Where do you start, with marketing, when you’re about to launch your product or service? This is possibly the most asked question when it comes to startup marketing, and one Guy Kawasaki once famously weighed in on, saying, “Sales fixes everything.”
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Certainly, in today’s context, that’s true: Sales is about driving inbound leads to your business. But Kawasaki also added this: “If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing.”
So, where should you begin? Three of the most important channels to consider if you want to drive traffic to your product’s website and increase sales, are Search, Social and Content.
It’s not one or the other, but all three that you must do simultaneously to get maximum benefits. The reason: They’re all interlinked and often you’ll have to use one channel to help amplify the other:
Search
Organic search still makes up about 64 percent of referral traffic to a website. Accordingly, SEO or search engine optimization continues to be relevant to your marketing efforts because content marketing alone will not rank you higher in Google searches; your content needs to be as well optimized for search as as your website.
There are two core SEO components to pay close attention to: on-page and off-page optimization.
On-page optimization: If your website is slow to load, is not optimized for mobile and isn’t providing a good user experience (high bounce rate), you’ll be left wondering why your website doesn’t draw organic traffic from Google. Google wants the best possible experience for users — meaning that people who are looking for something should arrive at their desired result in the least amount of time. This is how Google ensures that its own product remains relevant to its huge user base.
