Design and vision: why your startup needs an online marketing strategy

Any startup that has not embraced the digital revolution will find it increasingly harder to captivate and retain their target audience. In fact, the startups that show the greatest increase in footprint, market share and sales figures are all those that have invested in a carefully conceived online marketing strategy.

It is important to emphasise the need for startups to have a suitable and sustained business branding. If you aren’t good at design, employ the services of design specialists who can immerse themselves in your company vision, and help build your brand.

In an article on the MIT Sloan Management Review, it stated that digital transformation starts with a vision from top leadership — and where senior leaders had shared their vision it had huge buy-in. 93% of employees fully agreed with the statement that digital transformation was the right thing now for their companies to do, and 73% strongly agreed. Communicating your startup’s vision to your staff can align your strategy across structures.

Doing this will ensure that not only management drives this, but concurrently employees will be able to take every chance to promote digital opportunities. This why aligning interests is so pivotal.

If you want to penetrate the marketplace, you shouldn’t underestimate the role of the development of your website, especially when it comes to leads and sales.

While most people can attempt to design their own website, I wouldn’t recommend this. The ability to create a website that converts users into leads will be a major challenge without the right know-how and experience.

There are specific elements that need to be incorporated and utilised in order to achieve optimal results. Firstly the website’s online strategy: Social Media, SEO and PPC, should be able to capture the attention of the visitor. Amateur design, coupled with irrelevant and poorly written copy and strategies, will chase your potential customer away faster than you can press the Esc key.

The content should be aesthetically pleasing yet at the same time relevant. By presenting interesting and visually stimulating content the likelihood of ensuring a lead, which may result in a sale, is considerably increased. Professional website development adheres to Google Quality Guidelines to ensure long-term growth and sustainability of organic traffic to the website. SEO still remains a hot topic, but its implementation is subject to a number of criteria that will provide your startup with search engine advantages in order to drive traffic to the site.

Additionally I would strongly recommend using a responsive web design — one that takes into consideration the optimal viewing and interactive experience of your site. Reading and navigating should be simple, almost natural, plus resizing, planning and scrolling should be minimal, irrelevant of the device used to access the website. Basically the website’s layout and content should be able to easily adapt to its viewing environment, whether that is on mobile, tablet or desktop computer. A responsive website can be viewed and enjoyed by more people, and on more devices so that will significantly influence bounce rate, page views, browse time and conversion in general — it’s all about relevance.

Great functionality, UX, and content are important, but without an online strategy to attain the right leads, there is little hope to achieve measurable results in sales.

By employing a comprehensive online marketing strategy, your website will see an increase in site visitors, unique views, page views and organic growth. In turn this will translate into tangible results such as growth in leads and an increase in sales.

Ultimately, your website and its components should result in an increased number of leads, with a decreased cost per lead. Luckily, these two critical elements can be designed for success.