Digital Marketing Strategies In India
Want to get some startup marketing strategies for your new business? You have come to the right place. Let’s dive right into it and learn some best and most trusted digital marketing strategies for startups in India.
Startups have become important forces for economic expansion and the creation of jobs, and they frequently serve as a springboard for radical innovation. On average across OECD nations, young enterprises account for roughly 20% of employment but create almost 50% of fresh job opportunities. Additionally, young firm innovation significantly contributes to overall productivity growth, accounting for 50% of it in the USA (according to Klenow and Li 2020).
Look at the given chart and see the decline in new business setups in 2020 as compared to the similar months in the previous year. The given analysis shows how new firm creation decreased significantly across many nations in March and April 2020. In Portugal, for example, it fell by 70% in April 2020 compared to the same month a year earlier. In Hungary, France, and Turkey, it fell by 46, 54, and 58 percent, respectively. Australia, the US, and Spain all show weaker but still extremely significant drops.
The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 made things challenging for businesses by limiting their growth. But, as now coronavirus is receding, budding entrepreneurs have been exploring newer and more effective ways of jumpstarting their commercial efforts. And this is where digital marketing emerges as the most potent way of giving the much-needed thrust to startups in the reviving economy.
In general, it is no surprise that 90% of startups fail to sustain, even within the first year of their commencement. This is a clear sign that it is necessary for them to understand the art of branding and how to establish seamless communication with your audience.
At a time when the online sphere has been expanding like never before, digital marketing gives an unmatched opportunity to startups in widening their reach. Apart from this, it also helps budding businesses in establishing seamless communication with their potential and existing clients or customers. Some of the successful examples of startups that got succeeded with their distinctive digital marketing strategy are Bloomscape, Glossier, ByteDance, Uber, Zomato, and others.
If you are having a startup or planning to realize any such dream in near future, here are some of the reasons why digital marketing should be on top of your mind.
Why Do Startups Need Digital Marketing Strategies?
- Nearly 74% of marketers have a belief that e-mail marketing plays a role in augmenting customer engagement.
- Around 91% of internet users check their e-mails at least once ay. This means sending insightful, value-driven emails can help businesses in establishing lasting relationships.
- 75% of marketers witnessed an increase in their brand’s trustworthiness using digital marketing
- In 2020, 70% of B2B marketers said that their organization’s content marketing has become more powerful than it was a year ago
- Facebook has nearly a whopping figure of 2.89 billion users globally
- Organizations that master the art of securing leads through inbound marketing secure 50% more sales
- Nearly 40% % of people said that they would prefer to work with a brand due to its direct mail advertisement. Around 49% of users of the age group 18-29 said they’ve made a purchase after going through a social media ad
- Nearly 80% of internet users bought something after seeing a social media ad
- 61 percent of the companies polled want to hire more digital marketers.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that utilize electronic devices or the internet. It involves leveraging various digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, websites, mobile apps, and other digital platforms to connect with current and prospective customers. Digital marketing strategies aim to reach target audiences, build brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales or other desired actions.
Key components of digital marketing include:
1. **Search Engine Optimization (SEO)**: Optimizing website content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords, thereby increasing organic (non-paid) traffic.
2. **Content Marketing**: Creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. Content can take various forms such as blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, and more.
3. **Social Media Marketing**: Using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others to engage with audiences, promote products or services, and build brand awareness.
4. **Email Marketing**: Sending targeted emails to leads or customers to nurture relationships, promote products or services, share valuable content, and drive conversions.
5. **Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising**: Placing ads on search engines or social media platforms and paying a fee each time someone clicks on the ad. This method allows for targeted advertising and quick results.
6. **Affiliate Marketing**: Partnering with other businesses or individuals (affiliates) who promote your products or services in exchange for a commission for each sale or referral they generate.
7. **Influencer Marketing**: Collaborating with influencers—individuals with a large and engaged following on social media—to promote products or services to their audience.
8. **Online PR (Public Relations)**: Managing online communications and relationships with media outlets, bloggers, and influencers to enhance brand visibility and reputation.
