The 7-Step Startup Digital Marketing Checklist
As the internet continues growing with new online opportunities presenting themselves, businesses are collecting more information and data than ever before. When used correctly, this information offers new strategies to attract and retain customers by implementing effective digital marketing.
So… where do we start?
It is difficult to know where to begin when it comes to building a new brand or refreshing and existing one, so here is our 7-step digital marketing checklist:
1) Craft your ideal customer
When building a house, you want to start off with a set of plans, NOT the foundation. A set of plans (or a blueprint) will help determine how to lay the foundation in the best way possible when building a house.
The same thing applies towards your digital marketing. To start off this 7 point digital marketing checklist, we’ll first begin with crafting your ideal customer.
An ideal customer can vary greatly depending on the type of industry your startup is in. For example, if your startup is a ultra smart cell phone company, you should probably target a specific demographic that would like to buy these type of new cell phones: young individuals between the ages 18-29, are tech savvy, etc.
Here is a list of questions your startup should answer before moving on to the second point of this digital marketing checklist:
- What age are they?
- What are their interests?
- What is their lifestyle?
- What do they do for living?
- What might make this ideal customer buy your product/service?
- What problem does your product/service solve?
2) Determining your brand identity
After crafting or identifying your ideal customer, now it’s time to shape your brand identity. Shaping your brand identity now becomes much easier for startups, because now you have an idea on how to build a good brand out of your startup/small business.
This is the single biggest mistake every startup/small business makes. They first have an idea, they make a business out of it, but later struggle to gain any customers and it’s because they didn’t follow the first step.
With all of that said, creating a brand identity is not just about logos or colors, it’s all about why customers should go with you and not your competitors. What great product does your company offer?
3) Logo design
Creating a logo is another essential tool you must have for your business in order to be fully recognized. While there are ways to design a logo for free, it’s best to hire a logo design company to give you not just a logo, but a wide selection of ideas that you can implement into your business.
It helps to have a professional guide you throughout the digital marketing and logo design process, because it can be hard to stand out from the competition all by yourself.
There are some things to consider when designing your logo such as:
- Colors used
- Type of fonts
- Style of logo
- Visual designs
- Brand design
A logo design should be simple, you don’t want to make the logo too complicated as this will make it hard for your audience to remember, thus the recognition your brand will have will be limited. Before launching a website or digital marketing campaign, it’s important to design a logo that is simple, fun, and is relevant to your business.
4) Social media strategy
Being present on social media is often overlooked by many startups and small businesses. While it may take longer to get customers from social media, some startups never get a following on social media because they don’t have the right strategy.
This is similar to the house and foundation example explained on 1). Before you can start promoting your startup on social media, you need to formulate a strategy.
What are you going to post? What platforms should your startup focus on? How often will you post? How will you create an audience?
Many of the questions above should be answered before creating a social media account. There are many people who are not successful with social media, not because they are posting the wrong stuff, but because they are targeting the wrong people. This is where selecting the right platform comes in handy.
5) Building a company website
Now that you have the set of blueprints, now it’s time to set the foundation, the website. Remember that you shouldn’t jump right into designing a new website for your startup if you haven’t completed steps 1-4, because it’s important to have a good blueprint before laying a solid foundation.
When building your company website, here is a list of things you should be thinking about if you are looking to have an effective website:
- What pages do you want to display?
- What is your primary product/service?
- What are the goals of your startup?
- What is your SEO strategy?
- What type of hosting will you use?
- What kind of CMS (Content Management System) will you use?
Many of these questions should be answered either by you, the team at your startup, and even your website designer. Building a website from scratch can become a headache if you cannot answer these questions. We highly recommend hiring a web designer in The Woodlands or in your area if you simply don’t have the time to figure this out for your startup.
6) Search Engine Optimisation SEO
Along with this continual research and implementations, search engines such as Google and Bing are updating their algorithms every single day. In 2018 alone, Google has made over 3000 improvements to their search engine according to Moz.
For many startups and small businesses, keeping up with search engine updates and ever evolving changes can become overwhelming without a solid digital marketing plan
Although building traffic through search engines may be a long-term process, it’s an important a part of a useful digital marketing checklist. you would like to optimise your content favourably to the prospects who want to seek out answers for attracting organic, meaningful traffic and improve your search rankings.
The contents you publish should specialize in your visitors most asked questions if you would like to outrank within the search results. you would like to know the intent behind visitors’ searches to form an honest keyword search. Thus you’ll not only increase the traffic of your website but also attract a more qualified prospects.
There are numerous keyword research tools, Keyword Magic Tool is one among them. After you discover relatively low competition and drive sufficient traffic, optimise your site or post. to form on-page optimisation, properly structure your website or post for search engines to spot your target keyword relevancy.
Off-page optimization focuses on link building and helps search engines to spot how relevant your content is. For further information, you’ll check these on-page and off-page guides. Now you drive some traffic to your site.
In order to show your leads into customers, enhance the web site experience. Apply the simplest practices to your site that align together with your business goals. Make double or triple checks to make certain that everything is ok. Never ignore the worth of the mobile. Your business website must be mobile friendly as it’s a Google ranking factor.
7) Ongoing digital and content marketing
Create and distribute valuable, relevant, and consistent content to draw in and retain a clearly-defined audience and to drive profitable customer action. Content marketing sometimes overlaps with digital marketing), so it is vital to possess a radical strategy that comes with multiple elements:
Create a content calendar: Executing a content marketing strategy without an idea is probably going to waste an excellent deal of your time. Create a monthly calendar that outlines what content you’ll create and the way you’ll distribute it.
Share your content on social media: Your content is going to be wasted unless you’ll get the eyes of your audience thereon consistently. Have an idea for a way you’ll share your content on your social media platforms.
Reuse your content: you’ll use (and reuse) your content in many various ways so as to urge more mileage out of every piece of content. for instance, create a series of blog posts on related topics, then combine them together to make an ebook.
