7 Digital Marketing Challenges Faced by Startups
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Starting a business can be a wild ride, especially in that first year with all the different hurdles one has to juggle. You are probably working with a tight budget unlike most of the big players in the game. And, of course, you don’t have a whole team of experts working on several projects at once. Plus, you have to come up with a proper digital marketing plan that is feasible with your limited funds yet pushes for growth. With a small team, every dollar matters, and you need to keep an eye on the cash flow; in that case, digital marketing might feel like a real challenge.
In this blog, we’ll talk about the main digital marketing challenges for startups they might encounter.
Digital Marketing Challenges for Startups
1. Consistent branding
Startups often face issues with strong brand identity as they are new in the market. Stand out in a crowded market with a cohesive, recognisable brand through consistent branding. From fonts and colours to your voice and style, consistency is crucial for any brand out there.
Tip- Create a brand guidelines document which includes logo, brand colours, text font style, brand’s voice etc. to keep your team and partners aligned.
2. Generating traffic and leads
It appears that making traffic and leads is now becoming increasingly difficult with increasing numbers of platforms. Many business owners are left to put all their energy into social media, pumping out hundreds of posts every week. Most of the time mass posting doesn’t help with generating traffic and leads. It can get really frustrating, especially when others seem to be getting it right. You must start first with creating content that truly hits your audience’s sweet spots. But before all else, you need to figure out who your target market is.
Develop buyer personas by conducting customer surveys and research, and whatever additional insight you can collect on your target market. Once you have a clearer picture of your audience, you can take steps that really connect with them, which will help boost your traffic and leads.
This all kicks off with a campaign. As one of the four key elements of the business, campaigns lay the groundwork for generating leads and converting them. Here’s what you typically need:
- An attractive lead-generating offer, such as an infographic or a digital guide, targeted at a particular buyer persona.
- A landing page where prospects can complete a form to claim the offer.
- A follow-up email to deliver the offer at the right time.
- Nurturing emails to maintain engagement with the lead and establish trust until they decide to buy your product or service.
3. Creating an effective budget
There is not a lot of room for flexibility when it comes to the budget in most companies. Digital marketing often takes the backseat in terms of resource allocation. But reducing your marketing budget is just like turning off your open sign. Growth is null without it. To make a case for your marketing expenses, you’ve got to show that your efforts are paying off. Keep an eye on your ROI and be open to experimenting with new strategies if the old ones aren’t cutting it anymore. If you’re working with a digital marketing agency, request some end-of-year reports to highlight how your investment is being put to good use. And if you are doing it all by yourself, then do not waste all your money on SEO or boosted posts when you could be getting better returns from well-planned campaigns, created by digital marketing agency.
4. Finding the right marketing talent
One of the biggest challenges for most business owners and marketing managers is finding the right people to hire. You want qualified professionals without breaking the bank. But hiring full-time marketing experts is often out of the question, and you settle for less expensive options. This might mean bringing on a recent college grad who lacks industry knowledge or your cousin’s son, who claims to be an Instagram influencer. You may end up with someone who is great at one marketing area but misses the bigger picture. Similar to web designing, partnering with a marketing agency is probably your best step forward. Marketing agencies employ professionals, from creating attractive content for the campaign to dealing with social media, for that matter. If you have opted to hire in-house, ensure that you properly evaluate your candidates.
Tip- It will do best to look for someone with a bit of experience both in content creation and design as this person will contribute more effectively than one who specialises only in one area.
5. Persuasive content marketing
As we discussed above, generating traffic and leads indeed relies on having amazing content. When you stick to planning your content calendar in terms of blogs, offers, emails, or even on social media, try thinking about the pain points your audience experiences that you can offer relief to. Your content becomes more appealing and useful this way. Next, look into what kind of content is preferred by today’s consumer. For example, blog posts versus videos. Nowadays, videos and social media posts are consumed much more than other content types. To enhance your success, try incorporating video into your other content. Writing a blog? Film a quick 30-second video on your phone to include in the post. Making an infographic? Add a teaser short video on the landing page that gives a sneak peek at what’s inside. Remember that preferences vary with your audience, and this is why you must understand your buyer personas. Generally, people prefer video over text or images. Finally, remember to position your customer as the hero in your content. You’re there to solve their problems and improve their lives but think of yourself as the guide.
6. Poor SEO
You can really tell how well your digital marketing is doing when you look at search engine results and social media performance. Both of these platforms rely on search features to connect customers with what they want. If your SEO strategy is missing, then your startup could be buried in search results, which makes it even harder for potential customers to find you. To resolve this, try to see things from your customers’ point of view. Start off your digital marketing campaign by asking yourself, “What search terms would my ideal customers use to find this content?” Once you have determined that, improve your content by seamlessly adding those relevant keywords. Also, see to it that your content are easy to read; they have links to other valuable pages, and they should load fast so that visitors can easily access your site.
7. Marketing ROI
Figuring out the ROI of your marketing efforts is the best way to see how well each campaign is performing. Plus, it’s a solid strategy to secure a bigger marketing budget. But let’s be realistic: it can be quite tough. To measure your actual ROI, you would want to link your marketing efforts to the actual sale outcomes. There are quite many tools out there which you can use for such as marketing software and CRM systems. You can still glean some insights without any fancy software. When chatting with new customers, ask them how they found out about you. Was it through a social media post? Did they download something? Or did a friend recommend you? Keep track of their answers to see where your traffic is really coming from. You might even want to add this to a survey and send it to all of your customers. In this way, you would be able to determine if your marketing efforts are in fact getting people to come to you or if they are flat out failing.
Digital marketing challenges come to every startup as a routine challenge. These challenges can prove helpful in getting a better handle on the business as well as learning about the complexities in the market, along with strategies and everyday solutions necessary for a winning marketing approach. A solid digital marketing strategy should include such important areas of knowing the target audience, analysing competition, running an effective campaign, capturing leads and converting them, and understanding the customer’s buying habits while reviewing past case studies.
Being an expert, Tussle Digital can help you. Reach out to us today and let’s create a winning marketing strategy for your startup.