9. **Analytics and Data-driven Marketing**: Utilizing data analytics tools to track, measure, and analyze the performance of digital marketing campaigns, allowing for optimization and informed decision-making.
Digital marketing offers numerous advantages over traditional marketing methods, including cost-effectiveness, precise targeting, real-time tracking and analytics, greater reach, and the ability to personalize messages for specific audiences. It has become an essential aspect of marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes across industries in the digital age.
What Startup Marketing Services Are Covered In A Startup Digital Marketing Strategy In India?
The answer to this question lies in the understanding of different types of digital marketing. Digital marketing is like an umbrella under which a lot of things happen. So, let’s find out how they work together by understanding them one by one below.
Digital Marketing Services You Must Include In A Startup Marketing Plan
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Content marketing
- Pay Per Click, or PPC Services
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Mobile marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Marketing analytics
- Social Media Management
- Google Ads Marketing
Popular Digital Marketing Strategies For Startups In India
Since digital marketing is a group of activities that aim to enhance the visibility of a business or brand on the internet, a majority of digital agencies for startups employ proven digital marketing strategies to reap desirable outcomes in terms of more visibility, engagement, and sales.
So, let’s look at some of those Startup Marketing Strategies below
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization refers to a set of practices that aim at increasing the visibility of a website on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. When a website ranks higher on a search engine, it gets more visibility which brings more traffic to the website, and ultimately more sales and engagement.
SEO Strategy For Startups
To master this, search engine optimization experts search for the most effective keywords and key phrases that users type while doing the search. There are lots of SEO activities that are done both on the website (on-site) and other portals (off-site).
“The wording on your web pages, the way other sites link to you on the web, and the structure of your website are all factors in SEO.”
Since search engines like Google follow a certain algorithm, it is a challenge for SEO experts and digital marketers to optimize the website considering that algorithm. Some of the activities that are usually done to decode this algorithm are given below:
Content indexing – This is done to make it easier for search engines to catch the new content that is present on the website. The indexing includes adding alt text to images and adding text transcripts to audio and video.
Easy link structure — Search engines must be able to “crawl” your site structure when it comes to finding the content. An SEO strategist can style links, URLs, and sitemaps in a variety of ways to make them more accessible to site crawlers.
Targeted keywords – One of the essential building blocks of SEO is properly deploying your keywords – i.e., the search terms you want your site to be discovered for. The strategy of “stuffing” your content with as many keywords and keyword variations is no longer an effective way to get traction. Drafting value-based content with smart use of targeted keywords in the headers and a few times throughout the content is now considered a proven strategy. This way, your website pages will rank higher in search results.
How SEO Services Work For Startups Work?
When it comes to giving the required exposure to your business or brand, SEO emerges as the prevalent and effective tool to count on. Also known as Search Engine Optimization, it involves a number of activities that bring organic traffic to your website without the help of paid marketing.
For example, if you launch a blog, search engines will direct organic traffic to your services pages, homepage, and landing pages. As a result, SEO enables small businesses to grow without spending any money on advertising.
- High ROI and long-lasting results that are also cost-effective
- Improve website’s performance in terms of speed and visibility
- Increasing your audience organically
- Easy gain of trust and authority
- Increase the trustworthiness of your brand
There are different SEO techniques used by digital marketing agencies to help startups get their websites on top of Google search results. Some of them are On-page optimization (done on your website), off-page optimization (done on other websites), link building, and others.
Some people are saying that SEO is longer an effective way to target your potential customers or clients online. This is not true. In fact, the amount companies investing in search engine optimization has been increasing day by day. Look at the following chart.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Or Google Ads Marketing
Paid adverts and sponsored search engine results come under the purview of pay-per-click advertising. This type of advertising is based on a simple model, which means your ads won’t appear the moment you stop your payment. PPC, similar to SEO, is a proven strategy that is leveraged to improve a company’s web search traffic.
Google Ads Marketing Strategy For Startups
Advertisements that appear at the top and sides of a page of search results, ads that appear when browsing the web, commercials that appear before YouTube videos, and ads that appear in mobile apps are all examples of pay-per-click advertising.
