How digital marketing can fuel a Startup to achieve uncommon success?

It is a pertinent question on how to leverage digital marketing for the startup ecosystem's success. Subhag Kirankumar from Hiveminds shares some thoughts on the topic.

Every startup is the founder’s baby and the proudest moment for the founder is when the project starts taking its baby steps. However, startups tend to face difficult challenges in making a name for themselves as they are competing against already established businesses in the market.

Nowadays, consumers prefer a digital approach which allows them a research and shop option. Everything is pretty much online and businesses need to be present where their audiences are.

Digital marketing, being a fairly cost-effective approach than traditional marketing has become the most popular method for businesses to promote themselves, their offers, products, and services. One thing that’s true for startups and something we can even safely say, is that no business can succeed in the online market without digital marketing. Startups need an effective digital marketing strategy that can help them counter a highly competitive and crowded market. 

What is digital marketing?

Wikipedia defines it as the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, primarily on the Internet. However, mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium are also regarded as tools of digital marketing. Briefly, digital marketing offers the following benefits over traditional marketing tools.

Also read: Moment Marketing – is the wave really delivering?

Benefits

Most of the business industries have now become extremely fast-paced and influential, and when startups enter this space, they need to take measures on establishing their brand name with a robust digital marketing strategy. As such, brands are now using a multi-faceted approach to marketing.

Since consumers now spend the majority of their time online, we can define Digital marketing by the use of various digital tactics and channels to connect with them.

Furthermore, digital marketing also provides marketers with accurate results on a real-time basis helping you measure ROI of your digital marketing efforts. 

There is a wide spectrum of tactics ranging from the website itself to branding assets such as Facebook marketing, paid marketing, email marketing, influencer marketing, etc. As a digital marketing manager, having a clear picture of how to reach out to consumers, what channels to use, what are the measurable KPIs, etc will allow you to build a marketing strategy and execute campaigns to achieve your overarching business goals. 

In Social Media, for instance, you can run campaigns to increase your follower base and then post blog articles or make the best usage of user-generated content to promote your brand.

To give a clearer picture of how - let us elaborate on one such instance of Nap Nap Mat’s #FirstCupOfMotherhood Campaign. This in-house campaign was run a week before Mothers’ day where Nap Nap Mat, a brand that sells baby products, posted a series of posts with a respective 'firsts' and turned it into a contest.

They started by posting a series of these ‘first’ such as the baby's first smile, first crawl, first finger hold and so on. Later, they asked their followers to do the same by using the hashtag #FirstCupOfMotherHood.

This emotional campaign single-handedly brought the brand contest entries of over 600, the organic reach of 1.5 lakh and a tremendous engagement of over 20K.

Another example of a highly successful social media campaign that gave proper returns of digital spends to its brand is RAW Pressery’s “Eat Clean Stay Lean”. This cold-pressed juice brand leveraged on a single primary aspect of digital marketing i.e. influencer campaigning and collaborated with famous fitness influencers to promote a healthy lifestyle amongst the youth.

The brand here asked these influencers to take up a detox challenge and stay away from unhealthy eating habits. In the end, it garnered them 10K followers with over 5M Impressions.

Next, as a paid media marketer you can run advertisements targeting customers either when they are explicitly looking for your products or in a pull strategy, show them advertisements when they are browsing the net searching for information.

As an email marketer, you can also create an email campaign to send them more information on the company. As a content marketer, you can create engaging content for awareness, lead generation, etc. through blog articles, infographics, ebooks, and many other mediums.

Let us look at a few brands that have achieved success by using a spectrum of tactics under the umbrella “digital marketing”. 

Multiple Indian brands have leveraged digital marketing to scale their businesses such as PayTm, Redbus, Portea and more. Cure Fit, a brand in the health and fitness industry which provides an end-to-end health and fitness app for your wellness.

Cure Fit uses the location data to showcase the closest fitness center and workout classes that customers can attend in your neighborhood. CureFit’s marketing strategy is an exemplary example of how as a startup, brands can leverage digital marketing to increase conversion rates and reach.

The current scenario

Online channel sales through Flipkart and Amazon are also complimented by Digital marketing as it allows marketers to use rich media content to engage with audiences, giving them better visibility of the product and its capabilities. This is another crucial channel as video and rich media content are now increasingly becoming the main forms of content.

All this is further evident from the data on advertising spends which is expected to jump by 46% by 2021 with the Digital Spends expected to grow 2x in the next 3 years.

As the country is now driven by cheaper data prices and affordable smartphones, the digital advertising industry in India is expected to grow at a rate of 32% to reach Rs.14,281 CR in 2019.

Digital transformation is being adopted at a tremendous scale, which in turn, will increase the adoption of digital media at a rapid pace. At the end of the day, it’s not about selling a product and rather about creating an experience for the customers. Hence, it is now crucial for digital marketers to understand what is important for consumers, what would drive action for these customers and eventually for the business. 

The only question you need to ask yourself is: Is your business Digital Ready?

Authored by Subhag Kirankumar, Digital Marketing Delivery Unit Head, HiveMinds.