5 Digital Marketing Strategies that Boost Startup Sales

New businesses are launched every day. They come with burning ideas, passion, and major plans to succeed. But once they set up shop, they realize that the very customers they are targeting are also being pursued by competitors.

So the job isn’t just about outdoing the competition but climbing over millions of existing marketing campaigns to make themselves heard. 

While this can prove quite that challenge, it is scalable if you have an effective digital marketing strategy.

The kind of strategy that helps you analyze customer behavior, improve visibility, create awareness, and boost online conversions while remaining cost-effective.

Is this possible? Why don’t you read on to find out?

1. Prioritize Customer Experience

Here’s what you should know about the B2B customer ultimatum, “make shopping easy or we’ll find another company that will.”

According to a report by PwC 73 percent of buyers’ decision to buy is influenced by customer experience. A further 42 percent are willing to fork out more money for a welcoming, friendly, and overall friendly experience

Moreover, up to 65% consider positive experiences with brands far more influential than advertising.

You can also achieve instant traffic from the start by investing in pay per click advertising.

Is the point home yet?

When your customers feel appreciated, they come back for more and recommend others boosting your sales numbers. 

So shift your focus from yourself to creating experiences that reflect the things that matter to your customers. 

How?

■ Map out your customer journey and identify all customer touchpoints. Pinpoint sources of friction, areas where prospects get stuck and remove them. 

■ Study your clients so you can understand their preferences and tailor solutions to meet their needs.

■ Automate processes. Use technology to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your operations right from the first point of contact to delivery. Chatbots and CRMs can collect visitor and customer data to help you understand their needs.

■ Train all customer support teams to improve their knowledge base and their ability to handle customers in a professional but friendly way.

■ Learn from customer feedback. It will let you know what’s working and what’s not. You can then use this information to improve their experiences.

2. Optimize Your Website for Selling

Websites are typically the first encounters visitors have with businesses. If the website isn’t serving your customers then it’s not doing much for your bottom line is it?

Rather than talk about yourself and how awesome your solutions are, focus on showing your customers how well these solutions can solve their problems. 

This will help keep them attracted to your offerings rather than moving on to a competitor, who by the way, is a click away.

So, how do you optimize your company’s site to attract the right visitors, generate high-quality leads, and close deals?

■ Create high-conversion landing pages. Come up with attention-grabbing headlines that compel audiences to want to know more about your offerings. Use images within the landing pages, add contact information, and powerful calls-to-action.

■ Incorporate shopping carts and online payment methods for convenience. A good combination may include direct bank transfers, payments from major credit cards, and 1-2 online payment systems like PayPal, etc.

■ Include customer reviews to improve credibility. Reviews reassure B2B buyers that others have worked with your company and enjoyed success

■ Incentivize customers to buy. Customers are always looking out for great deals and competitive prices. Think about offering free trials, discounts, complimentary services for repeat purchases, or reducing/eliminating shipping costs.

3. Create Content

Creating content is a strategic approach that focuses on putting together and sharing valuable and relevant information consistently.  It also needs to be tailored for the specific reader which is why if you were writing content for an automotive company you would use an automotive content marketing strategy.

It zeros in on customer needs, the problems they face, and possible solutions.

Content helps you attract potential customers, establish your expert authority, and retain defined audience bases.

What types of content can you use?

■ Blogs. Use blogs, not to talk about yourself, but to provide value to your audiences and solve their problems. Customer feedback and questions posed on social forums are great sources of content material. 

■ Infographics. Create interesting infographics to share statistics, thoughts, and ideas or to explain complex information. Their beautiful and captivating design may help you stand out in a text-filled world.

■ Case studies. Prospects look for proof to determine if your solutions work as well as you say they do. Case studies are storytellers. They bring your solutions to life, illustrating how others are putting them to use, and the results.

■ Explainer videos. A captivating explainer video provides a quick pitch on your value proposition while capturing your audience’s problems.

■ Ebooks or white papers. The content you write about should fulfill your audience’s needs and include valuable insights and examples they can put into practice.

4. Make Cold Calls

If you want to spread the news about your company, encourage engagement and boost purchases, then cold calling needs to be a part of your strategy.

It provides a consolidated way for potential customers to know more about your brand and offerings without spending tons of time browsing the net.

Here are some tips to help make your approach more effective:

■ Understand your customer. Do they really need your solutions? Avoid answering this question from your point of view—looking at the perks and all, but from the customer’s side. 

■ Use a calling guide to encourage engagement from both sides. The guide should include all the points you want to cover, critical statistics, and intelligent questions for the prospect. It should also contain common objections that apply to your products/services and how to handle them.

■ Don’t push a sale on your first call. Use this opportunity to learn about the customer while creating enough interest in your offerings to get them to agree to the next step. 

■ Focus on the call. Avoid multitasking, as it will only annoy your listener. Plus, you may miss opportunities for learning or identifying not-so-obvious needs that you can meet.

■ Track all cold calls made and analyze their results. Have a record of the contacts reached, time of call, topics discussed, barriers faced, and the outcomes. Review this database regularly to pick up patterns and to help you improve your message.

5. Email Marketing

Alongside the cold calling strategy, email marketing is a vital tool for creating brand awareness and promoting your offerings.

With email marketing, you’re contacting businesses that have given their consent to receive emails from you. These are people who want to hear what you have to say and possibly engage.

So, how do you move these audiences from the silent followers’ group to the engaged prospects and customers section?

■ Segment your list. Your emails should have a specific target audience if you want to earn a spot in their inbox and not the spam box. Categorize your subscribers into prospects, present customers, and past buyers to ensure your message applies to them.

■ Prioritize quality over quantity. Here’s where most businesses go wrong. When I subscribe, I don’t want you to bombard me with emails all day, every day. An average of one to two emails a week should be enough to communicate your value proposition.

■ Stick to a single topic and call to action in every email to improve engagement. Adding three, four, or five CTAs in your email is confusing and people don’t have time to investigate their relevance. 

■ Automate journeys for the different segments. It’s an efficient way of personalizing the journey and engaging with your subscribers.

■ Perfect your design. Ensure the pages are optimized for mobile viewing, load fast, and show off your branding. Keep the content short and to the point.

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