3 Digital Marketing Ideas Every Startup, No Matter the Budget, Can Implement Now
When Bai approached our digital marketing agency, Be Found Online (BFO), they were a small, home-office startup beverage brand based in Hamilton, New Jersey. Bai needed help in driving the digital side of its business, with the goal of turning its regional distribution into national distribution.
The main challenges with Bai were identifying a target audience, generating awareness for their new brand, and measuring engagement over time. Bai’s products were only available regionally and in only a select number of stores, as well as only on Amazon. In the beginning, our digital marketing agency had to create an awesome digital marketing campaign for Bai with limited resources and budget.
We’d like to share here the top strategies that we implemented with Bai that helped them be named one of America’s “Most Promising Companies” by Forbes before being acquired by Dr. Pepper.
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Scale your digital media strategy across multiple platforms.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Before turning to BFO for assistance with its digital marketing strategies, Bai was only running Google Search. While Google Search was a good tool to leverage their product, it meant there was a wide array of untapped potential in social media that they were not utilizing. Once we began working on digital strategy, we added remarketing, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and Twitter. We also ran Hulu ads for Bai’s new flavor launch during shows that reached their target audience: such as Hell’s Kitchen and Iron Chef.
The great thing about all these platforms is that they have a massive audience that you can reach for free. You do not need a big budget to market your brand. All you need is a defined brand image and a target audience to get started.
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Know your audience and market to them across all platforms.
Once you’ve already set up your strategy across platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, look at your existing audience and market to them on these different platforms. Take the time to learn your target demographic and create targeted lists using existing audience data to maximize the potential of your existing, interested audience.
When we worked with Bai to drive traffic to the company blog, their website visitors became a part of the “Remarketing List” on Google, as well as “Website Custom Audiences” on Facebook and Twitter. From there, BFO was able to use those lists for targeting promotions and ad flights.
Aside from making use of these lists, you would also need to ensure that the copy for your ads resonates and have an impact on your audience. A marketing campaign without an effective copy is like missing one piece of a puzzle. You wouldn’t be able to get the complete picture. This includes optimizing your copy to include keywords relevant to your target audience for SEO. Working on your company blog can bring you organic results without spending a single dime. Take the time to publish valuable content on your blog in order to rank in search engines and make your website more interesting to readers.
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Finally, analyze your data.
Several platforms such as Google have their own dashboards where you can analyze the results of your marketing strategy. You need to check this data consistently to know if your marketing campaign is working and assess your progress. Google Analytics will help you identify weak spots in your marketing campaigns.
One of the limitations that Bai had in the beginning was that they sold primarily through Amazon and did not do direct shipping. Because of this, they weren’t able to take advantage of Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs) which placed a limitation on analytics. However, Google has other options for analyzing company data such as Custom Dashboards in Google Analytics and Google Trends.
The marketing data available on these dashboards can give you unique insight into where you are reaching your target audience, measure your engagement on the countless platforms you are marketing to, and which content – if you are doing A/B testing – is doing well. By knowing how to analyze this data, you would be able to scale spending, adjust your audience targeting and capitalize on new opportunities.
While having a tight budget limits the amount of marketing tactics and tools you can use for your business strategy, it does not mean that the quality of your marketing campaigns must suffer. Even if your company can’t afford to hire a digital marketing agency, you can still run an effective digital marketing campaign. Start-ups must be scrappy, resourceful, and learn on the go in order to succeed. Everyone starts somewhere, even a big business like Bai.
Bai’s case study demonstrates that even if you start small, you always have the potential to make it big. You just have to be confident about your brand messaging and your target audience and have a single, dedicated digital marketing strategy.
As CEO/Co-Founder of BFO, Steve excels in ‘unleadership’ (his word). Steve believes in collaboration and leading by example, remaining vulnerable and open to new ideas, accepting feedback…and doing good things.
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Steve Krull is the CEO and co-founder of Be Found Online. Steve is a fun loving, optimistic guy who cares a lot about the BFO family and relishes in all of the staff’s opinions and can easily articulate and execute any of these visions. He enjoys reading spy novels, rooting for the Cubs, and having fun with his family including chasing his kids around the house.
3 Digital Marketing Ideas Every Startup, No Matter the Budget, Can Implement Now