While launching a startup might require a lot of hard work and creativity, there is hard work involved in ensuring your startup gets noticed.
If you’re finding yourself falling short in terms of economic or promotional aspects – don’t worry, it’s normal. Unless people know about your business, they are not going to want to do anything with your startup. In any case, marketing seems to be a suitable method to promote your business. Most of the time, however, the marketing can land your business in unnecessary cash burns.
As your business grows, organic customers and word of mouth would start pouring in automatically. Till that happens, here are some steps you could take to build recognition and improve discoverability for your startup.
Analyze your competition
Understanding your business’s competition is extremely crucial to differentiate your business from the others. Recognizing who your competition gives you clarity on the type of market you are entering and the type of challenges you could face. Not just that, it also allows you to redevelop your strategies if required. When it comes to startups, it’s the idea that sells more than a product or service. Analyzing your competition essentially helps you solve the problems and bridge the weaknesses that other companies have.
You can use the same knowledge to rank better in search engines. Once you optimize your business online and develop better strategies than your competition, you can also achieve that organic ROI that didn’t seem possible before.
Start a newsletter
The digital space is an enormous place with billions of people. Starting a newsletter is one of the best ways to get people aware of your business. As compared to the rest of the methods of promoting a business in traditional mass media, newsletters are inexpensive, appealing, and could potentially bring in more results. Not just that but the efficiency of a newsletter could also be measured better.
If your business doesn’t have an email audience base yet, it could get started right away. Collecting emails from people isn’t a daunting task. Most of the time, people voluntarily sign up for newsletters. Once you have an audience base, the next step is to create quality content about your business and bundle it in an attractive newsletter.
To do that, you can research hundreds of newsletters across the internet, find what kind of content people like to read, and most importantly:
- Provide value with your newsletter
- Talk less about yourself and more about your industry
- Keep it entertaining so that people read it in the future as well
- Make it shareable across other platforms
Don’t underestimate social media
Social media is a powerful tool that could potentially expose your startup to thousands of people. It’s a no-brainer that brands and businesses need social media to grow and adjust in new communities. Social media is an important tool for:
- Reaching alienated audiences
- Test out new strategies
- Feature your products or services and talk about their importance
With the variety of features, platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn allow you to produce different kinds of content and collaborate with other accounts. If you are creating visual content for platforms like YouTube and Instagram, you’d want to make sure to keep every element visually appealing as well. Right from your intros to the conclusion of your video, everything plays an important role in how your startup is perceived by people. You can even resort to a simple intro maker for creating appealing intros and hooks in your videos. Identify where your audience hangs out the most and produce content for those platforms individually.
Leverage SEO
It doesn’t matter what kind of industry your startup belongs to, building a digital presence is important to get noticed by people across the internet. SEO helps you achieve exactly that. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most useful things for anybody on the internet that wants to improve their discoverability on search engines and get organic traffic.
SEO is potentially a blessing for startups. When done right, it can help you drive so much traffic and sales to your business website that other methods can’t.
The beauty of SEO is that it could be implemented across all startups from almost all industries. When you show up higher in the search results for the keywords your customers are looking for, your business seems credible and your customers start trusting you. Not just that, but the more you focus on SEO, the more discoverability your startup gets.
Stay up to date with the latest trends in SEO and keep working on building your site’s SEO to achieve results for the long term.
Use paid search advertising
Ultimately, paid search is that one method of business promotion that always delivers promising results when done right. Paid search is an emerging type of advertising that allows business owners to ‘buy’ their way to more discoverability and recognition. With paid search, businesses could rank on the top results for a specific keyword.
Platforms like Google and Bing are the most used advertising platforms. Either of these networks could help you create new ads and campaigns that can help your startup appear in the top search results. Being a cost-per-click model, paid search advertising charges you only when somebody clicks on your ad. This essentially doesn’t burn through your budget and also opens the door for getting more results as compared to the rest of the platforms.
Conclusion
Promoting your business necessarily demands you to set clear expectations and try those approaches that your competitors aren’t even thinking about.
Startups like yours have limited capital for experimentation. Don’t focus on those areas that won’t build results for you over time. Be wise in making decisions and providing the maximum value possible with your product or service. At the end of the day, people don’t buy products because your product is cheap. They buy it because your product solves a problem for them.
