These digital marketing tips will build up your startup

If you’re just getting your startup off the ground, the chances are, you’re wearing a lot of hats. Most entrepreneurs are forced to start out with a limited budget and a ton of self-belief.

You may be acting as your company’s spokesperson, salesperson, CEO, and even answering the phones. It can be hard to focus on your digital marketing as well.

But there’s little point in building the world’s greatest product or offering the best possible service if customers never get to hear about it. If your website is looking like a beautiful wallflower at a party, it’s time you focused on improving your online presence. Check out these digital marketing tips that will build up your startup.

Optimize your content

We hear the word “optimization” thrown around a lot these days, but do you really know what it means? The waters of SEO used to be very murky indeed. Getting your website to rank through the powers of digital marketing was something you had to pay a lot of money for. Normal people knew nothing about algorithms or ranking metrics.

Welcome to 2017. It’s easy to optimize your content and go at your own pace, and there’s a ton of digital marketing tips on the web about it. If you’re starting from scratch, keep in mind the length of your content (over 400 words per page), the use of keywords (around 1.5-2% density), H1 and H2 headers and metadata.

If your website is in WordPress, add a simple plugin, Yoast for SEO. You’ll get pointers on the length of your titles, readability of your content and anything missing, such as image captions or a meta description.

Ensure an awesome user experience

You don’t need to hire a UX manager to provide a user experience that delights your site visitors. If you have the budget to outsource to a professional web services agency, so much the better.

But if you need to do things on a bootstrap budget, look at what you can tweak by yourself. In a world where we’re pretty much pressed for time all the time, site speed is key in digital marketing. More than 40 percent of people will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load.

You can check this out with a developer or your hosting provider, or you can look at resources for site speed and digital marketing tips. Simple things like optimizing your images (making them smaller and lighter), not adding video, and minifying your HTML code can all improve your speed.

Make sure that your website isn’t overcluttered and that your users can find what they need easily. Navigation should be logical and simple. No broken forms, incorrect links or glitches.

A great user experience will encourage repeat visits and glorious reviews. Since one of Google’s metrics is the length of time spent on page, and another is positive reviews, actioning these digital marketing tips will build up your startup fast.

Be an authority in your niche

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and build up visibility for your startup is to become a go-to source of information for customers. If you make car parts, people might want to know the right products to choose, or how to fit them. If you sell cosmetics, provide tips for applying makeup.

When you start putting out useful and relevant content on a regular basis that is rich in keywords, you’ll soon start to sound like an expert. If you’re stuck for ideas, you can use AdWords Keyword Planner to see what topics people are searching for and build your articles around the keywords. This will help you appear higher in search results, as well as encourage likes, shares, and traffic.

Build your backlinks

Whether you hire someone to do this for you or do your own outreach, the important thing is to get links. Backlinks are crucial in digital marketing. When you’re offering a great service and putting out awesome content, people will naturally want to link to it. But you can give yourself a helping hand along the way.

One of the fastest ways to get your site to rank is by building up the quality links pointing to it. Think of each link as a vote. The more votes the better. Keep in mind though, that not every site was created equal. Just the same as when you were in high school, you don’t want to be associated with the wrong crowd.

So, don’t aim for alliances with low-quality sites, reach out to reputable businesses and blogs instead. Sometimes the best way to get a website to link to you is to offer them quality content or ask them to review your product.

Get social

You already know the importance of social media by now. About a third of all time spent online is done so on sites like Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter. And if your customers are spending time there, you need to be there as well. Rather than looking at updating your status on Facebook as a waste of time, think of it as a chance to portray the human side of your brand. Post photos of your employees or your facilities. Tell stories about how you source your products. Share your fans’ content and interact with them frequently.

Remember, digital marketing is all about building traffic to your website with the aim of getting customers to convert. You need to apply all these digital marketing tips together. There’s no point spending all your time on social or building backlinks if your website is slow or outdated. Just as it’s of little use having a fabulous website that isn’t optimized or seen.

Be patient and diligent and apply these digital marketing tips. You’ll soon start to see your startup getting bigger every day!

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DISCLAIMER: This article expresses my own ideas and opinions. Any information I have shared are from sources that I believe to be reliable and accurate. I did not receive any financial compensation in writing this post, nor do I own any shares in any company I’ve mentioned. I encourage any reader to do their own diligent research first before making any investment decisions.