Founding a new business is exciting and entertaining, but perhaps the hardest part is the marketing or advertising of the product or the service especially if the budget is constrained. Thanks to a carefully designed digital marketing plan, a startup can attract new customers, enhance brand recognition, and stimulate development – all without spending a fortune. Below is an easy to follow plan for developing a workable digital marketing strategy for small and new businesses.

1. Set Clear Goals

Prior to the step of engaging in digital marketing, it becomes necessary to understand what you want to achieve. Setting specific and quantifiable targets gives a reason and direction to the marketing strategy. This will involve trying to seek what achievement looks like for your business, do you want to focus on creating awareness of the brand, increasing sales or enhancing your social networks?

Start with simple goals. For example:

• Enhance the volume of traffic to the website by 20% in a span of half a year
• Reach 500 social media followers in the next three months
• Generate 50 leads each month

These objectives will direct your approach and aid in the assessment of achievement.

2. Understand Your Target Audience

Knowing your customers is the very first step for effective marketing. Put efforts in understanding and pinpointing your particular customers. Consider their age, location, and interests as well as their potentials for pain.

For instance, let’s imagine you are running a startup with a product line of healthy snacks. It is likely that your target audience is made up of health conscious youth, or parents looking for healthy foods for their kids. This factor is very crucial as it helps in developing precise marketing messages to your audience and also helps in choosing the right means of reaching them.

3. Build a Strong Online Presence

A business is incomplete without a professional website which is more intense for startups because it is a necessary first step. For most of the customers, the company’s website is the very first contact they will have with the brand so ensure it is user-friendly, housed in mobile phones, and reflects all that you have. After this, let’s look for the most suitable networks for your audience and set up the corresponding profiles. Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn for instance are used by many small businesses as a starting point. Use the same logos, colors and messages in order to create the same brand across all the sites for easy recognition.

4. Put resources into SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

The basic aim of SEO is to make sure that the website is visible in relevant searches about products and services provided by a particular firm. For instance, if one is looking for cheap web design services, this action makes it possible to warrant that such a web design agency does not lose out on the results.

Here are some beginner-friendly SEO tips:

• Utilise pertinent terms while creating a website for example, ‘cheap website design’ or ‘healthy snacks’ etc.
• Create and Publish quality content that addresses your audience’s questions.
• Ensure that your site uploads fast and is optimized for mobile devices. 
• Seek reputable sites to link back to yours as this will enhance your SEO rankings through backlinks.

Developing SEO strategies takes time as it is a process but the returns are definitely worth it. You can attract people to your site for free because of the organic traffic generated and this is favorable to most of the new businesses.

5. Leverage Social Media Marketing

Social media has become a highly effective (and oftentimes, costless) avenue for enabling business promotion. Determine at the outset, which of the many platforms existing that target customers use the most – one or more of them. Provide useful information, communicate with different audiences, and make inner posts frequently to create a devoted audience around the program.

To harness the power of social networks to its fullest potential, you should:

• Offer useful advice, present news from the industry, and post some insider pieces as well.
• Interact and connect with your followers by answering their queries, comments and messages.
• Organize contests or giveaways to encourage people to follow you.
• If your finances allow it, make use of Facebook and Instagram paid promotions as these will help you reach your ideal audience by filtering them according to age, gender, interests, geographical location, etc.

6.Implementing educational and engaging content marketing.

Part of your Marketing Management focuses on Content Marketing which involves creating and sharing content to reach a particular audience, for instance, through blog posts, video publications, and even brochures. While providing relevant content, one also earns credibility and positions himself/her as an expert in the respective industry.

In this case, a fitness-based startup could begin its own blog filled with workout tips, nutrition advice, and general health information. The goal being that such content appeals to the audience that is more or less fitness inclined, interacts with the audience and encourages them to seek further information about the business’s products or services.

7. Try Email Marketing

Apart from the social media channels and blogs that one use in promoting the brand, email marketing is the cheapest form of the digital marketing strategies. It helps in retaining the customers, helping in making the marketing campaigns for new products and developing a relationship for a long period of time. Offer a free gift, such as e-book or discount coupon, that would encourage visitors to leave their email addresses on your site and at the same time, periodically issue a newsletter containing news, offers and useful information.

Remember:

• Avert undue length for your messages and enhance their attractiveness.
• Incorporate a straightforward request for action (for instance, “Buy Now” or “Find Out More”).
• Distribute messages regularly but avoid overdoing it – once or twice per month is an ideal baseline.

8. Measure Your Results

Monitoring progress is a key element in understanding the efficacy of various approaches. For example, in Google Analytics, check the number of users, average time spent by each user on the site as well as pages they have visited. For the case of social media, there are also metrics that give a breakdown of which posts are the most interactive.

Assess your goals periodically and be flexible enough to change your plan whenever results change. A practical example would be, if a certain social media outlet is not yielding anything, then perhaps it would be best to devote your efforts to a different one or to reinvent the type of content.

9. Start Small and Scale Up

There is no need to feel daunted by digital marketing. Implement a couple of simple and low-cost strategies first such as social media and content marketing. As your business begins to expand, you can make use of paid advertising, hire influencers or collaborate with different companies in order to reach more people.

Do not forget that digital marketing is an ongoing process. Expecting results immediately wouldn’t be wise, but giving it time and being resolute in employing strategies that are informed by the data available will yield positive results eventually.

Conclusion

Creating a suitable digital marketing strategy for a startup is not as hard as it may seem. Set out with definite objectives, know who your target market is and aim at achieving an effective online presence via search engine optimization, social networks, content creation, and emailing. In this way, you will develop a sound strategy that will enable you reach most potential clients and aid in brand loyalty which in turn will lead to business growth.