How to market your new business
Starting a new business is like a roller coaster ride! You are incredibly excited one moment and a bag of nerves the next.
Now that you have created a formidable product or service, it’s time to move on to the next step and market your business.
As a startup, you face many challenges when it comes to marketing.
To begin with, you don’t have the unlimited budget of a big corporation for expensive print and television advertisements. You also don’t have the massive budget to organize a large-scale event to create buzz.
But the good news is you can still market your business effectively.
You can leverage the power of digital marketing to strengthen your brand and promote it effectively. You could capitalize on your existing strengths and leverage the power of your existing networks to market your new business smartly.
6 ways to market your new business effectively
1. Leverage the power of social media
Social media is a valuable marketing resource for all kinds of businesses, especially for smaller businesses.
As a new business, social media should be your holy grail. What kind of social media presence you build depends on your niche and the nature of your product or service. But, as a rule of thumb, you must invest decently in organic social media growth.
Consumers these days prefer buying from businesses with a regular social media presence. If they cannot find you through social media, they would prefer your competitors who have a presence on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
Run innovative marketing campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Build a WhatsApp presence for directly interacting with customers and resolving their queries. Social media is a valuable marketing tool for building a strong customer base and generating direct sales.
2. Invest in SEO Marketing
Digital media marketing is all about search engine optimization. In other words, every business wants to organically rank higher up in the Google search engine.
A new business must invest in SEO to boost its credibility, increase brand awareness, and develop a solid customer base.
You could hire an SEO professional individual or firm to look into the SEO of your website. If you haven’t created a website yet, you must create one using a comprehensive SEO strategy that includes off-page, on-page, and technical SEO improvements.
As a new business, you must develop a comprehensive SEO marketing strategy based on your specific needs and requirements. The field of SEO has different verticals like Data Analysis, Website Design and Development, Content strategy & creation, and Outreach. You need to decide your priorities and invest accordingly.
SEO doesn’t only help you in reaching more people overall, but it also aids you to get a better ranking in local searches. It is one of those forms of marketing that can give you concrete results and ensure the long-term success of your business.
3. Content marketing
Content marketing is a highly cost-effective way of marketing your business.
Content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy in which you consistently create and distribute relevant content in multiple forms ( written content, videos, and podcasts ) through various digital channels like websites, emails, social media, YouTube, etc.
The principle of content marketing is simple. Once the audience gets hooked on to your content, conversion is easier.
This is also where your SEO strategy would also come in handy. Sound SEO management is at the heart of content marketing. Your ultimate aim is to attract and retain a well-defined audience. Your content should ultimately lead to profitable customer action.
Content marketing is great for a new business because it’s all about long-term results. Starting with great content creation early on in your business cycle can give you incredible results later on.
Content marketing is a highly complex strategy that involves a lot of creativity and precision. You got to keep the following points in mind.
Relevant themes and topics
Quality content
SEO optimization
Effective distribution through multiple channels
Create content in different formats
Regular content creation and optimal promotion
Content marketing is a creative endeavor; you must have a well-defined strategy.
Leverage the power of multimedia by creating online courses, explainer videos, short teaser-style videos, and relevant podcasts.
4. Social media ads
Social media ads are an inexpensive way to widen your reach.
It won’t be an exaggeration to say that the reach of social media these days is way superior to most of the traditional media like print where you have to spend a fortune to get an advertisement out.
Social media platforms are capable of targeting extremely niche audience groups. So you can easily focus your budget on the kinds of people most likely to be interested in your business.
Facebook advertising is a great marketing tool for a new business, especially if you are a small to medium-sized company.
Facebook advertisements are easy to create, and using these, you can reach the specific kinds of audience you are targeting. The technical infrastructure of Facebook makes it convenient to test and run multiple ad sets.
Instagram account works somewhat similarly to Facebook advertising. Using a business account, you can boost your posts and target the right audience. Although Instagram marketing is slightly more expensive than Facebook, the higher organic reach you get compensates for the price difference.
5. Paid search
Paid search advertising is a great marketing tool for new businesses.
It is a digital marketing strategy that enables you to pay search engines to place your ads higher up in the results pages of that search engine. The aim of paid search advertising is to drive more traffic to your site and boost sales.
The biggest advantage of paid search advertising is that you can directly reach users who are genuinely interested in your services or products and are actually searching for them on the internet.
Paid search advertising comes in many forms, but PPC advertising or pay-per-click is its most commonly used service.
You can go for a paid search campaign on popular search engines like Google and Yahoo. You could go for popular options such as Google Pay Per Click ads.
The biggest advantage of paid search ads is that they can give you immediate and effective results. You don’t have to wait for months or even weeks to get the desired results. You can even make your business appear on the first page of Google after launching the ad.
6. Use networking as a marketing strategy
Networking is the most cost-effective marketing strategy.
Capitalize on your existing networks to market your new business. Reach out to your contacts to create a buzz about your new business.
Networking should be at the core of your marketing strategy. Forming meaningful partnerships with other businesses is as important as targeting customers. Those useful alliances will ensure that some of those businesses will willingly promote your products or services to their customer base.
Business networking is all about mutual benefits. You offer someone a valuable proposition, and they provide you something of value in return.
Smart networking can be a great strategy for marketing your business. It simply means that a lot of thought and research goes into your networking. You research your network to determine who can be useful to your business by evaluating their credentials in advance. This will save a lot of your time and energy. Random marketing won’t get you specific results.