Explaining bits and bytes of startups and entrepreneurship.
Category: Marketing & Branding
Marketing & Branding: Get the latest news and updates on Marketing & Branding campaigns, along with relevant information and material on Marketing & Branding. Explaining bits and bytes of business, startups and entrepreneurship.
When search engines like Google and Bing first appeared, marketers might not have thought about what they could do for companies trying to become more prominent.
When search engines like Google and Bing first appeared, marketers might not have thought about what they could do for companies trying to become more prominent. However, as time passed, and SEO entered the picture more, it became obvious that using search engines for advertising was a viable option. Google and Bing were two of the ones that rose to prominence, and their importance continues to this day.
If you’re the owner or operator of a business, and you reach out to a marketing strategy agency about how to get your company, products, or services noticed, it is likely they will bring up the notion of PPC ads. They may also talk about using Google or Bing to your advantage, since these are logical places to place those ads where potential customers might see them.
However, which one makes more sense for marketers to use? There are positives and negatives that go along with each one, and we’ll take a moment to discuss them now.
The Best Aspects of Google
Probably the best thing about the Google search engine that has risen to dominate the market over the past two-plus decades is how many people use it. It would not be hyperbole to say that billions of people use Google every day. It’s easy for marketers and business owners alike to understand how getting access to that large of a potential customer base can benefit a company looking to become more prominent.
Google ads also present a wide range of options. The ads are highly customizable. They can be targeted toward specific audience segments. Your ad might only appear if someone types in a particular keyword string in a specific geographic region if that is the way you have set up your ad campaign.
The Best Aspects of Bing
Bing is probably more cost-effective than Google because it does not have as large of a market share. If you have a smaller business and a limited ad budget for it, it makes sense to consider Bing over Google because of the lower price tag.
If you are targeting an affluent or older demographic, Bing is also probably a good place to focus. Bing, which is Microsoft-based, appeals to a more targeted audience. However, it is usually one that is better positioned in terms of their spending potential.
If you are running a B2B business, you might also feel like Bing is the superior option to Google. That is because of LinkedIn targeting that comes with Bing ads. The connection of Bing and LinkedIn won’t be helpful for certain demographics, but if you are running a B2B business, this might be a feature that makes it more attractive.
Drawbacks of Using Google
Probably the main drawback of using Google ads if you’re running a major marketing campaign is that the ads, on the whole, cost more. It’s possible the price may work for you if you have a larger ad budget, but if you have a smaller one, using Google may be an impossibility.
That is particularly the case if you are attempting to market some products or services in a highly competitive niche. The more competitive the industry in which you are operating, the less likely you will be able to afford Google ads, especially if you are running a startup company and only have a shoestring ad budget.
The other drawback of using Google is that they have somewhat stricter ad policies than Bing, which could be considered more permissive. With Google ads, you can’t promote products that are in any way related to politics, healthcare, gambling, alcohol, or anything that falls into several additional categories.
Also, there are not as many demographics that it makes sense to try and target with Bing because those who use the platform are typically younger. It also is not usually as wise to use Bing if you are trying to get the attention of individual consumers vs businesses that might have need of your products or services.
Which One Should Your Company Use?
If it comes to deciding between Google and Bing, there are a few questions that business owners and the marketing departments or agencies that work for them need to ask. The first and most important thing to determine is how much money you have to spend.
If you have a very limited budget, but you still feel like pay-per-click advertising is a smart way to go, then you may have to use Bing because you can’t afford to use Google. If you have more money to spend, then Google becomes a viable possibility.
Still, you must remember that if you are trying to make some headway in a niche or industry where competition is fierce, ads are going to be more expensive. Ads on Google will likely not cost as much if you work in an industry that is not as popular or where you do not have as many direct competitors.
If your company is working in the B2B space, then Bing will likely be a more attractive prospect. However, whether you choose to use Bing or Google, you’ll want to do some research beforehand.
The best marketing agencies or individuals that you hire in the freelance market should know all about the industry in which they are creating and placing ads on search engines. If someone works in marketing but does not know very much about ad creation for a particular niche, they will not be the best choice because they lack the hands-on experience that is so crucial in the advertising space.
