Start Up Your Start-up!
If you’ve just started out in business, then congratulations on making it this far! Now the hard work begins – you have to stay afloat in a tough market. Digital marketing is one of your strongest tools so if you want some quick pointers on using it, look no further.
Harness your user experience
You’re nothing without your audience and your customers, but your audience needs something to engage with, something to remember you by and identify with. They need to know your values and your aims so that they know whether you speak to them or not.
Make sure their experience of you and your brand isn’t just fun, make it informative, inspiring and above all, aimed at your core audience. Research them well before you commit anything to your site and whatever your content actually is in the end, make sure it’s easily accessible, easy to navigate through and that there’s several channels of communication with you.
It’s all about the content
You need to pin down your content strategy early on; not only because it brings in the punters (hopefully) but because it bumps you up the Google ranks.
Aim for an 80/20 mix of content creation and content management so that there’s always something new and exciting to watch, read, respond to and enjoy. This mix also works well when it comes to subject matter – only 20% should be directly about your products or services and this 20% should be mainly giveaways, promotions and reviews (good and bad).
Use social media
This doesn’t mean messaging your chums and sharing kitten vids (unless your business is kittens…) it means establishing an identity and a presence on an easily-accessible platform. This could be Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, or as many as you have time for.
Make sure your approach is consistent across the platforms and you’re responsive to comments. If you can start a decent discussion a couple of times a week, your brand name will grow and so will your Google reputation.
Video marketing is on the up
Videos are instant communication, so try out Facebook Live or Snapchat stories to hold live events, tutorials, giveaways and Q&A sessions. Your customers will feel more connected to you.
SEO still counts
If you don’t know how to perform an SEO audit then there are lots of agencies that can do this for you. It’ll show you how your customers are using and interacting with your site and social media. It’ll also show you how to become more visible online and whether anything is getting in the way, such as not being fully-optimised for mobile devices.
