One of the most fundamental problems that face any startup founder or digital marketer after building their world class product is how will they launch it into the market, and then how will they market it to acquire its previously planned market share.

In this blog post we introduce a simple guide for beginners to use online marketing to market their products online.

Why Online Marketing?

Before getting to how to market your business online, you must know first why to choose online marketing in the first place? There are a lot of reasons for choosing online marketing over other marketing methods. This includes controlling your segment targeting, knowing how much of your marketing budget is spent and on what exactly. But most importantly maximizing the ROI of your marketing efforts and yet reducing the cost of it up to 1800% less! As the image shows below the cost of reaching 2000 audience through traditional marketing and digital/online marketing according to Seriously Simple Marketing.

What Are Online Marketing Channels?

Now that you know the reasons for choosing online marketing over other marketing methods. Let’s dive into different online channels and what fits your business. There are a lot of online marketing channels, but these are the most important ones to start with as a startup.

1- Online Advertising

Online advertising hails a real pain of finding your potential customers through ads instead of waiting for them to find you (or not). Online ads can be made through diverse forms, such as search ads, display ads, social ads, native and many other forms. But the game here is all about how accurate your ads targeting is. That’s why automated advertising would be a great choice if you want your ads to be accurately delivered to your target group, with the minimal interaction from your side. Especially if you don’t have technical skills or a dedicated marketing person. And it also lowers your advertising budget up to 65%.

2- Content Marketing

When it comes to the internet, you know, content is king! That’s why we consider content marketing as one of the most channels to attract and convert your website visitors into leads and customers. By creating attractive and appealing content that is useful to your visitors and really adds value to them, you will have more credibility and they will consider buying your offering much more. Particularly when you know that while content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, it generates more than 3 times as many leads, according to Demand Metric. You can start adopting content marketing by starting a blog about your offering, which can be done in under 10 minutes but you must dedicate time to choose and create the appealing types of content that convert.

3- Social Media Marketing

If what you are building now isn’t your first startup business, then you probably know that building what people love is way more important than building ordinary things that people like at most. And that’s why Social Media is a perfect place to showcase the public behind the scenes of what you are building (on a daily level), and also to brand your team and company culture later. Because at the end people love to see people on Social Media. So for the first steps, you can start working on Social Media by creating a strategy of what you want to do and get from Social Media, and making a simple Content Calendar with the types of content you will work on, and a Posting Plan for every week/sprint as the ones below.

And if you don’t know where to get them, you can use a copy of the ones I am using.

How To Choose The Most Suitable Channels For Your Business?

Choosing a suitable channel depends on your business priorities and what you want to get from your online marketing efforts. This means you should first define clearly what are your marketing objectives (attraction, acquisition, activation, retention, …etc). Secondly your product lifecycle stage (introduction, growth, maturity, …etc). Then choose the channels that serve these objectives and stage best. For example, if you are launching your product (introduction stage) and want to attract some visitors to get their feedback. Then Social Media Marketing would be the channel to go to.

In A Marketing-shell

You may be confused now on where to start and what is the first step to take. So here’s a simple outline of what to start with:-

1- Study the market you will be competing in well.
2- Define your marketing objectives.
3- Choose your targeted group very clearly.
4- Put a marketing strategy to work according to, with the channels you will work on.
5- Set your tactics.
6- Start working on the selected channels.
7- Analyze and iterate.

And always remember that “marketing is about values”.

If you want to automate your traffic acquisition with minimal interaction from your side, but still guarantee high quality results. Then you should check InstaScaler, as it can help you with automating your online advertising and scaling up your business! (There’s a free credit when you first sign up) ?