If you’re a small business owner, or even just someone with a great startup idea, you may have considered using digital marketing to promote your business online.

But you might be asking yourself: Where do I begin? What strategies should I use?

In this post, we’ll walk you through how to take your startup marketing to the next level by leveraging digital marketing to promote your business and get more customers.

Let’s dive in!

Startup marketing strategy #1: Blogging

Blogging has become really popular, and for a good reason: It works.

Not convinced? Let’s look at the recent stats from Optinmonster):

 
• Marketers who focus their efforts on producing blog content are 13x more likely to get a positive ROI.  
 
• B2B marketers who have blogs receive a lot more leads (about 67% more) than those who neglect blogging.  

As you can see, blogging is still an excellent way to promote your business online.

Here’s why.

When people are looking for information or a solution to a specific problem, they usually use search engines—especially Google. This means that if you can rank on the first page of Google for queries related to your business, you’ll attract more leads and as a result, more customers.

And what’s the best way to do that?

That’s right: Blogging.

To give you a practical example, let’s say you’re a SaaS company offering email marketing software. Usually, businesses who are interested in buying email marketing software will look for things like “best email marketing software,” “cheap email marketing software,” or “email marketing strategy”, just to name a few.

What does this mean for you, the SaaS?

It means you can use your blog to write quality content that addresses consumers’ questions on your blog, rank on the first page of Google for these queries, and then present your SaaS as a solution to their problem.

Need some inspiration? Sign up for Belighted’s Blog updates here.

Startup marketing strategy #2: Social media

First, let’s look at the numbers:

 
• Nearly 50% of the world’s population uses social media. That’s over 3 billion users worldwide.  
 
• 54% of social browsers use social media to research products.  

As you can see, being on social media is a pretty big deal nowadays—especially if you’re targeting a younger audience.

But the real benefit of having a social media presence isn’t getting tons of likes and shares.

It’s connecting with your customers.

The goal behind social media is to make the conversation between you and your customers a two-way street. When you’re marketing your brand, whether through blog or social media ads (we’ll get there in a minute), it’s always you—the brand—talking to your customers.

Social media allows you to change that. It’s a great place for you to ask for your customers’ feedback, opinions, and suggestions.

It’s a place to listen to what your customers have to say.

And that’s very helpful to your business.

Why?

Because by engaging with them and responding to their questions, you’ll get to know your customers even better, which means you’ll be able to offer a better product.

This is especially true when you’re offering a software solution since bugs, UX issues, and overall functional problems are very common.

There is, however, one big drawback when it comes to social media marketing: low reach. The recent algorithm updates have made it very difficult to actually reach your followers on social media platforms.

The average reach for a Facebook post for instance is 5.17% of a page’s likes, which is pretty low.

Startup marketing strategy #3: Paid advertising

Paid ads have been increasingly popular, especially on social media platforms. The great thing about this strategy is that you can target your ideal potential customer by specifying different factors like:

 
• Location  
 
• Age  
 
• Gender  
 
• Language  
 
• Interests  
 
• Behaviors  
 
• Connections  

Another benefit of using paid ads is the PPC (pay-per-click). Basically, this means you can run ads and only pay when people click on them. Since you’ll only be paying if a user is actually interested in your product, this means you’ll get a much better ROI.

Some examples of famous SaaS companies running paid ads are Mailchimp, Wix, and Squarespace. If you’re wondering what their ads look like, here’s an example from Mailchimp.

Pick a strategy—then do it better

Now that you know what the best strategies are, it’s time to try them out. But before you do that, we have one final tip for you: Check out your competitors.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Just keep an eye on your competitors’ marketing strategies, learn what’s working (and what’s not), and try to do it better than they do.

That’s basically what startup marketing comes down to.

So go ahead: Start testing out different strategies and see what works best for you!