9 Fresh Ideas for Your Startup Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing best practices are ever-evolving. Our list of fresh ideas for your startup's marketing strategy includes some evergreen suggestions to apply and some cutting-edge ideas. Integrate these where appropriate to ramp up your startup marketing efforts. 

1) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Even with what some may proclaim, don't sleep on SEO. Over half a billion people search for something using Google every day. Search engines allow prospects to get eyeballs on your product when needed. Search enables them to find you rather than you having to find them.

Even if you're not ready to pay for SEO services, you can tweak your content in small ways that can together go far towards helping your business get found by the search engines:

• Produce good content that's thorough and truly helpful for your readers.

• Optimize your headers and make sure they are self-explanatory.

• Optimize local listings if that's relevant to your market niche.

When you're prepared to pay for SEO services be aware that this is an area where you generally get what you pay for. You need to be prepared to pay a decent price for good services. If they guarantee results, they're likely selling you snake oil. And remember, it generally takes at least three to six months to see SEO results.

2) 1:1 Marketing

This customer relationship strategy aims to boost personalized interactions with customers. Do things like send a handwritten postcard to essential customers or personalized birthday emails. These things only cost you time. Personalized interactions can foster loyalty and give you a better return on your marketing investment.

Using established customer relationship management (CRM) software helps automate these tasks and track who's at what stage of their customer journey.

3) Video Marketing

Video optimization is becoming more critical as YouTube and other videos are displayed in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Use text overlays and closed captions in addition to your description, title, and file names so the bots can read them and have some context.

A valuable benefit of implementing a video marketing campaign is how many ways you can reformat that content. Take the video you recorded for your YouTube channel, and in addition to publishing it there, you can also do the following:

• Create a transcript of the video so you have a text version.

• Publish the transcript on your blog under an embedded YouTube video for better rankings.

• Upload the video with the transcript as subtitles to Facebook. Native Facebook videos get a higher impression share and engagement than shared YouTube videos.

• Do a short rewrite and add relevant stats and images to turn the transcript into a blog article.

• Create a podcast episode by ripping the audio.

• Use the word "Video" in the subject lines to increase email engagement and use video thumbnails in your email campaigns.

4) Volunteer for Charity  

These events are a good place for brand visibility while enabling a good cause. Donate your time and maybe some product, and potential customers will associate your business with positive actions. Participating in fundraisers or contributing to local charities shows public support for causes you and your company care about. You can get greater visibility if you become a sponsor or give away branded prizes.

5) Programmatic Advertising

Use artificial intelligence (AI) to automate ad buying and target more specific audiences. This automation is efficient and fast and yields higher conversions and lower acquisition costs.

6) Personalization

Now that data is available for anyone's purchase history, consumer behavior, links clicked, and software to implement campaigns, custom content is easier than ever. You need to personalize your marketing to stand out. Not just personalized emails but content and products as well.

7) Social Media Stories

Telling your audience a story can be part of an effective marketing strategy because social media stories bring with them:

• Increased brand awareness

• Constant engagement with followers

• Cost-effectiveness

• Increased traffic to your website

• A way to reach younger audiences
  
  

8) Micro-Moments

These are moments when people turn to a smartphone device to take action on whatever they need or want. Instant decisions are made on what to eat, which restaurant to pick, what to buy, or where to go. So a marketer should consider I-want-to-know moments, I-want-to-go moments, I-want-to-do moments, and I-want-to-buy moments.

The growing focus on these micro-moments means rethinking the linear buyer funnel of awareness, consideration, and decision. The customer journey is becoming more of a whirlwind where people think of, see, or talk about something, and they need to learn about it, watch it, and buy it, right now. People nearly wholly depend on their phones to aid and abet this behavior.

9) Artificial Intelligence

You can already see AI implemented in customer service chatbots, essential communication, product recommendations, content creation, email personalization, and commercial transactions.

Chatbots are estimated to power as much as 85% of customer service by the end of this year. There are benefits and dangers to implementing AI chatbots to interact with your customers on a 24/7 basis. Here are a few of the tradeoffs all digital marketers will have to address.

• Benefit = Always on with no need for coffee breaks.

  Danger = Constant supervision required for situations the AI has never encountered, a troll messing with it, or unrecognizable grammar.      

• Benefit = Find the most efficient solutions and perform them perfectly because of the ability to analyze massive amounts of data and consistently apply the results.

  Danger = Improvising is not an AI skill. So when presented with entirely new and unexpected challenges, the bot must be programmed to know when to hand off to a human, or it will take a stab at a solution, which could fail spectacularly.

• Benefit = Collecting and analyzing data while chatting and applying everything from past conversations while adding more about the person they're chatting with.

  Danger = Collecting data can make you a target since data collected can include geo-location or address, account information, payment information, legal name, and anything else that can enable identity theft. You have to be current with virus protection, firewalls, and complex passwords, and be sure your employees know the best privacy practices.

• Benefit = AI can develop a personality that aligns with your branding.

  Danger = Your AI can be manipulated by bad actors to do evil.