How Do Startups Market Their Services?

When businesses are just getting started, it can be difficult to get their name out there. Some startups and businesses may use cash reserves or they may even use an overdraft to get the initial money needed to get a business’ marketing off the ground. Here are some successful strategies that startups use to market their services. 

Develop a brand

Before starting out, it is important to have a clearly defined brand. This will guide all future communications and make sure that you are promoting your company in line with your brand image and voice. Every time you take a marketing action, it is an opportunity for you to establish your brand.

Email marketing

For startups looking to attract companies, email marketing is a very cheap method. The hardest part of this is collating an email database. One way to do this is to introduce a newsletter signup form on your website. 

You can also ask customers directly for their email addresses. Once you have their email address, you can send emails which promote your startup. However, bombarding your email database with promotional content or advertorial emails is not likely to be effective. Instead, diversify your email content including things that offer value to your customers such as guides, discounts, videos or relevant how-to articles.

Start a company blog

Blogging can help your startup reach their relevant online audience. Blogging is a great way to start the process of marketing a company without having to borrow money to do so. In some cases, businesses may even need to look to get just $500 to get their blog off the ground.It is a way for you to position your startup as an expert in the sector and also attract organic search traffic to your website which, in turn, can create leads. In fact, one report found that businesses who have blogs generate 126% more leads than companies who do not.

When creating your blog, think about putting yourself in your audience’s shoes. Ask yourself what content would be engaging and valuable to them. Search engine algorithms will consider whether your blog is actually offering valuable information so it is not merely a case of producing content for the sake of it. When your blog is ranked highly by search engines, and recognised as offering valuable information, it will rank highly and attract more visitors. All of this will help your startup gain more visibility.

Social media

Having a social media presence is key to successfully marketing your startup. With over 2.4 billion people using social media, it is the chance to tap into a huge audience and multiple demographics. As your social media presence grows, it will reach more people and you will start to gain brand awareness. Across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Linkedin, you have the opportunity to reach multiple different audiences. As well as developing a free social media strategy, you could also invest some money into paid ads which can target certain people and make your marketing more optimised.

Social media is also a great way for you to interact with your customers. Posting engaging and relevant content, and encouraging questions and comments from your followers, can spark conversation and give you a chance to personally communicate with your customers.

Paid search

Paid search allows business owners to buy targeted web traffic from search engines via a pay-per-click (PPC) pricing model. 

Through paid search, you can create custom ads for your startup that will appear if a user searches a term which is relevant to your business – you can choose these keywords to target who your ad will reach. Because you only pay per click, it is a cost-effective way to market your business. You will only pay if you are receiving a volume of traffic.