startup

The Process of Embracing Digital Advertising for Your Startup

There are hordes of digital advertising toolkits, guides, and “secret formulas” available online. And, you have scoured them all in the months leading up to your startup transitioning from a mere blueprint to an active entity.

You know all the marketing concepts on a theoretical level. And, it is now time to manifest the results for your business. But first, take a step back. Before you decide which channels you are going to deploy to rake in the returns, go back to the basics.

Surely, this is the only way to ensure you have picked the right channel(s) for your startup’s digital marketing. Here are four ways to ensure you put the pieces together in the puzzle that is digital advertising.

Set up your buyer persona like you would a dating profile

That is copywriting 101, but hear us out.

When you think about the long journey ahead of you as a startup, the essential steps at the beginning might not get all the attention they need.

A Jenga’s tower will collapse if you pull out the bottom pieces no matter how tall the tower is. Similarly, an advertising strategy will fail no matter what channel you choose if you don’t have the buyer’s persona finalized.

Naturally, your buyer’s persona has to be detailed and holistic. Age group, gender, location, occupation, affluence levels, marital status, income, favourite coffee, favourite sitcom, what do they care about, do they have children. Include all of this, and much more. In fact, buyer persona is the GPS for your journey to reaching the right channel.

Consequently, startups face difficulties in identifying target audiences based on their persona. Indeed, explore ReBid’s suite of products that come equipped with a wide array of targeting options. Specifically, these options allow advertisers to deliver the most relevant and personalized ad content to their potential audiences.

Pros-cons list… Not downloaded from anywhere

You will find a lot of sources listing down and recommending a particular advertising channel based on a pros and cons list. They are a good starting point. But to efficiently identify a viable advertising channel, you need to personalize the pros and cons specific to your business.

A generic list is precisely that – generic. Achieve an accurate and balanced picture of which channel has manageable cons and high-profit benefits. To do this, you must situate the pros and cons within your startup’s context. Moreover, you know best where your target audience hangs out. Those platforms would work best for your business.

Another example – the chief detriment of email marketing is that you will have to build a customer email database over time. However, if your professional experience has allowed you to accumulate a database already, this significant disadvantage goes away.

Therefore, start with a thorough examination of different channels with respect to your business model and buyer persona. Then, create a personalized pros and cons list of each channel.

Track results – from day one

Often, startups end up using many advertising channels without having a way to track the responses across all of them in a holistic manner.

This is where you should consider programmatic in-housing. In-housing will involve you, a startup marketer, early on in the process. It will allow you to tweak your strategies in real-time as per the results of a campaign.

In the advertising world, there are multiple challenges when it comes to identifying which channels would work best for you. The siloed and constantly evolving nature of digital advertising adds to this challenge. We created ReBid Buy, an integrated, all-in-one advertising console for this very purpose. It helps you determine the channels that would give you the best ROI. You will get an across-the-board experience of how your team ideates and executes campaigns. This will help you not just identify the correct channels but also the skill sets that you need to prioritize as you grow your team.

Treat your competitors as case studies

Doing a trial on every channel may not be feasible for you. In such cases, or even as a general practice, try to analyze your direct competitors‘ digital marketing strategies critically.

Gauge how you could improve their campaigns on a particular channel.

Your granular analysis will help you identify which marketing channel worked at what time, in what way, and to what extent.

By doing this, you can skip through some of the common mistakes that your competitors have already made. Consequently, you identify what works. All that is then left is to innovate!

Want more advice?

Between the stage of knowing all the digital advertising channels and pinpointing which channel is the best for your startup lie four techniques, as explained above.

Subscribe to our updates to receive personalized guidance. Allow ReBid to help you discover the best advertising channel for your business.

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