Eight inexpensive digital marketing tips for start-ups

Driving engagement with video content, engaging with audiences, experimenting with learning, making most of social media and performance platforms are some of the inexpensive tips given by experts

Archit Ambekar | Mumbai | January 3, 2017

India is among the fastest-growing small and medium-sized business (SMBs) markets in the world with thousands of SMBs advertising on social media.

Throughout 2016, there have been start-ups that succeeded and failed when it comes to digital marketing. For some there was no relevance, others were trying to find a way out and very few have got digital marketing right.

In an era where the importance of digital marketing is top priority, why is it that many fail and just a few succeed? BestMediaInfo spoke to Arvinder Gujral, Senior Director, Business Development, Asia Pacific, Twitter; Gopa Kumar, Vice-President, Isobar; Akshay Mathur, Sr. Vice-President, Komli Media; Varun Duggirala, Co-Founder, The Glitch and Nitin Sabharwal, Founder, nNext, who gave eight digital marketing tips for start-ups.

1. Drive engagement with video content: Video is becoming a great media asset. Brands are embracing video and experimenting with the different formats available – long form, short snippets, scratch-reels, GIFs and so on.

Content marketing is one of the most overlooked investments, and once you have developed a great content, it's very important to do a good outreach. After you produce an incredible piece of branded content you need to amplify that piece of content as much as possible.

2. Experiment and learn: Start small and scale. Keep trying and experimenting new things, be it social or influencer marketing? Keep looking at things and understand what ticks with your customer. Try A/B testing, different variations of marketing in order to determine which option customers prefer.
3. Continuously invest in a strong SEO: It will go a long way. SEO and SEM strategy will help you in getting the right audience and the traction that you are looking for. This should be an on-going effort and not a onetime affair.
4. Social media – the double-edged sword: In addition to providing a platform for growing your brand, it offers a window for your brand to be seen and heard. Be frequent and consistent. If you do not have bandwidth or time, either hire an external agency or do not get into it at all. It's better to not to do anything than do an inconsistent job of it.

Hire at least one person focussed on social and digital marketing. It'll save you a lot of mistakes. Invest in a good agency the day you can afford it, a professional is a professional after all.

Don't overdo your social feeds. Look at posts by brands you admire, read reviews of successful campaigns in digital publication and see which posts get more traction and understand why. Then make your own posts. Also, if you can't say what you want to in one line then don't bother.

5. Tailor the message to your audience and tie it to a moment: Rather than tweeting a generic greeting or jumping in on a timely hash tag, try to craft the message in a way that will resonate with that target audience. Yoga studio @CorePowerYoga realised that both donuts and yoga are important to their audience on #NationalDonutDay. They added some emoji flare to their tweet to help increase engagement.
6. Learn media buying (Facebook and Google explain how to quite well): It's not rocket science and because you will end up spending money on it, learn and learn. Don't put all your eggs in one basket because you may not end up with any money to push anything after that.
7. Camera and photo apps: From boomerang to Cinemagraph pro, from cameo to adobe spark (post/video), there are tons of apps out there to help you make interesting content to amplify what your product is all about.
8. Performance platforms: Enough and more performance platforms are available today that are willing to work on strict matrices of performance. For instance, cost per visit (CPV) is an effective price point to buy quality traffic for these platforms, cost per lead (CPL) is when you pay only when you get specific type of customer who envisages interest in your product, or cost per sale (CPS); pay marketing monies only when customer on your site end up transacting or buying your product or services. This can also be deployed for mobile app distribution and driving engagement on such apps. Cost per view: all video-based marketing activities look at reach and effective eyeballs for the marketing monies spent. Cost per view of such video ad units also drive top of the mind recall for effective brand communication.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

Info@BestMediaInfo.com