Is your startup lagging behind the competition? Are you having trouble boosting name recognition, getting your name on investors’ radars, and hitting the growth and sales goals you’re aiming for? If so, you may want to consider revamping your web marketing strategy. Having an awesome idea is great – but if you really want to see your profits soar, you need people to know about your idea and to start demanding your product.
In this post, we’ll outline some of the most important web marketing basics that every startup owner, marketing manager, and PR specialist should be aware of. Let’s dive in.
SEO
First thing’s first: if you want to be a known entity in your industry, you want to be relevant to consumers searching for products or services like the ones you offer. Where do consumers first turn when looking for a business? Google (– well, and sometimes Yahoo!, Bing, or DuckDuckGo). That’s where SEO – or search engine optimization – comes in.
Say you run a startup that allows people in your city to easily rent a bike. If someone searches “bike rentals near me” in your town, it’s important that your company is one of the first to pop up on the search engine results page, or SERP. If it’s not, you’re not going to see a lot of business; users rarely if ever click to the second page of search results.
If you’re not sure how well your business does on search engines, start by contacting an SEO audit service. Many companies offer audits for free or low, competitive prices, and this should be able to give you an idea of how much you need to work on your SEO strategy.
Content creation
If SEO is lacking, don’t panic. There are ways of boosting your ranking while also increasing your utility to users online. The solution? Web content. Users are hungry for content, and many firms estimate that this desire for content is steadily increasing.
So, what does web content look like for a small business? Let’s continue on with our example from before. If it wasn’t already obvious, your local bike rental shop should have a website. On that site, along with your hours, a description of your service, and policies, you should maintain a blog. Post articles regularly, and be sure to focus on topics in your industry that users will be interested in. For instance: blogs on bike maintenance, where the best spots in your city are for a leisurely bike ride, and rules of the road cyclists may not be aware of.
If you have the budget, expanding into other types of content can be an excellent strategy too. Video tutorials on bike repair, for instance, would be an excellent way to draw in users. That leads us to the next item.
CRO
If SEO is the bait, CRO is the hook. CRO stands for conversion rate optimization. Once you get tons of users interacting with your high-quality content, or visiting your website curious about your products, you want to increase the percentage of users who follow-through with a purchase. There are tons of ways of doing this, from A/B testing the graphic design of your home page to sending out engaging customer feedback surveys where users can inform you on what works and what doesn’t.
Using an analytics tool, you can first see how many users are actually purchasing when they visit your page. If you find that it’s a pretty small percent, you may want to consider changing up your layout, modifying your offerings, or redirecting your content to better suit users’ interest and increase the likelihood they’ll buy.
Affiliate and influencer marketing
The last strategy on our list is affiliate and influencer marketing. These, like quality content, aim to make your startup relevant and useful to consumers by providing context in something they really care about. Influencers are a great way to do this.
Suppose a local influencer in your area has tons of followers, and often partners with local brands to show off how those brands help build their lifestyle. You may want to use an influencer marketing service to help you connect with them. Keeping up with our bike rental example, the influencer may make a post on Instagram featuring a fun day in the sun riding one of your bikes around town. This will seem natural, unobtrusive, and persuasive to that influencer’s followers – and dramatically increase the likelihood that they will want to use your service.
Web marketing may seem like the Wild West before you get your feet wet, but by following the right strategies, your startup is sure to get ahead.
