Top 7 Marketing Strategies Startups Should Follow to Gain Traction Fast

The first and most important step in your marketing strategy is to mark your territory. When you create your online website, you’re claiming that territory is yours in the digital landscape. 

After that, it’s time to outline your company’s growth plan by using the required marketing strategies for increasing web traffic, acquiring new customers, and generating more leads. 

As you climb the ladder in the digital world, you’ll have lots of competitive resistance, but that doesn’t mean you should stop.

In this article, we’ll learn more about the top marketing strategies you should follow to gain traction in the digital landscape quickly. 

What makes a marketing strategy good? 

Some different points and assessments will make your marketing strategy good, but the key elements to a good marketing strategy include: 

1. Defining your target audience 
2. Crafting your unique selling proposition 
3. Creating your price tags for your product and service 
4. Setting a budget for your marketing strategy 
5. Implementing a strategy you’ve chosen from 
6. Continuously tracking and improving your plan 

Therefore, it’s important to fulfill all of these requirements and make sure you are always monitoring and tracking your plan to improve it over time. 

7 Marketing strategies to follow for your startup 

1. Content marketing 

The past decade has shown us that content marketing is on the rise and more than 50% of businesses plan to spend more on content marketing this year than they did last year. Nowadays, we see lots of blogs, podcasts, and webinars being created for target audiences so they can feel more connected to their brand. 

Creating engaging content is becoming a win-win situation for brands, especially when it comes to improving and developing customer engagement. Content marketing is great since it allows you to engage with your audience on a much deeper level. 

It not only builds brand awareness but helps you in all aspects of marketing. Great content marketing ideas you can implement are: writing a few blog posts a week, including infographics, creating video content, or even starting a podcast. 

2. Social media marketing 

If you want to increase your brand exposure, it’s time to consider social media marketing. Many businesses across the U.S. are even spending lots of money on social media ads. In fact, the total social media ad spend stood at nearly $300 billion this year and is expected to rise over time.  

Social media marketing is an excellent way to increase web traffic and can be used as a sales channel for lead generation. The only important part is to make sure that you are most active on social channels where your target audience is interacting with your content the most. For example, if your target audience is using LinkedIn, and Instagram the most, focus your marketing efforts on those channels. 

Nevertheless, video marketing is also a popular form of reaching out to your audience on social media. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, all offer you options to create video ads to create your marketing campaigns. In other words, it’s a great way to get people to purchase on your website. 

3. Search engine optimization (SEO) 

Search engines are the backbone of influencing a small business to become successful. SEO is the core of a good marketing strategy and is what makes a brand’s content discoverable by millions of users. 

The most important practice of implementing an effective SEO strategy is to make sure you are creating high-quality content and ranking for your keywords. While many experts claim that keyword research is important, the truth is that no matter how many keywords you use, if your content is irrelevant or low-quality, your content won’t rank as high. 

Creating a good SEO strategy can only be done by including the following components: 

1. Keyword research: Identify the words and phrases people are using to search for your product or service. Powerful tools you can use are Google Keyword Planner, Moz, Ahrefs, and Semrush. Always make sure to use short-tail and long-tail keywords. 
2. On-page SEO: Includes structuring your content with relevant keywords in your headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.), internal & external linking, image optimization, and content optimization. 
3. Technical SEO: This part is all about optimizing your images, ensuring your website is mobile-friendly, and even possessing an SSL certificate since HTTPS is a ranking factor that shows proof of your website’s security. 
4. Off-page SEO: Backlinking, guest posting, brand mentions, and social sharing are all part of off-page SEO. 
5. SEO analytics: Your SEO strategy needs to always be monitored to see if you are going on the right path or not. You can use Google Analytics or perform regular SEO audits to see what results you are producing. 

Your ranking position on search engines should never be considered a second option, as they have a direct impact on how successful your business will be in the long run, so carefully plan your SEO strategy. 

4. Email marketing 

Emails are one of the primary channels used for communicating with people. However, setting up a successful email marketing campaign means you need to be informative, and not spammy. If you are someone who is sending endless amounts of emails to your clients, they most likely will hit the unsubscribe button and never accept another email from you ever again. 

Before you create your email marketing campaign, you need to make sure you know all the types of email forms that exist: 

1. Newsletters: Regularly send emails to your audience to keep them informed of any updates, news, and educational content. Give a choice to your audience to either accept or refuse these emails. 
2. Promotional emails: This includes sending out emails that involve discounts, product launches, limited-time deals, and special offers. 
3. Welcome emails: Sent to new subscribers, or customers that are introduced to your brand. 
4. Abandoned cart emails: Emails sent to customers that added an item, but didn’t make the purchase. This tactic is used to keep your customers interested. 
5. Transactional emails: These emails are sent after a customer purchases something off your website. Used as a method of confirmation. 

After you’ve learned about the types of emails, it’s now time to craft the perfect email to send out to customers. Here’s what it should consist of if you want to make it attractive to customers to open and take action: 

1. Subject line: Always try to keep your subject line under 60 characters. That is what grabs user’s attention and if you don’t have a persuasive subject line, your email most likely won’t get opened. 
2. Email body: While some businesses like to write long-form emails, it’s best to keep everything short. Focus on a single message, and make sure your email is easy to read. Include a strong call-to-action (CTA) at the end that is action-oriented (“Subscribe now,” “Download now,” “Buy now”). 
3. A/B testing: Test different versions of your email, such as your subject lines, CTA buttons, email copy, sending times, and images. 

