Scaling Startups: Practical Advice on Using Digital Marketing and Automation for Long-Term Growth

Today, there are already more than 150 million startups across the globe, with around 50 million more added every year. The competition in the startup world is massive... And not all young companies survive it.

The unfortunate statistics show that about 90% of startups fail to scale and close soon after the launch. This might happen due to a variety of reasons. Yet, a lack of a strategic approach to digital marketing might be among the biggest ones.

Whether you are launching a cutting-edge SaaS company, a paper writing service with native essay writers, such as the ones that satisfy students’ “I need someone to help me with assignments” requests, or a small offline business like a grocery store, there is one thing we know for sure—scaling startups is impossible without digital marketing in our digitized world.

Why does it matter so much? And which specific tactics can propel your business? Let’s find the answers!

The Importance of Digital Marketing for Startup Growth

Probably the biggest challenge holding startups (similarly to small businesses) back from growing and driving profit is a lack of brand awareness, which makes it nearly impossible to compete with big, successful companies everyone knows about. Hence, marketing plays a critical role in ensuring rapid growth.

But why digital marketing, in particular?

Online marketing tends to offer quite a lot of benefits to new brands. It’s accessible and versatile. It also enables you to target your message to the right audience and see measurable results. Most importantly, compared to traditional marketing, digital marketing tends to be more cost-efficient (which is important for startups), and it can also offer you broad outreach and visibility, regardless of your location. And it also lets you get noticed by a larger number of prospects and satisfy their needs better, as 81% of consumers tend to research brands and products online before making a purchase, and you want them to be able to find you.

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3 Digital Marketing Tactics for Scaling Startups

In a nutshell, digital marketing is a means of promoting and, hopefully, selling products and services through the digital medium (aka the Internet, search engines, social media, mobile devices, etc.) It comes in many shapes and kinds.

Yet, the following digital strategies have shown to be the most effective for growing startups:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is one of the essential elements of every modern business success. This is because a huge part of consumer interactions with brands now begin in search engines. People use Google and other engines to explore new brands, products, and services, compare competitors, and find sufficient information to make weighted purchase decisions. And the truth is that they rarely get past the first page in search engine result pages (SERPs).

The goal of SEO, in turn, is to help you optimize your brand’s site to match ever-changing search engine algorithms and, thus, take higher positions in SERPs. It’s a cost-effective tactic for reaching your audience, getting noticed among competitors, and also improving your trust level and customer experience through a well-performing site and high-quality content.

Content Marketing

Regardless of their purposes, people come online for content. It can be educational, informative, or entertaining content that may be text-based, video, or visual—in any case, content is king on the web.

Content marketing has many benefits. With its help, startups can improve their SEO, capture the audience’s attention, inform people about their products/services, earn trust and credibility, and ensure sales and growth. And it’s quite cost-effective too, making it another strategy modern startups can’t do without.

Social Media Marketing

According to the latest statistics, there are 5.07 billion social media users out of a total of 5.44 billion Internet users. That’s over 62% of the entire world’s population. Apart from the growing number of social media users, we have to consider the increasing amount of time they spend on social networks as well. Spending an average of 2 hours and 30 minutes daily on social networks, users don’t just communicate through them but also consume plenty of content and explore new brands, products, and services.

These statistics make it crystal clear that social media is a powerful marketing channel today. By getting out there, creating engaging and shareable content, and interacting with users, startups can build solid brand recognition and follower base faster and easier compared to using some other marketing channels.

Practical Tips for Ensuring Rapid Growth With Digital Marketing

1. Start With a Plan

If you’re aiming toward rapid growth, playing the guessing game is never a good idea. Effective digital marketing requires thorough planning and preparation that will guide every step on your path and help you make better, strategic decisions.

So before you can use any specific entrepreneurial strategies, take these steps in advance:

• Analyze your current situation. Define how much traffic you attract, how many people buy from you, and how many of them come back—all this information can help you see in which state your marketing currently is.
• Establish marketing goals. Establish specific and measurable targets you’re hoping to achieve with your refined strategy. For example, if the big objective is to scale your startup, the measurable goal might be to increase sales volume by X% or attract X more customers.
• Establish the budget. Even if you focus on cost-effective marketing tactics, they will still cost you some money. Thus, you need to identify your fixed and variable marketing costs and set up a realistic budget that will let you implement your strategies in life.

