From Starting Small to Winning Big

The Definitive Digital Marketing Guide For Startup Entrepreneurs

Shishir Mishra

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781951527877
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Digital Marketing Guide for Start-up Entrepreneurs is a practical, step-by-step guide that will help budding entrepreneurs in setting up and executing their digital marketing strategy from scratch to achieve the goals they have set for their start-ups.

Topics covered in this book include search engine optimization, content marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, and online reputation management are essential for entrepreneurs to learn and master for the success of their start-up.

The author guides entrepreneurs in establishing a digital presence of their startups to jet fuel their business growth. He brings in real-life examples and insights gained from executing digital marketing strategies for start-ups and small businesses.

This book is perfect for start-up entrepreneurs, founders, marketers, and small business owners who are unaware of digital marketing concepts and how to use digital marketing for their advantage. It will give them practical tips on applying digital marketing to increase their brand awareness and sales–a concise book that can be completed quickly. The text serves as a reference guide for start-up entrepreneurs, to which they can always come back to while setting up and executing their digital marketing strategy.

CHAPTER 1

Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a means to achieve your business goals using the Internet and digital platforms such as search engines, social media, business listing websites, e-commerce portals, and so on.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

Let’s rewind the clock backward: remember the time when you were a teenager, and you saw a new TV commercial of denim jeans. You got a strong urge to go to the mall and buy those denim jeans. You got a sense of accomplishment as you purchased the latest fashion denim jeans before any of your friends in your neighborhood.

Let’s look at it from the advertising agency’s standpoint that created the TV commercial. Their goal was to successfully launch a new clothing line in the market and increase sales of the denim jeans through their advertisement. The agency created an exciting commercial for the television and ran the ad during a famous MTV show as the target audience for their clothing line was teenagers.

The manufacturer of the clothing line invested heavily in the advertisement. There was a substantial increase in sales of denim jeans. But the ad agency will never get to know how many teenagers watched their ads and how many of them did purchase the jeans. This is a traditional form of marketing in which the marketer was driven by gut feeling or intuition on the performance of their ad campaigns rather than facts or data.

Now let’s look at a similar scenario and see how digital marketing can be a game-changer? Melissa is a fashion designer; she is very famous among her friends for her trendy t-shirt designs. She was so far designing the t-shirts for her friends and her acquaintances. Melissa was able to sell her designer t-shirts through strong word-of-mouth publicity. Motivated by her initial success, she plans to promote her designs to a broader audience and sell her t-shirts online. She takes the help of her college friend Nick who is studying digital marketing.

Nick creates a four-page website and a Facebook ad for Melissa’s t-shirt brand. He sets the target audience for the Facebook ad as the students in her college. So everyone in his college who is on Facebook can see the ad.

Nick also sets up a tracking code on Melissa’s website to see how many people purchased the t-shirt after viewing the Facebook ad. Melissa was able to sell 30 t-shirts in a week, and she invested roughly the cost of two t-shirts in the Facebook ad and her website. She shared 20 percent of the profits with Nick.

Melissa, with the help of Nick, was able to not only sell her designer t-shirts online, but she was also able to identify the t-shirts designs that were higher in demand.

The crux of the story is that digital marketing levels the playing field. Before digital media took shape, only deep-pocketed businesses who were able to buy media time on television and radio could promote their offerings. Digital marketing offers a more affordable way to reach a broad target audience. It gives marketers data-driven insights on their target audience and their buying behavior.

The most important question that comes to your mind will be how digital marketing does that?

Well! This book is all about how to achieve your business goals with the help of digital marketing. You need to first know the advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing to get started.

Benefits: Digital Marketing Over
Traditional Marketing

1. 1. Digital Marketing is cheaper than traditional marketing

Traditional marketing is done through the following media:

• • Print
• • Television
• • Radio
• • Flyers and billboards
• • Events

The conventional forms of advertising, like running a TV commercial, print ads, radio ads, and so on, require huge investments, whereas digital marketing is inexpensive, and it has the capacity to reach a broad target audience.

There are two types of digital marketing:

• • Organic
• • Inorganic

Organic marketing is a natural, authentic, value-based approach to drive traffic to your website and develop brand voice over some time. This is a form of inbound marketing approach in which you educate your target audience through blogs and convert blog readers as potential customers. Organic marketing that takes leverage of search engine optimization is virtually free.

Inorganic marketing, in other words, is paid marketing that allows a business to target, engage, and convert their audiences directly and quickly. Inorganic marketing is a push strategy in which you push your content to the target audience in the form of ads. Inorganic marketing, which is done with the help of Facebook ads, Twitter ads, LinkedIn ads, and so on, gives more control over your budget and ad spend.

1. 2. Digital marketing helps you reach a larger audience

There are over 4 billion users of the Internet, which is more than half of the world’s population. Every single day, there are more than 3.5 billion searches on Google. The number of Internet users is ever increasing, and with the advent of smartphones, the number of mobile Internet users also keeps growing. Imagine the visibility your business could get over the Internet.

With the help of the Internet, you can reach out to your
potential customers, even on the other side of the globe. The television and radio commercials are limited to a geographical region, whereas people can view your Internet ads anywhere across the world.

1. 3. Digital marketing helps you precisely target the right audience

The level of precision you get while targeting your audience through digital marketing could not be achieved by traditional marketing. Using digital marketing platforms such as Facebook, you can target your ideal audience based on their interests, demographics, location, preferences, and lot more.

While running a re-marketing campaign, you can choose to reach out to only those audiences who have engaged with your previous campaign. You can also choose ...