Keep in mind to remain compliant with data privacy laws when sending out emails. Get consent from users and use opt-in and opt-out methods. Every email should have an unsubscribe button, or this can result in penalties from global privacy regulators. 

5. Influencer marketing 

Influencer marketing is a strategy that leverages individuals who are engaged on social media platforms or other online platforms to promote products, services, or brands. They have a strong influence on customers and can help you increase brand awareness. 

There are three types of influencers: 

1. Mega-influencers: Public figures or celebrities that have a large fan base, usually millions of followers. They might cost you lots of money and are less niche focused. 
2. Macro-influencers: Usually individuals that aren’t at the celebrity status, but have up to 1 million followers and have a broad reach. They won’t cost you as much as a celebrity, but will still be an expensive option to consider. 
3. Micro-influencers: Influencers that have anywhere between 1,000 to 100,000 followers. They are more niche-focused and have a much more engaged fan base compared to larger influencers. They are definitely a more affordable option compared to other types of influencers. 

Since you are a startup, your best bet is to hire micro-influencers as they have a more engaged audience. Popular platforms where you can find influencers are: 

1. Upfluence
2. AspireIQ
3. Influencer.co 
4. Traackr

Otherwise, influencers usually have a great relationship with customers and will positively help you grow your marketing campaign. 

6. AI marketing 

Artificial intelligence is transforming the marketing world. Plenty of AI tools are being created for different marketing purposes, from automating tasks to personalizing experiences, and targeting audiences more effectively. They’re becoming a must-have in creating a successful marketing strategy. 

While AI marketing is still on the rise, its development is continuing to change the world. Some great examples of how it’s impacting the marketing world includes: 

1. Chatbots: Nearly 90% of customers use an AI chatbot according to statistics. Chatbots are used for offering 24/7 support, answering questions, and generating leads. 
2. Personalization: AI is used for recommending products or services to customers based on their purchase history, online behavior, and interests. 
3. Targeted advertising: AI can also be used for targeting ads for special audiences based on demographics, interests, and purchasing behavior. This is a much more effective way to reach your target audience and improve return on investment (ROI) for ad campaigns. 
4. AI website builders: There are plenty of AI website tool builders that help businesses create websites in a matter of seconds. These AI tools are used for creating website content, web layouts, and even generating templates. 

While there are plenty of other ways AI is being used in today’s market, these are just a few examples. AI technology continues to evolve, and we can expect to see many more innovations in the future that will simplify the way you market to your audience. 

7. Paid ad marketing 

Paid ad marketing is a strategy that involves paying to promote your product or service, and business on search engines, websites, and social media channels. Paid ads help you reach a larger and more targeted audience that helps in generating leads, and increasing brand awareness. 

There are different types of paid ads that you should be well aware of: 

1. Google & Bing ads: Businesses bid on keywords, where their ads will appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) when users search for those keywords. 
2. Display ads: Banner ads that appear on sites across Google networks. Automated buying of ads that will display across different websites based on the user data they collect. 
3. Social media ads: These are ads you run on social media channels. Each social channel has a different way of running ads, but in general, they are great for building brand awareness, generating leads, and increasing web traffic. 
4. Video ads: Ads on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram reels. Statistics show that video content ranks 53 times better than written content on search engines. 
5. Shopping ads: This is a popular ad option for e-commerce businesses that includes a product listing with a price, image, or description that appears at the top of search results. 

Now that you learned what are the types of ads that exist, it’s time to dive deeper and learn more on what makes an ad successful: 

1. Audience targeting: There are a number of factors that should be taken into consideration when targeting your audience. This includes age, gender, location, education, income level, interests & hobbies, and targeting users based on their past purchasing behavior and patterns. 
2. Keyword targeting: Bidding on relevant keywords in order to reach users for a specific product or service. 
3. Ad creative: You need to make sure you are creating clear and concise copy that is important for capturing people’s attention and always include a well-defined call-to-action (CTA). 
4. Bidding for ads: Key components included when bidding for ads are the Cost Per Click (CPC), Cost Per Impression (CPM), Cost Per Action (CPA), and the daily or lifetime budget. 

When paid ads are done effectively, they can seriously help your business growth skyrocket. This helps the business in long-term growth and even drives immediate results. 

Overall, it’s important to make sure that your ads are always targeted and have a persuasive copy that urges people to click on it and find out more. 

It’s now time to upgrade your marketing strategy 

As the marketing world keeps evolving, it’s now time for you to upgrade your marketing strategy and put everything we mentioned into practice. Most importantly, it’s best if you always monitor your marketing strategy and see if it’s on the right path or not. 

Also, state what your key performance indicator (kpi) is. Are you focusing on increasing your web traffic? Increasing your lead generation? Or what is your final goal? 

By having this information in place, you can effectively position your product, pricing options, promotional methods, and how you distribute your marketing efforts.