2. Understand Your Customers Better

Comprehending your target audience and its needs is the key to growth. It can give you hints on what kind of content your potential customers prefer, which calls to action work on them, and find other pressure levers to attract, engage, convert, and retain your prospects.

There are several ways to gain the data you need:

• Analyze the existing customer base to detect similarities;
• Run client interviews and audience surveys to learn about your prospects’ needs, interests, and pain points;
• Run deep competitor analysis to see which customers your rivals target;
• Conduct thorough market research;
• Create detailed buyer personas and segment them according to different factors.

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3. Study Your Competitors

Regardless of your niche, your primary competitors are the best teachers to learn from. Companies that offer products and services similar to yours and that have already achieved the level of recognition, trust, and sales you aim for have already gone a long path of marketing and growth. By analyzing them, you can detect what mistakes they made along the way, which channels and tactics brought them the best outcomes, and which strategies didn’t work for them at all.

This knowledge can help you set up for marketing success faster and avoid a bunch of mistakes that can steal away your time. So be sure to identify your key competitors (you can do this by looking up similar products or services on the web) and carefully analyze their activity.

4. Get Started With Your SEO

Once you know your goals, audience, and competitors, you can start growing your startup through marketing. SEO is one of the first things you should focus on as it shapes the basis of your online presence.

To appear on top of SERPs, follow these baseline SEO tactics:

• Research and target relevant keywords;
• Analyze your competitors’ SEO to see which tactics work in your field;
• Take care of your site’s technical SEO, such as optimizing navigation, loading speed, ensuring mobile-friendliness, and so on;
• Create an extensive network of internal links to make users stay on your site for longer;
• Optimize your pages (including URLs, headings, meta tags, etc.) with relevant keywords;
• Create unique and valuable content with your target queries;
• Optimize your content with visuals for greater engagement;
• Focus on building high-quality links to boost visibility and trust.

5. Get on the Right Track With Content Marketing

Content marketing is basically a set of approaches and tactics involved in creating and sharing top-notch content that engages and converts users. It can include tactics like blogging, video content marketing, visual marketing, etc.

Based on your audience’s needs, you can choose any content tactics that will work for you. Here are a few extra tips that will help you achieve your goals:

• Have a detailed content strategy and calendar to stay on track with your content.
• Always keep your readers in mind. User-centered content is rewarded the most on the web.
• Optimize for SEO but write for humans. Don’t compromise the quality of your content for the sake of optimization.
• Experiment with different content types to create diversity and engage more users.
• Make sure you offer a unique outlook and real value to establish credibility and earn users’ trust.
• Cross-promote your content through different channels to ensure maximum outreach.

6. Use Social Media Wisely

To grow your startup quickly and steadily, you need to approach social media marketing with the utmost attention. Based on your buyer personas, detect which social networks your target buyers hang out on most often. Also, detect the perfect times for sharing your content… And get active!

Regularity and active presence are the two keys to success in social media. So be sure to create plenty of appealing and quality content and publish it regularly. And don’t forget to interact with your audience through comments, likes, and other mediums to create a sense of trust and community.

Pro tip: Since most users now trust the recommendations of their favorite bloggers, be sure to include influencer partnerships into your social media marketing tactic. It can help you reach a larger number of prospects and instantly gain their trust.

7. Watch Trends and Never Stop Developing

Augmented reality, virtual reality, personalization at scale, voice search SEO, and video content marketing—these are just a few of the most prominent digital marketing trends emerging this year.

Every year, the landscape of online marketing is changing. Keeping an eye on these changes and adjusting to them is the only way to remain competitive and continue growing your brand. So don’t stop after you implement your first marketing campaigns using the tips above and be sure to watch trends and adopt them for maximum success.

8. Leverage Business Automation

Last but not least, if you want to secure rapid growth, you cannot do without automation. From helping you collect and analyze huge sets of audience data and researching the right keywords for your SEO to letting you monitor and measure the results of your marketing efforts—business automation solutions can give you plenty of benefits.

By equipping your startup with such solutions, you can save a lot of time on everyday tasks, boost the accuracy of your data, and improve overall productivity. Marketing automation can help you streamline your marketing efforts and attain your goals faster.

The Bottom Line

Launching and running a successful startup isn’t easy in today’s competitive world but ensuring rapid growth is possible with the right approach.

Cost-effective and winning digital marketing strategies like SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing can help young companies grow and attain their goals. And if you add a bit of business automation to this, you can scale your startup faster and easier.

So don’t wait any longer, and use the tips from this guide to grow your business!