Remember, though, that there are always many other ways to market your company or products if you determine that Google or Bing ads are not the optimal way to go.
Influencer marketing for startups can help you enhance your business reach and connect with your potential customers. Ready to leverage influencer marketing for your startup?
Being a startup business, your current focus with marketing goals should be getting your name out there and being noticed by the right people. But, due to the limitations of the budget, you are unable to fulfill your goals.
If you are in the same situation, then Influencer marketing being a highly-efficient and cost-effective marketing method is the perfect opportunity for you.
Influencer marketing for startups can help you enhance your business reach and connect with your potential customers.
Ready to leverage influencer marketing for your startup?
We will discuss everything about it in this blog. Before that let’s take a look at the different types of influencer marketing collaborations you can explore for your startup growth.
Types of Influencer Marketing Collaborations To Deal With
It’s better to understand what are the possible methods for an influencer marketing collaboration for your startup on the basis of your requirements. Here are the different types of collaborations you can deal with.
Sponsored Collabs
The oldest and most effective way to carry forward an influencer marketing campaign for your startup is by doing sponsored collaborations. Under this type of collaboration, you can share a photo, video, or reel created by the influencer, where the influencer is responsible for promoting your offer or products in a natural way so that the customers don’t feel like the influencer is selling something.
A study by Influencer Marketing Hub stated that micro-influencers are playing an exceptional role for startups and businesses. Even though their followers are fewer than macro or mega influencers, the micro-influencers audience is more engaged and action-taking.
Affiliate Link Strategy
Startups can also develop a unique affiliate link for various influencers, which the influencers can promote using their channels. This directly helps the startup in enhancing its reach and sales. Affiliate links can be helpful for influencers as well, as they can get around 10-15% of every sale made through their unique affiliate link.
Giveaways
You can collaborate with influencers to give a giveaway to his/her audience. By developing a giveaway-based influencer marketing program, you can easily create a buzz around your startup’s name.
You can also develop a 2-3 step content for the audience, which the audience would have to fulfill to take part in the giveaway.
Brand Ambassadors
If you are looking for long-term influencer partnerships, who can help you create your regular social media content, then Brand Ambassador based campaigns are the perfect option for you.
A number of businesses create macro and micro-influencers as their brand ambassadors which enhances their reach and generates sales. If you are unaware of the right ways to leverage influencer marketing for your startup, then make sure to follow the upcoming section.
Effective Ways To Leverage Influencer Marketing For Startups
Year
Number of Users in Billions
2019
3.4
2020
3.6
2021
3.78
2022
3.96
2023
4.12
2024
4.27
2025
4.41
More than 90% of marketers suggest investing in influencer marketing and that’s because they understand the potential influencer marketing holds.
Currently, there are more than 3.5 billion active users of social media platforms and by investing in influencer marketing for your startup, you can tap into them easily.
Let’s understand the ways that can help you leverage influencer marketing for your startup.
1- Search For The Right Influencer:
The first step in building an influencer marketing campaign for your startup is to search for the right influencer for your brand. Finding influencers manually is the perfect way to do so. As it gives you a better idea about their engagement rate, the audience following them, how effective their previous influencer marketing campaigns were, and many more.
Working with the right influencer is a key factor behind the success of your campaigns. The influencers who are relevant, highly engaging, authentic, and resonate with your brand values can contribute exceptionally to your influencer marketing campaign.
Factors to consider when selecting influencers for your startup are as follows:
Audience:
The major reason behind selecting the right influencer is that you are able to reach your target audience. Hence, it’s important to work with influencers that have a relevant audience for your startup.You can take advantage of the audience demographics feature offered by influencer marketing platforms and tools to identify which influencer has an audience from your target location, age, and gender.
Engagement Rate:
Engagement rate is one such metric that shows how well the audience responds to the influencer’s content. To check out the engagement rate on a post of an influencer, you can add likes and comments on a post of the influencer, divide the total by the number of followers the influencer has, and multiply the final result by 100.
You can also use tools to find out the engagement rate of influencers online.
