If you’re a startup, operating on a limited budget, it becomes essential to focus your marketing on low-budget marketing strategies that are proven to work. You need to make every penny count.
Social media is essential to any new startup’s marketing plan because it offers free and low cost ways to promote a new website. Social can work better than techniques like SEO to build traffic in the initial states of promoting a startup.
Here are ways that startups can build a strong following on social media.
1. Create buyer personas
Creating a buyer persona will help you focus only on those people that are likely to purchase what you have to offer. When creating your buyer personas for potential customers, you need to list:
- Their job and demographic information
- What a day in their life looks like
- Their challenges or pain points
- Places where they access the information they want
- Their most common objections to making a purchase
Understanding all these aspects of your buyers will help you focus your marketing and content to appeal to the right buyers at every stage in the sales funnel.
2. Create a responsive website
With a majority of internet users now accessing the web from their mobile devices, your startup website needs to have responsive web design and be easily accessible on all mobile devices.
Google’s “Mobilegeddon” update made having a mobile-friendly site a ranking factor in the Google search results. That means, if you hope to use SEO to get traffic to your website, your design needs to be responsive, so it adapts to any mobile device that it is viewed on.
3. Create a social presence on select channels
One of the biggest misconceptions startups have is that they need to build a presence on every social network. This only means you’ll spread yourself thin and remain unfocused in your marketing strategy.
While I would recommend creating an account on all social networks, just to make sure no one else takes charge of your brand name, you need to focus your efforts only on those networks that your buyer persona is spending the most time on.
4. Invest in social advertisements
The fastest way to build a strong following on a network like Facebook is with paid advertising. Facebook Like ads can grow your following, while Promoted post ads can boost engagement on your best content.
On Twitter and Pinterest, it is still easy to build a following without advertising. But if you’re in a hurry to grow your numbers and get your startup in front of more people, explore Twitters follower ads and Pinterest’s Promoted Pins options.
Set aside a budget for social media advertising and you will be able to build a strong social media follower base in a much shorter time.
5. Start a blog and post regularly
Your blog is an essential component of your sales funnel, so invest some time and effort in publishing posts that target the challenges and pain points of your buyer personas.
Publish content in multiple formats, like video, infographics and PPT (Slideshare) to reach those customers who prefer consuming content in these formats. Spend some time learning how to make your content stand out from the clutter.
For the complete list of tips, visit the original article:
http://trak.in/tags/business/2015/11/30/7-top-startups-ways-strong-social-media-following/