The Importance of Digital Marketing

As a startup founder, your main focus is probably creating your product. That makes sense. You are, hopefully, passionate about what you are creating and want to spend your time making it is good as it can possibly be. Unfortunately, due to this passion, you are probably neglecting something more important. Marketing your product. Having a great product is somewhat pointless if nobody knows about it. So please start marketing your product and start today.

Where to Start

Simply. Always good advice, is the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid). So I'm going to list all the simple ways you can market your product today without too much effort or money. Definitely worth looking outside the box in the future but cover the basics below first.

Social Media

Cover as many as you can manage. Manage multiple social media channels with the help of apps like Hootsuite, Buffer or Loomly. At the very least you should be posting to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & YouTube but don't ignore Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest. Also worth looking into TikTok, 850 million active monthly users and currently less competition… probably won't be like that for long.

Blogging

Blogging is a great way to engage with your potential customers. It's important to optimise your blog posts for SEO (see below). You can simply use google to figure out what your potential customers are searching for by typing in a keyword and seeing what autocomplete suggests or look at the 'related searches' at the bottom of the page.

SEO

Search engine optimisation is a great way to minimise your ad spend. Getting your main website or blog on the first page of a google search by a potential customer is your goal here. A huge topic in its own right, start simply by checking your website with a tool like Measure. This will at least check whether google is happy with you site and point out any major issues that need addressing.

founderofa.com - Very little room for improvement

techcrunch.com - Could do better…

Landing Page

It may be worth creating a dedicated landing page focusing on getting a potential customer to sign up to your email list (see below). Your website may not be ideally set up for this. Often they are more like a general information resource or brochure, not really designed for getting a sign up. A dedicated landing page can focus on pushing a lead magnet in exchange for a sign up. It is not unusual to have many landing pages each pushing a unique lead magnet. These landing pages can then be targeted with pay-per-click ads or linked from relevant blog articles or social media posts. See how this spider web hangs together?

Email

Still incredibly important in 2020. A lot of successful entrepreneurs base everything around their email list. That's easy to understand since that email list is a channel that they have complete control over. Perhaps you could consider doing the same. This would mean trying to capture a potential customer's email from your website, blog or purpose built landing page. Once you have that email list, nurture those contacts with newsletters, informative emails, video tutorials etc. Of course eventually you can try to sell to them ;-) .

Ads

Left until last since ads cost money and you can do all of the above for free or at least a relatively small up front cost. However ads should still be part of your marketing strategy but definitely not your sole focus! Pay per click ads can be a fairly straight forward way to drive traffic to your landing page. 

Summary

Social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & YouTube), blogging, SEO, Landing pages, Email & Ads… Have I forgotten something? Of course I have but these are the ones you need to pay attention to initially. Some will work for you, some may not, some, like ads can give you immediate results, some, like blogging, take time but can be worth it in the long run. Either way you probably need to start spending more time (& money!) on digital marketing and you probably need to start today.

Interested in creating your own blog? Why not check out the free book below?