How To Properly Market Your Startup In A Digital Age

Posted on Jul 16 2018 - 7:01am by Adam Steele

This is a guest post, courtesy of Adam Steele, the founder of Loganix, a popular SEO fulfillment company located in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

So you want your startup to get some attention? You’re in for a lot of work, because there has never been more noise to shout over. If you want to stand out, you’ll need to be agile, active with your audience and prepared to prove your worth with defining content.

Sure, that sounds hard, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. All you need is the right set of fundamentals to start building the most efficient parts of your future marketing strategy. You can always scale up when your budget eventually allows it. Here are the steps to properly marketing your startup in the digital age.

Get social as early as possible

Your business needs to be everywhere that your targeted audience might find you, so make it a priority to build social profiles for your business as early as possible. Facebook isn’t considered the hippest social media platform anymore, but their page features are still some of the best for interacting with your audience. Build a Facebook page for your business to provide a base of information for anyone who searches for you.

Twitter is still the best way to have quick, snappy conversations with your audience, so make sure that you reserve a branded handle for curious people to tweet at when they want details or help with your products or services. Instagram is still a great option for showing off photographic proof of your expertise — this is especially useful if you startup works in design, architecture or some other visual field.

Keep up with new platforms as they develop so that you don’t have any blind spots.

Find a way to deliver video content or create it in-house

Those social profiles mentioned above are going to be the home of your future content. If you want to properly market your startup, you need to think about how you’re going to develop and produce that content right now. One thing you will need is one of the most expensive to acquire — video content.

Video content is eminently clickable on Facebook and Twitter and it does better in ads. You’ll need a lot of it if your startup is going to be successful, but that’s not something you’re likely to be able to afford if you’re constantly outsourcing it.

That’s why you need to start working on a way to develop video content on your own. Having your own in-house production will allow you create and distribute video content at a much higher velocity than you could with back-and-forth exchanges with outside sources. This will allow you to market and brand more aggressively than your competitors who don’t have in-house production.

Learn advertising on the platforms that cater to the young

You’ll still need ad campaigns to market digitally, but by now you should move to the digital platforms that are used and seen by younger people. Start with Google and Facebook advertising, and develop an understanding of what works for each audience. Don’t graduate from those platforms until you become effective at creating or approving ads that get noticed.

After that, add ad networks to your marketing budget. Find ad networks that serve websites that serve your audience. For example, if your startup is related to home and garden issues, you can choose ad networks that mainly post ads on websites with the same subject matter.

Develop good relationships with press you trust

One of the biggest challenges of digital marketing is making yourself authentic to your audience. While you may have a hard time developing trust, the same isn’t necessarily so for streamers and bloggers who write in that sphere. If there are any major media sources that have the same audience as you, you should reach out to make friends.

Start by offering press releases. If you already have a large audience on social media, this can be good content for them, and they’ll rarely refuse. If they are nice enough to write a profile of you or publish your press releases, make sure you return the favor by linking back to them. That will make them more likely to publish you in the future.

Nurture communities of people who have problems you can solve

Once you’ve built an online presence and begun running ads, you should have a consistent audience on at least one of your social media platforms. It’s time to start developing this group into a community that can provide you with feedback and insights into what makes people like them purchase.

Coax out a community by making sure you always answer questions that are asked on your pages. Feature any content that is created for you by your communities and occasionally reward hashtagged brand loyalty with prizes. Once you have a community of people who like to engage with your content, you can market yourself through their commitment and willingness to pass your content to friends.

Stay in front of the pack

Above all, if you want to most effectively market your startup, you need to keep up with the people. Everything is social now, and by having that social foundation and leveraging it, you can stand out from the rest of the pack.

About the Author

Adam Steele is a builder of things, including agency and link building solution, Loganix, internet marketing agency The Magistrate, and among others, a Referral Spam Cleanup tool. He is always looking for a new hustle, and eager to help others with their marketing and business-related questions.