its behavior, and how to reach them properly. Find the top-performing companies in your industry and have a look at their marketing strategy. Identify the channels they use to reach their audience effectively and use the insights to inform your own marketing strategy.

Lastly, check your ad sets analytics to know what types of people have interacted with your marketing campaign. This data will help you understand the unique characteristics of your target users, and you will be able to use this information to optimize upcoming campaigns.

People crossing the street blurred

2. Influencers

Influencer marketing is one of the best brand marketing techniques, as recommended by digital marketing experts. It is a highly effective technique that allows you to gain visibility on social platforms and grow your small business. It gives your products great exposure and return as well as helping you gain trust and credibility with customers.

The key to a successful influencer campaign is to choose the right person to work with. You don’t necessarily have to go with celebrity influencers with millions of followers as this can be too expensive for your small business. You can instead look for free or cheaper opportunities with nano and micro-influencers in your niche. This will ensure your brand messages reach the right customer base, thus converting more users into paying customers.

Don’t get left behind by failing to include influencers in your marketing campaign. Learn how to get started here: How to Make an Influencer Marketing Strategy.

Or, if you want to skip the small talk and jump straight into it, let the team over at Atisfyreach help. Atisfyreach allows you to create incredible campaigns and connect with the right influencers at the click of a button. Find out more by clicking the link above!

Influencer in front of camera

3. Analytics

It is important to analyze the data your business collects from different touch points such as your website and social media pages. The analysis will inform your business decisions going forward, and this calls for companies to set up appropriate systems to capture user data.

Tracking your site data can be done for free with Google Analytics. It allows you to track where your web traffic is coming from, how long people spend on your website, and the pages that are popular with visitors. For your Facebook Ads campaign, you can check the user stats from your Facebook Business Manager tab.

It is not enough to rely on these platforms to understand your customers’ needs and preferences. Consider using Google Forms to collect valuable user feedback and SurveyMonkey to capture the opinion of your target users.

Data should be the backbone of many of your company’s workflows, including marketing. Read our top 5 Reasons Analytics Helps Create Data-Driven Customer Journeys to find out how you can give you customers what they want, when they want it.

 

Web analytics on tablet

4. SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective ways of bringing traffic to your website. Your pages should be optimized with the right keywords to make it easy for prospects to find you when they perform a search. Every startup needs to focus on SEO to ensure they can generate organic traffic from search engines.

The good thing about SEO is that it allows businesses to acquire customers at no added cost. This makes it a foundation for a healthy business, especially for startups that are short on cash. It gives long-lasting results as well and helps businesses gain trust and authority in their industries.

SEO can be a difficult field, we know. But with the right tips, you have the tools to generate organic leads easily. Find out more in Your 10 Tip Must Have SEO Strategy Checklist.

Person using Google search

5. Mobile optimization

Google reports that more than 50 percent of its traffic comes from mobile devices. This means that a huge portion of your audience is likely to visit your site on their mobile devices. So, it’s essential to have a website that is easy to navigate and looks clean when someone accesses it from their smartphone.

Google also announced that it would be rewarding mobile websites with a higher ranking on search, and this makes it important to optimize your website for mobile devices if you crave the top spots on SERPs.

Creating a mobile-friendly website is not difficult since most web development platforms offer mobile-optimized templates. Just ensure not to make the site heavy with media such that it becomes too difficult to load.

Data on smartphone screen

6. Social media

It goes without saying that your audience is on social media. Facebook alone has over 2 billion users every month, and this makes marketing your products on social media one of the best ways to gain exposure and customers for your products.

There are lots of social media platforms, but you need to pick the right channels for your marketing campaign. From your customer analysis, you will know the platforms your audience spends most of their time. Create your profile and post amazing content to engage your audience.

With its popularity and wide reach, Facebook is a great platform for promoting any type of business. LinkedIn is used by professionals, and this makes it ideal for B2B startups. Instagram can work for fashion, beauty, fitness, and other photography-related businesses.

As you promote your business on social media, consider paid ads to help you target users based on specific characteristics. Your marketing messages will reach a lot of people, and this will boost your brand visibility.

Social media is more than posting cute pictures of animals. Find out how to master it in How to Increase Brand Loyalty with Social Media Marketing.

