Digital Marketing Strategy For Global Product Startups

A Product, no matter how good, will succeed without great marketing. Great product companies like Druva, Freshdesk and Zoho have also been great at marketing. This post will leverage my experience of growing a $1,000,000 business with $1 investment and highlight global online digital marketing strategies that work effectively within the budget constraints of early stage startups. We will focus on the following stages of the buying cycle:

• Awareness (Not Relevant)

• Consideration (Focus)

• Decision (Focus)

At consideration stage customer is looking for the right solution and company, 72% of the customers start their search in Google. There are 2 ways to be visible on google; SEO and Adwords. Its inbound way of generating leads which is your 1st option, and 2nd is hunting where you can select your prospects which is not the case in latter. So let’s start looking at the 2 options in detail below:

Inbound Lead Generation

The first step is searching for the right keywords, you can start with Google Keyword Planner. We can use tools like Spyfu and Semrush to look for competitors keywords and Google Trends tool which gives you keywords which are rising or are in top searches, with regions where you should target specifically.

Take the final keyword list and design the campaign using one keyword per Adgroup strategy with 3 variations modified broad, phrase and exact type. Using this strategy you will see 3X savings from the day 1 of your campaign. Also keep landing pages relevant for each adgroup to ensure higher quality score which ensures minimum spent. You can use Unbounce to design your landing pages, also use tracking URL’s and hidden fields in the form to capture important information like keywords etc. relevant for your business. Before launching the campaign add negative keywords to respective Adgroups and campaigns to ensure maximum ROI. Keep optimising the campaigns by regularly adding negative keywords and making single keyword adgroups from search terms that have shown conversions. For large campaigns use tools like wordstream to automate the process.

Simultaneously design the remarketing campaigns for Google Display and Facebook-Youtube Video for brand recall as it affects overall conversions and its 22% cheaper that the average cost per click. Now after 3-6 months of concrete data from adwords you will exactly know which keywords are giving you business conversions. You can use those keywords to optimize your landing pages to rank in the search engines organically.

Outbound Lead Generation

Firstly we need to nail down our customer personas, which means defining the demographics of our target audience specifically:

• Industry

• Geography

• Company Headcount

• Function

• Seniority Level

We’ll need to 2 tools to start the process of making database Linkedin Sales Navigator & any email finder tool that works for you. Once the database is made, please verify the emails through tools like leadwash oruse this method from Hubspot. Design the 4 set of emails including an intro mail describing your services with USP’s, and then 3 follow up emails.

You will need 2 more tools namely Gmail Account for Business or Personal & Gmass for drip emails. Connect your Gmail account with Gmass and upload your mails with unsubscribe option. Schedule it over the period of 20 days following 3-12-5 rule or whatever works. As per our experience you should see 1-3% response rate depending on your quality of database and industry.

With these 2 techniques of lead generation Inbound Marketing and Hunting you will be able to grow your business with minimum investment. If you aggressively implement these techniques you will definitely see staggering success in your business.