Relevance:
Make sure to work with influencers who are a good fit for your startup. For example: If you are a real estate startup, you would not want to collaborate with influencers from the food blogging industry.
By collaborating with relevant influencers for sponsored posts, you will have an enhanced ROI.
Content Quality:
By working with an influencer you give them complete freedom to create the best possible content for your sponsored posts. Hence, the content quality of the influencers will be representing your startup.
That’s why select influencers create high-quality content that is a perfect fit for your brand image.
Frequency of Content:
When you are looking for the right influencers it’s important for you to keep an eye on how often the influencers publish content. Select influencers who post their content with a perfect balance between normal and sponsored posts.
You should also check out the comment section of the sponsored posts of influencers. If there are negative comments it means the influencer must be promoting a lot of brands/products.
Values:
More than 60% of consumers trust influencer recommendations, you just need to check if the values of your brand resonate with the influencer. To learn more about an influencer’s values, you should check out their bio, post captions, and stories as well.
By having a look at these factors you can get a good enough idea about their likes and dislikes. This evaluation process would be highly effective for you to select an influencer with the right values for your startup.
2- Work on Creative Ideas
One factor to integrate into influencer marketing campaigns for your startup is “Creativity” as it will help you in attracting the attention of your target audience. Your campaign should be both informative and entertaining to create a buzz.
Make your influencers understand everything about your startup and the goals you have in your mind regarding the campaign. Along with that, you should also provide influencers the freedom to work on creative ideas, as they know their audience better than you.
You can offer suggestions to the influencers around the content for a better output.
3- Set SMART Goals
The SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) foundation works effectively for startups and business growth. If you are able to understand the framework of setting SMART goals, then there are high chances of your campaign succeeding.
For an influencer marketing campaign, it’s important to set SMART goals before launching. Startups should have a clear idea about what they want to achieve.
Some common goals startups should consider for their next influencer marketing campaign:
Enhance brand awareness
Fetch more followers
Build a loyal community
Generate more leads
There are a lot of startups that create unrealistic goals and they are never able to achieve even 1% of them.
Hence, by setting SMART goals, you can push yourself further, give yourself a sense of direction, and help you achieve your goals effectively.
4- Focus on Micro-influencers from your niche
In a Linqia Survey, it was found that more than 89% of marketers prefer working with micro-influencers because they have a better grip on their audience and their audience is more action-taking.
Hence, you can expect a better ROI by finding micro-influencers from your niche. Startups and micro-influencers are the perfect combinations, these influencers build personal connections with their audience, which can lead to a better impact.
Some benefits of using micro-influencers from your niche are:
Higher Authenticity:
If you have a look at the journey of most of the micro-influencers, you’ll come across they have built their following from scratch by focusing more on their content quality and relation-building with their audience.
Although they have few followers, those followers listen to the influencer, which can directly enhance your campaign’s ROI by dealing with such influencers.
Cost-Effective:
When you have a look at the per-post pricing of macro or mega influencers, they charge thousands of dollars. On the other hand, micro-influencers charge between $150 to $550 for a single influencer marketing campaign, which can help startups save a lot of money.
Better Conversion Rate:
Whenever micro-influencers say something about a startup or a brand they are heard by their audience and their opinion plays an important role in the life of their audience, which later can help in generating better conversion rates.
5- Barter Collabs
Influencer marketing for startups can be a challenging task, firstly because it’s a bit difficult for you to choose the right influencer, and secondly, most influencers charge a lot of money for sponsor posts.
Hence, to solve this issue you can move forward with influencers who are ready to work with your startup for free products or services from your end.
This type of influencer collaboration is called the Barter Collaboration. In this way, you create a win-win situation for both the startup and the influencer.
We hope these tips must have given you an amazing idea about how to leverage influencer marketing for startups.
6- Content & CTAs
Another important and effective way to leverage influencer marketing for your startup is by focusing on the content and CTAs that are going to be in the sponsored post.
Although you can offer complete creative freedom to the influencer, to make the content more effective and to the point you can integrate the best copywriting tips and work on the intent of your content.