Another feature that sets pay-per-click apart from SEO is that you just pay for the outcomes. In a conventional PPC arrangement, such as a Google AdWords campaign, you will only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
When a user clicks on your ad and visits your website PPC advertising allows you to spend virtually any amount of money. Some businesses may get a return on their investment of a few hundred dollars, but many huge businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars per month on pay-per-click advertising.
Though many business owners think that running Google ads cost too much, which makes them not so good choice for startups. However, the truth is that Google ads are very affordable and easily executable for startups. Google Ads marketing is ideal for finding highly targeted (based on search intent) clients for just a few dollars.
How Does A Digital Marketing Agency Help Startups With Google Ads?
A digital marketing agency for startups can help you carve out a well-thought Google Ads strategy for your business to give it necessary exposure in the quickest possible way. The best thing is that you will be charged only if someone clicks on your ad.
It is not like Google Ads would just work fine for your new businesses. There are lots of factors that need to be looked at before determining the feasibility of running Google ads. This is where a digital marketing agency can lend the much-needed help to startups by helping them find out if Google Ads investment is a profitable strategy for them.
Content Marketing
It refers to storytelling and kind of information-sharing tactics that tend to fuel brand awareness. This kind of digital marketing aims at generating interest among the readers and driving them towards an action like subscribing to a newsletter, buying a product, submitting the contact information, and others.
Here the term ‘Content’ refers to a number of text-based elements like blogs, articles, landing pages, white papers, videos, and much more. Content marketing is not just about creating and sharing the content, but the shared content should be persuasive enough to serve the purpose.
Content Marketing Strategy For Startups
It is important to note that content marketing works in conjunction with other types of digital marketing. For example, it makes the use of keywords finalized under an SEO strategy to make the content piece more effective and value-driven. By analyzing your content marketing strategy, you can answer several questions like – What kind of content your audience is interested in, which content piece drives more sales, what are the things that your readers love to search on your website, and more.
Content marketing, contrary to Google’s pay-per-click advertising, is typically a long-term strategy. Marketers accumulate a library of material (text, video, podcasts, and so on) over time that will continue to drive traffic to the site via search engines.
How Does A Digital Marketing Company Help Startups With Content Marketing
Whether it’s a blog post, an infographic, or a presentation, every piece of content you produce should strengthen your brand. The buyer’s journey’s many stages are followed by the practical content strategy as it is planned. By doing this, you can make sure that the material you produce is beneficial to both your present and potential clients.
You can create more material for your website’s blog and social media channels with the aid of content marketing, a useful digital marketing technique for startups. Your SEO and SMO activities are supported by content marketing as well.
- Boost brand awareness
- Bolster your connections
- Make your brand known.
- Boost your brand’s credibility
Social Media Marketing Services
Social media is a buzzword these days. Today, almost every business has a social media footprint, be it a local beauty salon, a multinational enterprise, a public sector bank, or any other business entity.
The best thing about social media marketing is that it provides an opportunity to brand by establishing direct communication with the end-user. This strategy involves posting content like social media posts, running ads, and sending direct messages to potential and existing users.
Social Media Marketing Strategy For Startups In India
Social marketers need to integrate with the rest of the marketing team to ensure that their message remains consistent across all platforms, both online and offline so that the entire brand is presenting the same story.
How Does A Digital Marketing Agency In India Help With Social Media Marketing For Startups
Startups can effectively sell their brands and spread the word about their companies via social media. Creating an online community with shared interests with your company is more important than simply gaining likes or follows.
90%of marketers concurred that social media is crucial to their companies, according to a research study done by Social Media Examiner research. 89% of respondents agreed that social media had given their businesses more exposure.
A digital marketing agency can choose from a number of tools and platforms to strengthen a startup’s social media marketing strategy which can benefit it in diverse ways. This is done by employing a team of social media strategists and experts who know how to derive value out of a social media marketing plan.
There is no point you can afford to miss social media marketing from your business’s digital marketing strategy. With the number of users on social media increasing day by day, there is enormous growth potential hidden in social media marketing that must need to be tapped by today’s startups.
