What’s the secret to sustaining a startup?
Providing great customer experience and generating revenue.
Many times, people will do business with brands, not because they like them, but because they believe there are no alternatives. The minute they find a vendor who offers better experiences, they leave without a second thought.
On the other hand, a business may offer good experiences but remain obscure. Worse, they may offer limited buying options on their website, effectively reducing the number of purchases that can happen.
As a startup, you can’t afford to be one of these.
This is why we are going to share with you top digital marketing strategies for attracting and retaining customers while boosting sales.
1. Turn Your Website into a Salesperson
Your website is your most productive sales member yet. You just need to know how to maximize its abilities.
It meets prospective clients long before you do, showcasing your offerings to interested parties.
Websites present a fine opportunity for you to communicate your key differentiator(s) while explaining the business benefits brands stand to enjoy by using your solutions.
If your site is not optimized, you’re losing opportunities to increase exposure and improve revenue generation.
What can you do?
- Create original, well-researched, and well-written content. Let your content educate, provide actionable tips, and apply them to the different stages of a buyer’s journey.
- Employ revenue-generating tactics to encourage visitors to take the next step. These tactics may include social proof (to enhance credibility), live chatbots, and mobile responsiveness.
- Determine where your online traffic comes from i.e. email, social media, blog posts, etc. Customize messages to suit those channels and add links to landing pages that spark interest in your offerings.
- Make payments convenient. Include card payments for major companies, mobile money transfers, and online payments like Paypal.
- Make contacting you easy. Include postal and physical address, telephone contact, email, and online contact forms.
2. Search Engine Marketing
According to Gartner, B2B buyers spend about 27 percent of their time independently looking up potential purchases. They look up businesses, solutions, and recommendations.
Question… are potential customers finding you or your competitor?
The internet is awash with information, which buyers can gather to make informed decisions, but this very thing makes it tougher for sellers to stay visible.
How do you maintain visibility amid all the noise?
Through search engine marketing.
This strategy helps businesses get in front of customers actively researching their products/services. It improves visibility through organic and/or paid searches.
Here are some practices to consider
- Define your target audience, their interests, needs, motivations, and how effectively you can meet their demands.
- Select effective keyword phrases. Consider terms customers and industry experts use to describe your solutions. Also, look up terms that refer to how your product/service is used.
- Improve organic search results by putting critical keywords in your content, landing pages, and sales pages. Use keyword phrases in file names, title tags, header tags, meta tags, and alt tags.
- Run sponsored search campaigns like pay-per-click or display ads based on relevant keywords. Focus on making your ads attractive and relevant to your target audience.
- Measure performance. Evaluate your results by checking your position on search results, traffic to your site, and the number of conversions that follow your campaigns.
3. Make Cold Calls
One of the best ways to let potential customers know you exist is through cold calling.
Research shows that up to 27 percent of B2B sellers find calling new contacts very effective.
Unlike most digital tactics, cold calling puts you in direct contact with your target audience, and the feedback is instantaneous. They either like what you have to say or aren’t interested.
How do you get them interested in your solutions?
- Research your contact lists. Eliminate any business that may not require your solutions. And for those who do, gauge to what extent your solutions can work for them.
- Build some familiarity. Be a student, learn how their industry works, common terminologies, and the challenges they face. Look up the contact person on social to get a feel of who they are.
- Create a pitch that piques their interest. While your end goal is to land a deal, bid your time. Work towards generating such an interest that the listener will want to take the next step.
- Pitch and listen, really listen. You want to gather as much information about this prospect to tailor suitable solutions. It won’t happen if you dominate the call.
- Learn how to deal with objections. Research common objections within your field and creative ways to handle them. Know where to draw the line so you don’t come across as a pushy and annoying salesperson.
4. Run Promotions
Exposure is always a pain for startups, unless B2B buyers know about your offerings, they won’t buy from you.
Promotions help build visibility and allow buyers to sample what you offer and, if they like it, become loyal customers who even refer others.
Here are promotional ideas you can consider:
- Offer free trials or sample products. Permitting customers to use your merchandise may help increase awareness and boost the likelihood of purchase.
- Use social media channels like LinkedIn or Twitter to prove your value to prospective customers. The conversations you start on social media can be nurtured into in-person conversations.
- Make promotional products with your corporate logo like pens, key chains, t-shirts, or water bottles and share them with customers and prospects alike. It helps keep your brand top of mind.
- Use limited-time offers or discounts. These offers create a fear of missing out with the sense of urgency encouraging potential customers to buy now.
- Organize referral discounts. Word of mouth is crucial to growing your business. This is true for startups as it is for established brands. Roll out a referral program that rewards current customers when they refer other businesses.
5. Content Marketing
From the onset, content marketing is a powerful tool for testing your offer, building credibility, and forging relationships with customers.
It’s also one of the most cost-effective forms of communication—but just because it’s cheaper doesn’t mean you can cut corners.
Today’s consumers are looking for high-quality informative content. The bar has been set high, so run-off-mill content won’t work.
As you embark on content marketing, your focus should lie in obtaining market validation for topics and creating a community around your go-to market.
Content ideas you can leverage include:
- Producing and sharing blogs, articles, videos, and infographics
- Running targeted outreach campaigns on LinkedIn or email
- Creating co-branded industry reports
- Appearing on industry-related podcasts
- Hosting webinars
Here’s a framework that you can use to plan your strategy:
- Set objectives for your campaign. The objective tackles the reason you want to produce content—make sales, improve awareness, etc. It will help align your team towards the goals, and measure progress as well as success.
- Set precise and measurable targets that support the objective. These targets may be to publish one keyword-focused blog every week, host one or two key industry influencers per quarter, etc.
- Ensure your message targets your ideal customers. Delve into the challenges they face and offer helpful solutions. Ideally, your content should educate your readers and not just push your offerings in their faces.
- Promote your content. It’s not enough to just put it out there. Entice readers to explore your content by talking about it on social and through email.
