Marketing is a key way to raise awareness for your startup. But for most people, running a business while managing your company’s marketing can be difficult. That’s why a majority of startups struggle to get it right. Amarpreet Kaur, Web Producer at Creative Destruction Lab, will speak at Beyond Business Basics on September 20th, 2018. She will cover the fundamentals of digital marketing , the different types of digital marketing strategies, marketing and sales automation, and best practices for small business with a tight budget. Here are a few quick tips to get you started:

What is one thing startups don’t consider when launching their digital marketing efforts?

Startups need to think about where their audience is. It’s really important to see where it’s worth putting in the most effort on digital channels. I’ve seen organizations spend time, money and resources in social media channels and other digital platforms where their potential customers, partners, investors and other stakeholders would never interact with their content. Another really important thing is planning. It is so critical to think before you start on social media. This obviously includes research on your audience, but it also needs to include:

• What kind of content are you sharing?
• When will you share it?
• What channels will you use?
• Will you develop your own content or are you going to re-share preexisting content?
• Will the whole team participate or is one person dedicated to it?
• What’s the company voice? Casual, professional, strict, loose, lay-man, technical, etc?
• How will you measure success?
• How much time and resources will you dedicate to this process?

This list of questions isn’t exhaustive, but they all feed into an effective digital marketing and social media strategy.

What social media platform is most effective for startups?

Different social media platforms reach different types of audiences. What platform you promote your startup on is dependent on the type of business (B2B or B2C), the kind of content being shared, and the outcome/goals that the startup wants to achieve through digital marketing. How do they want to translate social goals into company-wide KPI’s?

If you’re thinking about using Instagram as a platform, consider what this means for your business. Do you have a product with visual appeal? Are you targeting a younger demographic? For example, Altitude Accelerator Incubator startup, Aviron Interactive, sells interactive rowing machines to gyms. Aviron focuses on Instagram as their go-to platform. This is because Instagram has a large fitness community. Gym-goers and gym owners are both active on the platform. By using targeted hashtags to reach this group of people, Aviron will steadily be able to grow their following on Instagram.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn is not a visually-focused platform and the target audience are exclusively professionals. So, LinkedIn wouldn’t be the most effective platform for a company like Aviron to focus on. When thinking about your social media strategy, it’s key to understand what each platform offers. Sprout Social provides a lot of information on the demographics on all the important social media platforms. You can then work backwards from your objectives to figure out which platform will be most effective for you.

What are your top blogs and resources for marketing?

Consumers are now experts at avoiding advertising. So, marketing is forced to change just as fast as technology does. What works this year, won’t work next year. As a startup or business owner, it’s important to keep up-to-date on new marketing techniques. Fortunately, there are so many resources available for startups to use. There are online courses, content libraries, digital tools and platforms. So many of these work for startups on a tight marketing budget. I use Hubspot, Hootsuite, Buffer’s online blogs and resources quite a bit; they’ve provided content templates (5 different ways to write a blog post), a content calendar template, a social media audit template and so much more. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel: so much of the toolkit already exists. You just need to think about it in relation to your goals and your company. More resources:

• Zest Chrome plugin
• Moz
• Sprout Social