You’re a startup business. You have questions. We get it.
Perhaps you’re not landing on the audience you need; maybe you’re misreading the market demand but aren’t exactly sure how. Perhaps you need some advice on reaching your perfect audience to maximise your potential and secure those conversions.
One immediate piece of advice? If startups partner up with a digital marketing agency early on, they will reach the right audience and enjoy long-term success in the market.
Because when 90% of startups fail in the first five years and at least half of them don’t succeed because they misread the market demand or don’t target the right audience in the right way, getting ahead of the game at the very first chance could be the difference between making or breaking success.
But while you decide whom to work with, it is essential to do whatever you can to get your brand’s name out there and gain traction.
Since paid marketing is the best way to reach your prospective customers and improve brand visibility, here are some actionable advertising tips for your startup business.
Be the master of one
Your audience won’t pay attention to anything if you try to fit too much into one ad. Cluttering ads and ad creative with irrelevant information may force the customer to leave it as fast as possible.
For instance, muddying the waters with multiple call-to-actions may confuse your leads and cause them to discard your ad because there is no way they commit to everything you are promoting.
Instead, you should focus on one single element and make the most out of it.
What is the most prominent pain point of your audience? What’s the one demand that you regularly hear that you know your product or service resolves? This is the element that your ads need to focus on to ensure that you’ve got a clear cut message with an immediately actionable course of action.
Whether it is an image, textual, or video ad, your goal should be to keep your ads minimal.
And while visuals are important, don’t let them overtake your message. It is sometimes wise to ditch fancy effects to balance out the overall ad.
For example, if you are keeping a loud graphic, embrace a plain font. Similarly, if you have a solid background, you can play with fun fonts to keep things interesting.
Start with paid marketing early on
You might be new to online advertising, or you may be contemplating your channel choices before investing. Still, regardless of your reason, you must start with paid marketing as early as possible. It can and should be a cornerstone of your traffic acquisition strategy.
Many startups and new businesses make the mistake of neglecting paid marketing in some form or another. But just because you are a startup doesn’t mean that you have to wait before spending some money on ads.
Paid channels like Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Google Search Ads are perfect for startups as they offer performance-based analytics. They are ideal for experimenting with small budgets and can help you decide how much your efforts are worth from the get-go.
As with any other form of marketing, it takes time and money to understand paid marketing. But with your customer profile, you can begin to understand which paid channel your ideal audience populates – this is why it’s so essential to create this customer profile in the first place.
Identifying where your target audience spends the most of their time, whether that’s Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, for example, is the first step in determining which channel to focus your efforts on as early as possible. This way, you’re utilising the budget that you have – even if it’s small. Traffic campaigns on Facebook are much more cost-effective than conversion campaigns. You can increase your visibility to interested users and gain a wider top of the funnel audience to remarket to this audience when a larger budget is available.
This is also something that working with the right agency can help you accomplish – but first things first, identify where your target audience is and understand how to utilise even the small paid marketing budget you have to reach them.
In essence, paid marketing is indispensable for a startup!
Have consistency in your visuals and voice
You need to have and maintain a consistent brand image across your ad copy, ad creative and marketing strategies.
No matter which format you choose and where you advertise, your ads should always have a certain look in terms of colour palette, font choice, and graphic style. Your copywriting should capture your voice well, in a way that is replicable across your brand. Because your adverts are some of the first impressions that your customers have, so your brand needs to be consistent and recognisable no matter the platform.
Your ad should be eye-catching and memorable and should look like it belongs to the rest of your content.
Here are three types of consistencies that you must aim for.
Consistency in the brand
To generate leads for your startup company, you need to start building an audience through brand awareness. So, it would help if you made sure that your ads have the same message you are trying to convey as your brand identity.
By doing so, your audience will feel more engaged with what you share. It is also a great way to make people associate a particular visual or tone with your brand quickly and set a foundation for better brand recognition.
Consistency in the message
Your ads should be consistent with the message. This is key as it helps users and potential customers determine what your product is suitable for, what problems it allows them to solve and why they should purchase/convert in the first place.
Your copy should keep your main USPs in mind and never waiver from them – this doesn’t mean to say that all your copy needs to be repetitive, but having in mind the key ethos of your brand in your copy will create a consistency that goes deeper than just words.
Consistency with the specific message for your products helps to create a clear distinction between the different products and services you promote in your ads, which makes their benefits and, therefore, attractiveness to potential customers higher.
Consistency in the goal
This is probably one of the most common mistakes startups make when advertising their business.
A brand offering luxury products or services can’t be penny-pinching in its approach. You can’t use a free Facebook page for advertising luxury handbags unless the link redirects your customers to a high-quality website.
Similarly, if your goal is to introduce originality in your industry, you can’t use stock images or copied content in your ads, which are anything but original. You will have to pay for a professional photoshoot and a copywriter to align your ads with your brand goals.
Target customers of competing products
Before you set out to advertise your product, it is essential to understand your target market. The easiest way to identify that is by finding consumers who have purchased similar products, as they are more likely to be responsive to your ads.
Likewise, targeting people using a competing product but aren’t getting the results they need from it is like finding a gold mine of customers.
Because you are offering them a product that will potentially fill the gaps in their current product selection or experience, it will make your user acquisition strategy much more straightforward.
Remember that targeting users who are already using a similar product is much easier than acquiring completely new users.
When starting a business, it is tempting to feel that advertising doesn’t work. More often than not, this is an expression of apprehension, especially if you can afford a decent-sized ad to begin with. But it isn’t the size of your campaign but the quality that matters. And if you still aren’t sure, working with a professional advertising agency might just be the solution you need.
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