Tablet with social media pages

7. Marketing automation

Automation will streamline your marketing efforts and help you save time to perform other important tasks, while still nurturing leads and generating revenue. Email marketing is one of the focus areas for marketing automation, and it helps small businesses get their messages to the right people at the best times.

The first thing businesses need to do to automate their marketing efforts is to segment their subscribers using features such as new/existing customers, users that have not made a purchase, demographic factors, and so on.

With the audience lists prepared, draft appropriate email communication for each list. Finally, set the automated processes using the right tools.

Make the most of marketing automation with our guide here here: How to Nurture Your Leads With Marketing Automation.

Gmail open on smartphone

8. Good UX

A poorly designed site is one of the things that will drive users away from your company. Think about it, you have done all the hard work to bring people to your website only for them to find it user-unfriendly, poorly laid out, and difficult to navigate. This is a costly mistake that you need to avoid if you want customers to choose your business over the competition.

Use visuals to enhance your brand identity and to make it memorable. Your design team should be able to create an appropriate logo and use the right colors to give your brand a clear and unique identity.

You should also make sure that your website is easy to navigate. Customers should find whatever they are looking for when they land on your website to keep the churn rate low. Work with a digital marketing agency to see what you need to do to provide positive experiences to fulfill your user’s needs.

Person mapping out plan with string

9. Personalization

The future is personalization. Customers expect it now, with 59 percent terming it a key factor in influencing their purchase decisions. Investing in personalized marketing allows businesses to build relationships and offer better experiences to their customers. The rewards are great for businesses as it helps them retain existing customers and attract new ones.

Most businesses are also focusing on improving their personalization efforts, and the companies that are not working to provide tailored experiences risk getting left behind. To improve the user experience through personalization, research, and analyze customer data to find the best channels for connecting with them. If you are operating an online store, recommend relevant products to increase your cross-selling opportunities. Also, use behavioral data to send your customers personalized emails.

Learn more about creating customized experiences for your customers in Why Does Your Growth Marketing Strategy Need Personalization?

Color palette

10. Update old content

Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s not relevant. Rather than getting rid of the old content, update it to give it a fresh look. This strategy is less complicated and cheaper than producing new content. It takes less time and will skyrocket your search rankings without requiring too much effort.

The content that you publish on your website gradually becomes “stale” with time. Google uses the “freshness” score to determine the quality of websites and your ranking on search will deteriorate as when your content becomes old. By updating your old content, you give yourself a better freshness score. This will boost your SEO efforts and help you bring more traffic to your website.Fresh vs old content

Figure 1. Fresh content over time. Source: Moz

11. Video

People love video, and as such, your marketing strategy should include ways on how to use videos to promote your brand. 60 percent of consumers prefer watching videos than reading text, and this shows just how important video can be in marketing your business. You can create video tutorials to show people how to use a product and explainer videos to highlight the features of your latest product.

When creating brand videos, it is important to ensure they are of the right length so as not to lose the concentration of the viewers midway through the video. Internets users have a short attention span, and a recent study found 2 minutes to be the appropriate length for most online videos. Beyond this mark, there is a significant drop in engagement and this calls for marketers to keep their videos short and sweet.

Still not convinced that video is a must-have? Read our guide, Why is Video a Key Tool in Your Content Marketing Kit?, to understand the benefits it can bring to your brand.

Appropriate video length

Figure 2. Engagement vs. video length. Source: Wistia

Good growth marketing takes skill

Creating an excellent growth marketing strategy doesn’t come easy. Fortunately, with the right tips and tricks, you can get exponential growth for your business from end-to-end. Our guide, What is Growth Marketing? Your Complete Guide to Business Growth, will help you take your marketing to the next level.


The success of your business depends on how you market it on different platforms. The digital marketing strategy aspects highlighted above will help you boost your brand visibility and bring more customers your way. This information, however, is too much to take in for small businesses that are just starting and have a lot of things on their plate. At Growth Marketing Genie, we have qualified marketing experts that will help you market your business on the right channels. Contact us today to book an appointment with our marketing strategists.

Need more info? Let’s chat today about how we can make the most of your marketing opportunities.

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