Top Influencer Marketing Trends To Follow in 2023
In 2021, more than $3.6 billion dollars were spent on influencer marketing in the US and these stats are increasing exceptionally with every passing year. Till now we have discussed how we can leverage influencer marketing effectively for startups.
Another way to leverage influencer marketing is by focusing on the top influencer marketing trends.
Some of those trends are as follows:
Brand Leveraging Micro-Influencers The Most
Micro-influencers are social media personalities or accounts with followers ranging between 10,000 to 1,00,000. Launchmetrics found out that micro-influencers have the higher Media Impact Value (MIV).No matter if these influencers have a lesser following, their audience engagement is higher, even better than a few celebrities or mega influencers.
Repurposing Influencer Marketing Content on Social Media
Another trend that is being followed by brands is to repurpose influencer marketing content for different social media platforms. In this way, brands are able to carry forward cross-platform promotions without spending any extra money.
Most brands will be opting for influencers who can use storytelling marketing strategy for promotions of startups/brands, and later the companies can repurpose their content on various platforms.
More Video Content Will Be Pushed
It has been noticed that video content is loved by the audience, as it is easy to understand, and that’s why most social media platforms are pushing video content over static posts.VideoWise did a study and concluded that brands/startups were able to add 999+ hours on time site per month just by adding influencer videos to the product pages.
Final Words
Startups have a lot of issues to tackle on a daily basis and a limited marketing budget is one of them. By leveraging influencer marketing effectively for your startup you can overcome marketing limitations and achieve your goals of better brand visibility and higher conversions.
Jessica Robinson loves to write interesting and knowledgeable blogs regarding business management, education and life to satiate the curiosity of her lovely readers. Currently, she is serving as a content manager at the ‘Speaking Polymath’. Every piece of content that she writes demonstrates her immense love and passion for her profession.
Digital marketing has become an integral component of an effective marketing mix. There have been a lot of digital agencies popping up seemingly out of nowhere.
Find Your Niche
Digital marketing has become an integral component of an effective marketing mix. Because of this, there have been a lot of digital agencies popping up seemingly out of nowhere. This is why it’s so important to make your agency stand out amongst the competition. How do you achieve this? The key is specialization. By specializing in a niche, you can present your agency as an authority in it.
A lot of times, you can increase the attractiveness of your digital marketing agency to customers within your niche. After all, if you specialize in e-commerce businesses, your agency is going to be a lot more attractive and desirable to an e-commerce company than a digital agency that doesn’t have nearly as much experience working within the industry. While you want to niche down, you don’t want to get so niche that you run out of customers. You need to ensure that your niche is broad enough to support your business. Try to come up with a unique value proposition that helps to distinguish your agency from other agencies in the industry.
Figure Out Your Client’s Pain Points
This is the key to selling anything. If you want to sell your agency’s services, you need to figure out and address your client’s pain points. How do you figure out what their pain point is? The key is by talking to them. You need to be actively talking to your customers and listening to what they say. You will find different industries will have different pain points, for example trading online can be fraught with difficulties see here. You need to figure them out and get to know them to know how to effectively address them.
This requires a lot of research on your behalf. It will take a lot of time too. However, once you become an expert in a niche, you can much more easily identify the pain points of your target customers. After all, if you’ve niched down to a specific target market, they generally have the same pain points.
Come Up With Entry Level Positions
When you get into the process of scaling your business, you’ll need to have a reliable and repeatable system for getting new employees into the mix. You need to get a steady influx of quality entry-level employees. To do this, come up with hiring processes. You want to have systems in place to ensure that you are choosing the right people for the job and integrating them into the workflow seamlessly.
Here are some tips:
– Don’t Make Qualifications Too Strict
One of the main things you need to do is not over-qualify your entry-level employees. A lot of these employees will be very capable of learning things quickly. Because of this, you don’t want to require them to have too much experience. Otherwise, you risk pushing away excellent candidates for the job.
– Ensure Rapid Adaption
When you are hiring entry-level employees, you need to keep an eye on them. You want them to be able to effectively adapt as quickly as possible. The digital marketing industry is so dynamic. Constant changes are happening within it. You need your team to be able to keep up with all of the changes.
