Three insider tips to grow your startup through online marketing

The key to growing your business through online marketing is realising that the short terms wins aren’t always the ones that bring the greatest results.

Of course, it’s a fine balance between drumming up immediate sales through online promotions and introductory offers and crafting out an effective long-term online strategy that will keep your here-and-now customers coming back time and time again. 

To help you, Land Digital are sharing some of their expert online marketing insights – giving you some insider know-how on some of the best ways to bolster business growth for your startup using strategic digital marketing methods that deliver a lasting impact. 

1) Get engaged with your customers

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past ten years, almost every entrepreneur will realise that having an online presence is essential to growing your business in the modern world. But, to successfully expand it’s about more than just gaining large numbers of followers and visitors to your website – you need to actually engage and interact with them. 

This is where social media is king. With an estimated 3.2 billion users worldwide, social media provides a direct means of talking to both existing and new customers in a natural and organic way.

However, before diving into social media marketing, you should conduct research into where your target demographic spend their time online to ensure you’re reaching them on the most suitable platforms. Yes, Facebook and Twitter are undoubtedly two of the more dominant social channels, but do your customers actually use them? If not, what other platforms do they use? 

Another pitfall many social media marketing novices encounter is taking a blanket approach, posting the same message on each channel, but this can actually be counterproductive. People use different channels in different ways – so take the time to craft bespoke content that resonates with your target customers accordingly. 

To bolster your social media marketing efforts long-term, it’s also beneficial to tap into industry influencers on relevant social platforms who have followers that match your ideal customer credentials. They don’t necessarily need to have high volumes of followers either, micro-influencers can be equally as powerful in building trust and engagement quickly – it’s all about quality not quantity.

2) Hone your call-to-action

The cornerstone of any successful online marketing strategy is to have a clear and concise call-to-action (CTA) that commands your target consumers to do something that will convert them into customers.

This approach can be applied across every aspect of your marketing efforts too – from onsite content and blog posts to social media marketing and PPC adverts. 

Not least, instructive language such as ‘Join today!’, ‘Buy online for less!’ or ‘Sign up now!’ will talk directly to your audience and compel them to take action. But, when used correctly, CTAs can also have the potential to increase your brand visibility and authority in Google search when you use industry relevant language and keywords. 

A final note on honing your CTA is to ensure it’s quick and compelling. In a modern world where the on-demand economy means many consumers expect instant gratification, it’s essential to make marketing messages simple and easy to digest. Steer clear of complex, wordy sales messages, but rather get swiftly to the point to maximise their attention-grabbing capacity. 

3) Carefully craft content to prioritise customer experience

Customer user experience, also referred to as UX, is a crucial element of a successful digital marketing strategy. In terms of your onsite content, it should be carefully crafted to ensure it meets your customers’ needs in different ways. 

Firstly, whether you’re writing content for your homepage or individual product descriptions, ensure each piece of content is unique, informative and tailored to the user – providing them with all the relevant information they need in one convenient place.

For instance, if you’re driving traffic to your site through social media campaigns for a specific promotional offer, don’t waste your pitch-perfect CTA by directing users to your homepage, leaving them to find the relevant information for themselves.

Instead, create bespoke landing pages to deliver a positive onsite experience, meaning they’re likely to stay on your site for longer and hopefully visit again. 

Secondly, keep your content fresh and engaging with a regularly updated blog that offers insightful content that you know your ideal consumers will want to read. Taking the time to upload new and compelling blog content is a highly effective way of nurturing your audience and establishing your brand as an authoritative source within your industry.

It also provides an organic way to self-promote your products or services, but be mindful not to oversell yourself and make every blog post feel like a sales pitch – this is a sure-fire way to put people off. 

Finally, to ensure your skillfully created content reaches its target audience and its full potential, harness the power of search engine optimisation (SEO) by making sure content on your core pages includes relevant search terms. 

The key here is to be selective about which search terms you target, using the most relevant terms for specific pages rather than simply stuffing your whole website full of keywords.

The reason being is that Google’s algorithms recognise spammy content and favour well-written, unique and semantically relevant content over keyword-saturated text to ensure they deliver better search results – and ultimately a better user experience.

So, if you want to make your keywords really do more for growing your business online, focus on creating great content that gives your consumers all the information they need. 

Marketing is about trial and error

When it comes to online marketing for your new business, it’s often about trial and error, as some tactics will work better for certain sectors than others.

However, with these three basic principles in place, you should have the right foundations for building a robust digital marketing strategy that will work towards growing your business in the long-term. 

Tori Atkinson is Lead Digital Strategist at Land Digital, a full-service digital agency providing made-to-measure marketing, design and development solutions to help businesses in the UK solve their commercial problems.

Photo by CoWomen