One of the most difficult struggles every startup faces initially is getting a word out about their business and most times can really be frustrating to deal with. The truth is that your business isn’t going anywhere without customers and that’s why you need to effectively promote your business if you really want to get customers and ultimately get more sales in your business.
I will be showing you five incredible ways you can promote your startup and get it the clients you really need. But before we go into that, you have to answer two important questions. These questions would be a guide to crafting your message to whichever promotion strategy you wish to employ.
Who are your target audience?
You want to know who exactly you want to sell to, then aim, and shoot. You don’t want to reach the wrong crowd. You don’t want to reach people who don’t care about your product, or people whose problems aren’t solved by your product.
Know your ideal customer. You can’t produce baby pampers and market it to babies just because they’re the ones using it. You know you’re targeting mostly mothers, from say age 25-45. Then looking for where they’ll ideally be at, whether online or off, and reaching out.
What is your purpose?
If your purpose isn’t defined, clear, and doesn’t centre around the well-being of your customers, you may find a hard time having to connect on a deeper level with your customers.
Now, let us get down to the business of this article.
1. Email Marketing – Currently, it’s easy having to set up automatic email campaigns that you could advertise your business through and reach out to thousands if not, millions of people with a single click. This strategy is one you should employ for your startup as the internet is now taking over a whole lot of things.
2. Leverage social media – This one is really important as it helps increase your brand recognition. It helps tell customers that you’re active and has an amazing capacity to strengthen customer loyalty. Run ads, engage followers and make them feel part of something and they will be worth a whole lot to you when you want to sell to them. Research shows that social media has a great percentage of conversion rates. You want to harness this one as it also helps you rank better in search engine results.
3. Video promotion – Through Facebook, YouTube and others, you could create great video content that appeals to customers on an emotional level and run ads on your video. People are visual beings and would respond more to a video especially when it captivates from the beginning. Compared to texts where people mostly scroll till they don’t see that “boring text ad.”
4. Search Engine Optimization – Research shows that 80% of people use search engines like google to influence their decision to buy a product or not. Then, you want to optimize your business website to be able to rank high on some keywords that your ideal customers would likely use in a web search.
5. Giveaways – You could also promote your startup by offering gifts for some tasks or discounts on your products. One thing that happens when you start giveaways is this; a lot of people compete for some of your products for free, and the winner gets the prize. In the process of the competition, word is going out about your business. Be careful though, if you choose to offer discounts for your products, keep it between 15 to 20 per cent off and nothing more than that. You don’t want to make your customers feel your products are low value and you’re making a clearance sale or something.
There are a lot of businesses in the world today that it’s really a great challenge standing out. Follow these strategies and be amazed at how much more you could boost your sales.