Here are some examples of entry-level positions at a digital marketing agency:
– Account Coordinator
– Social media Coordinator
– Marketing Coordinator
– Project Coordinator
With the right hires among your entry-level workforce, you can ensure that you get hard-working individuals that can move up the ladder within your company providing you with a steady influx of talent.
Increase Prices
If you will be running your business and looking to scale it, you will want to ensure that you continue to drive more and more profits. Because you will be increasing hiring and other expenses in your company, you need the profits to increase to offset the increase in spending. The best way to do this is by decreasing your outgoings with surplus.net and increasing your prices. This can be a difficult thing to do. After all, a client isn’t going to be happy with having to pay more for something they got lower previously.
It’s undoubtedly the case that you will lose some clients to this transition. However, you will also get a lot of clients to stay who will be willing and able to pay the higher prices. This means you can pull in more per client which should help you better support your growing business.
Optimize Your Agency’s Operating System
You need to ensure that the entire business is running smoothly from top to bottom. Everything needs to be firing on all cylinders. To achieve the kind of growth you are looking for from your agency, you want everything to be running smoothly. This includes digital marketing agencies. You might be wondering what’s the very first step to getting your business running smoothly. Having a clear and concise layout of your entire organizations operating system is the start.
You need to know what your business entails. What are you doing for lead gen? What are you going to onboard new clients? What are you doing to deliver the final product? Once you’ve established the systems, you can better organize things and create an assembly line of sorts that can have everything running as smoothly as butter.
Here is an example of Agency to Client Process From DoInBound
You can leverage this overview to evaluate how effective your business’ flow is and whether or not it needs any changes. You want to continually reassess your business processes as needed to ensure everything is flowing seamlessly.
Leverage Facebook Marketing
Facebook is a platform that is excellent for all kinds of businesses. It features a range of different users. Because of this, your clients are likely already on it. Facebook advertising can be a major asset to your business. You can leverage Facebook advertising in your marketing processes. They offer cost-effective advertising which makes them a good option for digital agencies.
By leveraging the power of Facebook ads and messenger bots, you can effectively advertise your digital marketing agency to ensure that you are constantly feeding new leads into your marketing funnel.
Design a Lead Magnet
You need to have a lead agent designed for your website. Even if you run advertisements or drive people to your site, it’s not necessarily certain that they are going to turn into a client or customers. A lot of clients will end up at your site and bounce off. They are just shopping around. You need to ensure that you are offering them value. A lot of clients won’t exchange their email or phone number just because. Building out a lead magnet is one of the best ways to ensure that you are getting their contact information to put them in your lead funnel. Offering a value-packed e-book can be a great way to do this. Try to make signing up for your lead magnet as easy as possible.
Our very own captain cool MS Dhoni along with Oreo, in the most brilliant sense is bringing back 2011 again.
What if I told you that you could bring time back again? Had I been you, my answer to you would be I don’t have Harry Potter’s Time Turner with me. However, Oreo promises to bring you back to 2011 without any magic and that too with the help of MS Dhoni.
Our very own captain cool MS Dhoni along with Oreo, in the most brilliant sense is bringing back 2011 again. Why you’d ask? Well, his logic is as simple as it can get, India won the cup in 2011, and Oreo launched in 2011.
What Oreo has done here is initiated a campaign where they’re relaunching Oreo again, so that India can win the cup again. India when it comes to cricket is extremely superstitious, Oreo is playing with the same mindset and has created a masterstroke in terms of a campaign where they’re bringing back the same things that happened in 2011 to 2022.
And the advertisement also has an interesting take wherein MS Dhoni is shown sitting in a press conference, wearing the same hairstyle that he had sported in the year 2011. It is MS Dhoni who explains what the Oreo Bring Back 2011 is all about and since there is a World Cup again this year, he is launching the brand once again.
The video uploaded on YouTube has so far garnered about 52 lakh views. Users are asked to upload their pictures with hairstyles, tees and shoes using the hashtag #BRINGBACK2011 on Instagram tagging Oreo India’s handle.
What makes the campaign a hit? Well, what wouldn’t? There is the World Cup 2011 mention, there is MS Dhoni and of course there is Oreo.
