If you have been brave and have taken the plunge of starting up a new business, well done! If you are just considering whether you would like to start up a business, that is also ok. The point is every single business owner needs to participate in marketing activities in order to help spread a company’s name and to display the products or services they sell. This article is based upon how entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs can use digital marketing to help build a brand’s name, to help draw a wider audience to a webpage and to eventually generate happy and loyal customers, which will lead to profits being made.
Step one: Design a website
Design a website! There are plenty of website designing tools available to help. A favourite of mine is to use Microsoft Front Page, as the format is very similar to Microsoft word, so it is a very easy and efficient tool to use. It is also important to consider the colour scheme and font you will use, and it is just as important to keep the same colour scheme through the company’s branding as this what make an organisation look professional, trustworthy and memorable.
Step two: utilise email marketing
It is an important strategy for attracting your target audience to your start-up. It may seem difficult to collect email addresses from potential customers, so you must look to first collecting prospects mail addresses. You may do this by including in your website, you may consider placing a sign-up form. Make sure you are aware that if you bombard your email list with advertisements, your customers may unsubscribe which therefore defeats the object of using email marketing. Whereas if you produce relevant, insightful content you effectively have a better chance to generate interest and engagement from genuine customers.
Step three: consider using SEO
SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results, opposed to using paid advertisements. SEO is a relatively new concept and many business owners are not usually familiar with these terms. Therefore, it may be of benefit to seek some professional help. Mechanised, a Manchester SEO agency, is a perfect example of an agency who helps those with every single aspect of SEO.
Step four: use social media marketing (it’s easy!)
It’s vital to incorporate the use of social media platforms into your start-up’s strategic marketing strategy. Most people already use social media for personal use, so why not link your personal account to a brand new professional page. Use your followers you already have from your personal account and convince them to follow your professional page, you will not get hundreds of followers this way, but it is a good start. It is important to have a social media account for your company as people often use social media to look at brands and they are easily influenced by the types of products and services they view on social media.
Step five: explore content marketing
Content marketing is an efficient tool to use to help give your company a greater online presence. The use of pictures, blog articles and distributing content in order to promote a brand or business. If content marketing isn’t for you, you can employ a professional content writer to help distribute your company name.
Step six: start your own blog
However, if you are into writing and you don’t mind frequently creating blog posts about your company, products or services. Then blogging is a great digital marketing method, which is free, and blogs can draw in wide audiences, which will therefore give your start up business brilliant coverage.
Step seven: sponsoring and attending events (networking)
If you decide to sponsor an event which is based locally to you, you could help to get your start-up wide local coverage. Although you need to consider that you would need to pay a fee to the organisers of the event, but you would also have a place to promote your business with banners and other marketing materials in return. If you are not willing sponsor an event (which is fine, because it may be daunting for someone who has just opened up a new business to do so), you can always attend and use this opportunity to do networking. Face-to-face communication is usually beneficial when contracting services or buying products. You never know how far your start-up’s name will go.
