Establishing a business is relatively simple. Making others recognize and trust it, and eventually purchase from it, is a whole other challenge. Many new entrepreneurs immediately resort to advertisements or social media posts before determining the content of their message or their target audience. This leads to a rapid depletion of the marketing budget. The wiser strategy is to first create your credibility structure, and then direct traffic towards it.
Lock Down Your Brand Identity and Messaging First
First and foremost, you must identify your value proposition. Not a tagline. The real reason a customer would select you rather than an existing competitor. Summarize it in a sentence. If you can’t, you’re not prepared to market.
Next comes brand identity, which includes your visual style, the way you speak, and your messaging on all interactions. They don’t have to be too expensive, but they must be coherent. A prospect who reads your Facebook post, visits your webpage, and receives your marketing should perceive the same brand throughout the journey.
Then, create your buyer personas. Who is facing the challenge you are addressing? What are they looking for? How do they use their time online? Being specific at this point will help you avoid generalized messages.
Start With A Landing Page, Not A Full Website
Starting a business doesn’t necessarily require a detailed website with multiple pages. A new business would benefit more from having a landing page that is optimized for conversions and provides a clear description of their services, target customers, and the subsequent steps.
A landing page focuses on your value proposition and highlights the most important information to your potential customers. A good landing page helps you confirm your product-market fit much quicker than a complete site. Furthermore, it’s easier to experiment with a landing page and make necessary adjustments to identify what works best in terms of generating leads.
Many startup entrepreneurs underestimate the important role user experience plays at this early stage. A landing page with long loading times, poor navigation, and hidden calls-to-action will not deliver any customers, regardless of what your ads are promising. Stay focused, only add what’s necessary, and always guide your users to the next step.
Build A Two-Track Traffic Strategy
Every new business faces this tradeoff: SEO results take months to bear fruit, while with paid traffic you can have leads instantly, but you could burn through your budget with nothing to show for it if you lack experience putting together high-converting ads.
The solution isn’t to pick one and leave the other behind. It’s to iterate along both trajectories at a scale that suits each.
To go the long organic track, you need content that addresses real concerns from your audience. Around 70% of consumers would rather learn about a company through an article rather than an advert. This isn’t an argument against advertising – it’s the reason your content is where your advertising is directed.
To get immediate customers on paid traffic, your choice of channel will determine the cost-effectiveness of starting out as an unknown brand. If you go with display banners, you and your audience have that in common, because they will lose interest in you particularly since they didn’t find it noteworthy to engage with banner ads prominently enough that most of us started using ad-blockers a decade ago. Native ads appear in-stream, feeling part of the content your readers are there to engage with, on the kind of premium publishing sites where native operates.
Build Trust Before You Ask For The Sale
A new brand lacks trust from potential customers since they are unfamiliar with it. This makes it harder to convert visitors into customers. You can use social proof like testimonials or case studies to build that initial trust and credibility. Lead nurturing is important too. Since first-time visitors are less likely to make a purchase immediately, you can use email sequences to keep engaging with them over time. The goal is to provide useful information and keep your brand top of mind with potential customers.
Track From Day One, Not Day Thirty
Prepare an analytics dashboard prior to your launch. Google Analytics 4 is free of charge and provides you with sufficient information to determine where your initial visitors originate from, how long they are staying, and what they are doing before they eventually leave.
During the early stage, the most important factor is the cost of customer acquisition. Be aware of how much you are spending to acquire each customer through every specific channel, and eliminate the expensive ones that are not bringing in the customers. New ventures cannot afford to wait three months to determine if a channel is successful or not.
Use data as a decision-making tool, not a reporting feature. Monitor the data on a weekly basis. Make changes as necessary. The businesses that get their marketing right in the first year are not the ones with the largest budgets, but rather the ones that identified what is effective and started focusing on that early on.
