Though I have experience working for startups doing digital marketing to get leads and sales, the problem is always the same. It’s just one single word: “Trust”.
Why is there a problem with trust?
It’s because, when you’re ready to show your product to the world, nobody – literally nobody – knows about your brand.
So, for example, if your startup sells t-shirts, why would I buy a t-shirt from your company? I don’t know your brand. If I buy a t-shirt from your own e-commerce store, how do I know if it’ll arrive at my home? You’re not Amazon.
Those are the questions that so many startups face from their potential customers, and if your startup comes with an iphone app it’s double trouble, because you must convince your customers to download it and make a purchase.
When I started working for the first startup that hired me, I just thought it would be like the TV show “Silicon Valley”. I’d left a good job, with a good monthly income, to have my first experience in a startup.
But reality hit me hard. In a startup, if you don’t sell, then you literally don’t eat, and in my own first month we only made four sales.
How do you start making sales when nobody knows about you?
That is the question I asked myself when the CEO and the co-founder explained that they needed sales to pay the salaries the following month.
I told myself: “Ok, doing search engine optimization will be a long-term process, social media marketing also takes time nonetheless it can help… the one thing I can do is paid advertising, but I need a budget”.
At this point you have to remember this about digital marketing:
In digital marketing you have three options to promote your website, blog or startup:
● Search engine optimization
● Social media marketing
● Paid advertising
Search engine optimization is a long process; it can take months to see organic and natural traffic on your web site or blog, but once you get organic and natural traffic the probability of getting leads or sales are big.
Social media marketing can be a process, because if your web site or blog page is new then nobody will find out about this new site or brand. So, the work here is to opt for the right social media platform to promote your website or blog.
Paid advertising is the quickest way to promote your internet site or weblog because, for example, if you run a campaign to get leads on Facebook you then will get leads during that campaign, but after the campaign is over, you won’t get any leads.
So the ideal way to promote your web site or blog page is a mix of these three strategies.
Trust = Sales
If people trust you, you’ll get sales. That is what I learned within my experience working for startups.
It’s because, if your brand is new, persons will have doubts about your product, your services, and about everything.
My recommendation is to work on a social media plan with the goal of building rapport and trust.
I know that you want sales. That will take time, but you can run an advertising campaign on social media, though that campaign needs the enforcement of a social media plan.
Everything takes time, whether or not you work in a startup where everything goes at an easy pace.