Six innovative marketing tactics for startups

Word of mouth wins

Word-of-Mouth Marketing is an innovative marketing strategy that relies on customers to promote a product or brand by personally recommending or sharing it with others, both online and offline. These genuine fans of your business and its products can boost awareness of your company and build trust, since recommendations from friends and peers are known to be much more trusted than those from advertising. Examples of this user-generated content include reviews and testimonials by satisfied customers that are shared on social media or review platforms like Trust pilot or Trip Advisor; referral programs that reward customers for bringing in new business; and partnerships with influencers who endorse products to their followers.

However, Four week MBA cautions that with word-of-mouth marketing you must also consider that you’ve limited control over what customers say about you and how they share the information. And it’s a double-edged sword in that negative reviews can also be spread via social media.

Don’t skimp on SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a way optimising your new startup’s online presence so that it appears towards the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO is not something that startups can afford to overlook: according to Brightedge, 53.3% of website traffic comes from organic traffic (web searches) and SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media. What is more, Hubspot research shows that 75% of searchers never go past the first page of search results.

SEO can help drive website traffic to landing pages of your choice, generating new leads, attracting more customers and bringing in revenue. It also improves awareness of your brand and makes your business more credible and trustworthy, boosting your chances of growth.

And it’s cost effective: Terakeet shows that SEO can reduce the cost of attracting new customers by 87.41% on average compared to digital marketing. From creating a user-friendly website to ensuring you have enough backlinks to your content, gravitate design has these useful tips on SEO for startups.

Infographic intrigue

Infographics blend visuals with data representation to simplify complex information and make it easy to digest at a glance. High quality, well-conceived infographics can be a powerful startup marketing tool. They can get your message across to your target audience or target market quickly; after all, the brain processes pictures 64,000 times faster than words. What’s more, our retention of visual information is far better than for text only content. This visual style of content marketing is engaging and eminently shareable, amplifying your new product or service’s reach to new potential customers. And what is more, infographics are a low cost way to improve brand awareness and brand recognition. One study showed that content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without. Because they encourage backlinks and time spent looking at a webpage, they can also boost ranking by search engine algorithms and optimize SEO.

Partnerships with influence

They’re not just a flash in a pan: influencers are here to stay. That’s according to a Sprout Social survey in which over 80% of marketers agreed that influencers are essential to their overall social media marketing plan.

Over the past decade, influencers have expanded from a handful of celebrities endorsing products to a whole galaxy of social media influencers, who build trust with their followers by sharing relatable personal experiences and opinions on social media platforms. They are completely transparent about partnerships with brands and products. Because they only promote those which they genuinely rate, their credibility is further enhanced. What is more, as their content creation (eg podcasts, Instagram reels or thought leadership pieces on LinkedIn) appears to be unscripted it often feels more authentic and spontaneous than traditional marketing.

All of this makes influencers a key part of an effective marketing strategy for startups with a limited marketing budget to reach their ideal customers. But it’s critical to invest time in market research to understand your customer base’s preferences and select the right social media marketing partner for your brand, says Sprout Social, whether that’s a niche micro-influencer or a mega influencer with millions of followers

Google Ads gains

Sometimes there’s no need to reinvent the wheel: older and simpler marketing efforts can be effective for startups too. Writing for Forbes, Sam Kynman-Cole from the digital startup topVIEW, recommends Google Ads as an effective strategy for entrepreneurs launching business-to-business (B2B) startups, but he also says his number one approach is simply calling or emailing potentially interested parties, because the personalised approach can work wonders. He also LinkedIn as a great way to make direct connections with specific people.

Empathic email marketing

We look at our email many times a day on average, and when we do it’s common to be greeted with excessive ‘spamming’ marketing emails which can have the opposite of their desired effect. But a well-executed email marketing campaign can actually deliver a higher return on investment than almost any other marketing channel, if it’s done right: according to Statista, in 2024, email marketing revenue was expected to exceed $9.5 billion. Experts advise starting by creating a quality, targeted email list and coming up with a strategy for engaging your target audience regularly without overwhelming them, and using an email marketing tool. You can also explore email automation features to send messages automatically when customers take specific actions. Automating welcome emails and purchase confirmations streamlines your campaign and boosts efficiency, says Upwork.

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