Plan #1
One piece of digital marketing advice for startups to do today is if you don't have a Facebook business page, a Linkedin business page, a Google maps business page, if you sell a product or service, get one.
If you do get on there and make sure that all your information is accurate and up to date. Your phone number, your email address, your hours of operation and your addresses are all correct.
Get in there and make sure that all of those different directories have your information and it's all accurate.
This may not directly help with growing your business but if there's any inconsistency, even if that doesn't bother the search engines, it's going to take a hit on your legitimacy.
As soon as somebody tries to see how to reach this person and they get multiple email addresses or multiple phone numbers or disagreeing business hours, it looks like you're not in order.
Go take 10 to 20 minutes. Make sure your online presence is sinked up accurate and complete.
Plan #2
Another piece of good marketing advice is to start producing content. You can do it in 10 minutes or less. It doesn't need to be anything fancy.
Grab your phone, pick a marketing channel and bang out a quick blog or a case study. It's important that you don't make it "sales-y."
Make it something like addressing a challenge. Something you really care about. Something that your target audience is thinking about or they're struggling with.
What's keeping them up at night and keep it on that theme. Just put out ideas that are raw and authentic.
I do it in the hallway between meetings. Grab a conference room, set up a camera in front of yourself and begin putting out content.
Otherwise, you're losing out if you don't and it doesn't take that much work to do.
Plan #3
When I was in school, I was helping a clothing company get started. They were not finding any traction with their marketing efforts at all.
They were just posting and they had that idea that the ratio of followers to who they are following was really important. They didn't want to be following anybody.
A solid startup marketing strategy is just getting out there and just searching relevant hashtags on social media channels. It's free. Go find out what people in your target audience are doing.
Like someone's pictures so somebody sees that like. They're going to come to your page 100% free and you can do it on your own in your free time while you're watching Netflix.
Just click through some hashtags, find out what people are doing in that space and give them a follow right in that space and people are going to come to you.
Comment on people's stuff. Comment as your brand, engage as your brand, just be a human.
Plan #4
Moving away from media marketing and going back to email marketing. Try sending an email to all the people in your contacts.
Give them something. It can be a free ebook that you guys made a year ago, update it and send it out.
Even if it's just like a state of the union or maybe it's an upcoming webinar. Start to engage with your existing contacts cause they're there for a reason, they've already engaged with you.
Keep that engagement. That's going to be my advice for a successful marketing campaign.
Plan #5
Find some people that you want to sell too based on competitive research for marketing ideas. See who's following what pages that you want to compete with.
Add them on Linkedin, don't send them sales messages, people don't want to read or hear that.
Then start slowly building that base over time, just start pumping out content and they're going to see your name with blogs or videos in their feed.
That's how they get to know you over time organically without feeling like they're being pitched to or sold to.
They're going to see your content once a week or once a day or every couple of days.
Oh here's a great video that's 30 seconds long. I'm between meetings right now. The topic is awesome. I'm going to watch that.
Eventually, I'm going to get to a point where I've seen enough videos and blogs and I want to work with that guy.
I'm going to reach out or I'm the very least, you know, subscribe to them. And then they will word of mouth
Just add people on Linkedin and just start pushing out stuff into their feed and they're going to see it, they might love it and it doesn't cost you anything. Only your time.
For more, Check out our podcast "Under the Canopy: More than a marketing podcast" www.webcanopystudio.com/podcast
