Social Media Marketing For Startups: A Beginner’s Guide

A startup is like a baby that needs constant care to flourish. Out of all the crucial aspects of building a startup, marketing plays a critical role in its success.

You must be thinking of how and why?

Well, if people are not aware of your existence, then how will your startup grow.

Marketing helps you bring out your business in front of the world. As per stats, 56.9% of the startups have their dedicated marketing teams. At the same time, the most commonly used way of marketing is through social media.

These numbers are enough to prove that marketing, especially social media marketing, can take your startup to the zenith if done properly. Moreover, various new trends have emerged to make your SMM campaign much better.

In the succeeding sections, we will discuss how to market your startup using the latest trends. So, let’s just dive in!!

Without any additional jibber-jabber, here are some points that are worth noticing:

So, why are we discussing these random stats out of nowhere? Well, these stats paint a clear picture that social media is an awesome way to get your sales and revenue sky high.

Brand awareness

Brand awareness is the number one factor that governs the importance of social media marketing. Many brands around the world rely solely on Social media channels like Facebook and Instagram to market their business. For example, Audi Canada saw an 8.5-point lift in ad recall after running a Facebook ad campaign in 2018.

Other than this, 44% of local businesses say that they rely on social media for brand awareness. So, to put it plainly, social media channels are accessed every day by billions of users across the globe. Thus, making them a hotspot for marketing your business.

Direct communication

Communication is the key to every relationship, and it works best in the case of consumers and suppliers. With the help of social media, one can diminish the middle man. Thus, brands can interact directly with their customers.

These days Google comes after the social networks for communication for the customers. As per smart insights, 90% of customers have used social media channels to communicate with the brand. Moreover, 63% of users expect that brands should provide customer service via social networks.

Hence, along with building brand value, you must harness social media to gather customer feedback and resolve customer issues.

High traffic at a low price

As you are a startup right now, it can become a bit critical to saving cost while planning your marketing strategy. And as all the other media are going to cost you more for marketing your business, Social media is the best option for you. Why?

It is highly cost-effective. However, social media channels like Facebook and Instagram charge for the marketing campaign. The good thing is that one can decide his or her budget. Moreover, other than paid campaigns, if you take an organic approach, it will save you even more money.

If you plan and produce your content correctly, marketing on social media can bring you a higher return on investments. It will attract the audience that is most likely to convert into customers. Make sure that you create and include awesome visual content as it is most likely to get the user’s attention.

All these reasons sum up the importance of social media marketing for startups.

Well, SMM is not like just creating an ad on Facebook and BOOM! You are on the top, no! 

There are multiple attributes that you need to carefully analyze before going for the marketing streak. So, here are some of those factors:

ICP (Ideal customer profile)

When you go on a social network, there are many types of users on it. General users, businesses, etc. Just like their distribution category, they are also different in the case of the content targeted to them. All of them will not be interested in your startup with just one type of content.

Hence, it is necessary to check various attributes. After you have an insight into the customer’s behavior, you can get a better understanding of:

• The type of content that needs to be developed
• The segment of the audience to target
• The specific location

And others, then only you will be able to formulate a strategy for Social media marketing.

Moreover, you need to list the customers and firms based on your ICP, research about the common links between the customers, and filter out key people that you need to target.

Core values

The second in line aspect that you need to be sure about before you begin social media marketing is the core values of the campaign. This should include everything that you need from your SMM campaign.

Some firms create online pages on Facebook to gather feedback for their products. This helps them understand the demand and market of the product clearly, thus helps them visualize their goal. Based on this, they set future goals that they need to achieve.

After all, if you will be clear about your expectations, whether it is boosting app installs, raising user awareness, generating leads, etc. Hence, you will be able to plan your SMM campaign easily.

Think through customer preferences on groups and communities

Well, as teased above in the ICP part of social media strategy for startups, this factor will benefit you a lot, provided you have done your homework. While recognizing the ICP for your SMM campaign, it is necessary to research individual users, local and foreign communities, and groups that are most likely to convert into customers.

You have the liberty to find Facebook groups, LinkedIn communities, Growth hacker website, Indie hacker website, Hackernoon, Slack, and many others. It is necessary to discover these communities to grow your brand as they are the primary hotspots for your business success.

One crucial thing that you need to make sure of is the activity level of the communities. There will be no benefit in targeting groups that have no posts and pictures.

So, as we are well versed with the concept of finding groups and communities on social networks, it is time to check what channels can be leveraged.

Decide the channels

There are various social media channels that you can leverage. The point that will help you decide is the niche of your startup. For example, if you have an educational startup, you can go for LinkedIn ads specifically, or even Facebook ads. As per Statista, 29.4% of Facebook users are between the age group of 13-24 years of age. So, Facebook can be one of the prime channels for marketing your startup.