Email Marketing
The concept of email marketing is nothing new and it is still known to be the most effective marketing strategy worldwide. Some marketers consider it as a sub-domain in the content market which is true to some extent.
Email Marketing Strategy For Startups
According to the American Marketing Association, email marketing professionals are competent at not just creating attractive messages, but also understanding appropriate audience outreach and monitoring consumer interactions and data, as well as making strategic decisions based on that data.
How Does A Digital Marketing Agency Help With Email Marketing For Startups?
Among various available digital marketing strategies for startups, the most proven and long-standing strategy is email marketing. It has been used by both startups as well as established businesses and brands in securing new customers or clients. In fact, it is known to give the highest ROI, which could be as much as 400%. This is why it is preferred by almost all marketers today.
While choosing this strategy to power up your digital marketing campaign, you need to keep in mind the following three things.
- To let your probable customers know when your business starts, you may use the coming soon or launch soon template on your website.
- You may expand your email list while providing beta testing for your tools or goods.
- Offering free trials, reports, demos, or e-books will help you grow your email list.
Mobile Marketing
This kind of digital marketing focuses on targeting users on their mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. There are different routes a digital marketing agency takes to target them like websites, text messages, WhatsApp, email, social media, and others.
It allows digital marketers to provide customized offers or content to specific geolocation or time when the targeted user is most likely to get engrossed. With people spending more time on their mobile devices, mobile marketing has gained immense pace in the field of business marketing, particularly for new businesses.
Mobile Marketing Strategy For Startups
Mobile marketing is considered an effective way of digital marketing for startups as they can easily target their potential customers right where they are.
There are lots of benefits mobile marketing offers to start-ups like:
- Using efficient marketing strategies to connect with a growing number of potential customers
- Increased client loyalty thanks to well-timed, personalized mobile advertising campaigns and satisfying customer service
- A high amount of interest in rapidly delivered tailored marketing messages
- Enhanced knowledge of the offered goods and services and current or upcoming limited deals from your company
- More “online transactions, services’ subscriptions & renewals, and business mobile app downloads” were successfully converted.
- High return on investment in comparison to the minimal investment necessary
How A Startup Can Use Mobile Marketing For Growth?
Consulting a digital marketing agency is undoubtedly a powerful way to target your potential customers right over their smartphones. An agency can pick the most effective mobile marketing solution considering the industrial sector your business operates in and
Mobile Apps
Since a majority of mobile users spend 80% of their time on their smartphones, mobile apps emerge as a powerful way to target them right over there. Moreover, getting a business mobile app developed by a digital marketing agency can give you a competitive edge over others.
Here Are Some Of The Ways A Business Mobile App Can Help Start-Ups
- Ensure seamless communication with existing and potential customers
- Augment the desirable engagement endpoints like calls, inquiries, signups, and reviews
- Increase trust in the business
- Increase brand and product awareness
- Customize marketing messages
- Enable online conversion
- Develop long-term relationships
Mobile Websites
An average of 50 to 65 percent of web traffic comes from mobile devices, and 70 percent of mobile users’ online searches result in taking action on a website within an hour, either by getting in touch with your company using the available contact information or options, filling out the site’s lead generation forms, or making a purchase.
Having a mobile website offers an unparalleled user experience to startups through:
- Faster loading of web pages
- Easy call to actions
- Simple website navigation
- Easily accessible communication choices
- Faster product search and payment
Mobile Advertising Strategy For Startups
With the help of traceable, targeted, and customized mobile apps that are based on the types of devices, locations (“when they’re closer to your business branches or stores”), demographics (age, language, and gender), interests, and search terms, digital mobile advertising solutions enable advertisers to target potential customers who are “mobile users.”
Numerous ad formats that can be shown to mobile users can be selected based on the advertising campaign’s goals, such as raising brand awareness or motivating targeted potential and existing customers to take desired actions. Numerous costing options, such as cost per click, cost per impression, and cost per acquisition, can also be selected based on the campaign’s objectives while defining a maximum bid that is appropriate for your budget and expected return on investment.