Other than this, if you are a recruitment startup, choosing LinkedIn will be like hitting the bull’s eye for you. LinkedIn is a professional platform that has over 722 million users and will serve great for getting quality leads.

Facebook, with monthly active users of over 2.45 billion, is ideal for almost all sorts of businesses. Here are some of the best examples of it:

• Swiggy, an Indian food delivery startup, reached 16.8 million people and saw an ad recall of 3.3 points via its Facebook ad campaign.
• Invstr, an investing app, received a 2.8X boost in registrations and a 2.5X boost in app installs.

Apart from this, many other classic examples prove the dominance of social media in marketing.

To make your marketing campaign more attractive and interactive, you can leverage the latest trends like:

• AR (Augmented reality) in Facebook stories, Instagram, and Snapchat stories.
• Direct shoppable ads.
• Influencer marketing: Hire a person who has a high following on social networks.
• Chatbots: Let users interact with chatbots for their issues and concerns. This will help handle user complaints after regular working hours.
• Lead magnets: free webinars, free whitepapers, free templates, and other free and useful sorts of content.

And others!

Focus organic growth of the brand

Now, SMM is not just about running high-quality ads on Facebook and Instagram. You need to do a lot more to make people aware of your startup. For example, if you have noticed that many brands interact with their audience via Facebook posts. Like, people tell their problems in the comments, and the concerned person responds.

As 80% of people use social media to communicate with the brand, it becomes necessary for you to use them. Moreover, once you are aware of the customer’s issues via social media, you can create content like a blog post or a video highlighting their issues and their respective solution. You can share this content with the targeted groups, pages, and communities.

This method of interacting with your target audience will help in the organic growth of your startup. Plus, it will also help in attracting quality traffic to your business website.

For example, let’s say you promote a new platform for marketers. Then, you need to research Facebook communities using keywords like “digital marketing”, “SEO marketing”, “Social media marketing”, “B2B marketing” and so on.

Then, you need to check if this group is alive: how often there are publications, how many likes and comments they collect, and so on.

Then all you need to do is create a relevant post, you wanted to write about. You check the reaction of the community. Important note – you need to answer each commentary.

Then take your time, write a post.

And aha-moment is here: make a post with your post, and mention people that commented on your previous discussion.

It saves you from being moderated, and boosts engagement as well as driving first free traffic.

Toolkits for social media marketing

Well, as your business will grow with time, it will become necessary for you to keep your social media channel updated after regular working hours. And working out of your time zone can affect your body as well as your mind. 

So, here arises the need to use some tools to automate the process of posting the marketing content timely.

There are various tools on the web that you can use:

SocialPilot: This is an awesome tool that can be used to schedule social media content, analyze the results of the campaign, and create Facebook ads for multiple accounts. With this tool, you can also reply to comments and messages on Facebook. One can also collaborate with their team using SocialPilot.

CRM integration: A CRM software expanded as a Customer Relationship Management software is useful in maintaining coordinated communication with the customers. The tool features aspects like customer interactions, a track record of sales, and collaboration with your team. The tool is the best for B2B communication and management.

Lempod: As per the general definition, Lempod is a chrome extension that helps in enhancing LinkedIn engagement. With Lempod, you can find out groups and communities on LinkedIn that will support your curated contempt. You can filter those groups by using a location filter or based on the industry. The tool will help you foster likes and comments on your post. It will also enhance the visibility of the campaign.

Now, as you know the what and how of social media marketing, you will be able to design and run a highly productive SMM campaign. But, if you want to strengthen it further, you can club with other marketing techniques. Here are some of the activities that you can undertake along with SMM to power up your marketing process:

Retargeting: This is the phase that comes after you have attracted enough traffic to your website via your regular ads. Statistics suggest that the average click-through rate (CTR) of retargeting ads is ten times more than the regular ads. Hence, make sure you focus on this too.

Email marketing: The process of pitching potential clients with your products and services advertisements via mail is known as email marketing. You can implement this besides your campaign as the market is expected to go up to $9 billion by 2027.

SEO: As mentioned above in the reasons to choose SMM, SEO plays an important role while creating content for your marketing campaign. Embedding the right keywords and phrases in your content helps in boosting your site’s rank in Google search results, thus, making your site easy to find.

Final advice

I hope this guide was useful to you. The key is to find a recipe, that would work for your niche. Additionally, generate hypotheses, test social media performance, measure ROI. And again!

To make your work easy, make sure to check some of the best social media scheduling tools in the market.