Digital Marketing for Startups: How to Start Making Sales When Nobody Knows About You

Digital Marketing for Startups: How to Start Making Sales When Nobody Knows About You

Though I have experience working for startups doing digital marketing to get leads and sales, the problem is always the same. It’s just one word: “Trust”.

Why is there a problem with trust?

It’s because, when you’re ready to show your product to the world, nobody — literally nobody — knows about your brand.

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So, for example, if your startup sells t-shirts, why would I buy a t-shirt from your company? I don’t know your brand. If I buy a T-shirt from your e-commerce store, how do I know if it will arrive at my home? You’re not Amazon.

Those are the questions that so many startups face from their potential customers, and if your startup has an app it’s double trouble because you have to convince your customers to download it and then make a purchase.

When I started working for the first startup that hired me, I thought it would be like the TV show “Silicon Valley”. I’d left a good job, with a good monthly income, to have my first experience in a startup.

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But reality hit me hard. In a startup, if you don’t sell, then you literally don’t eat, and in my first month, we only made four sales.

How do you start making sales when nobody knows about you?

That is the question I asked myself when the CEO and the co-founder told me that they needed sales to pay the salaries next month.

I told myself: “Ok, doing search engine optimization will be a long-term process, social media marketing also takes time but it can help… the only thing I can do is paid advertising, but I need a budget”.

Also, read Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Business Owners Guide.

At this point, you have to remember this about digital marketing:

In digital marketing, you have three options to promote your website, blog or startup:

● Search engine optimization

● Social media marketing

● Paid advertising

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Now, where to start?

Search engine optimization is a long process; it can take months to see organic traffic on your website or blog, but once you get organic traffic the chances of getting leads or sales are big.

Social media marketing is also a process, because if your website or blog is new then nobody will know about this new site or brand. So, the job here is to choose the right social media platform to promote your website or blog.

Paid advertising is the quickest way to promote your website or blog because, for example, if you run a campaign to get leads on Facebook then you will get leads during that campaign, but once the campaign is over, you won’t get any leads.

So the ideal way to promote your website or blog is a mix of these three strategies.

Also, read 10 Best Content Writing Tools for SEO (2023)

We need sales

After talking with the co-founders I got a monthly budget of $150 to do a social media campaign.

The startup was about laundry. We needed people that had no time to do laundry by themselves.

Once they purchased a laundry service, we would pick up their clothes and take them to the closest laundry service, and then return them.

Yep, that was the startup.

Well, I decided to do a Facebook campaign but I had no luck; we got no sales.

I still don’t know the reason behind that failure. The copy was great, the graphics were nice, but I believe that the audience for the startup wasn’t there.

I then talked with the community manager and decided to launch a landing page on WordPress to try Google AdWords.

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It was a long shot; Google AdWords is all about keywords, so finding the right keywords for the ads, and also placing those keywords on the landing page, was a little difficult, but not impossible.

Just before the launch of the campaign, we decided to insert a Facebook chat box on the landing page, so in case people had any questions about the service I would be there to answer those questions.

To my surprise, I had questions to answer in real-time. Google AdWords was our gold mine.

And it was at that moment that I discovered people need to feel there is a person behind the brand.

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Why is that?

This is because if you are a new brand, people aren’t going to trust you right away.

The most-asked questions were:

● Will my clothes be in good hands?

● How long have you been in business?

● Can I pay when you deliver my clothes?

● Are you personally going to pick up my clothes?

After I’d answered those questions, I had to close the sales.

In my desperation to close sales I started to take orders on the chat box, though now that I think about it, this wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t let people go to the thank you page, and I needed that to have better analytics from the campaign.

We went from four sales per month to 64 sales per month in Lima, Perú, and 125 sales per month in Bogotá, Colombia.

Did we have a good number of buybacks from the customers? No, but that is another story for another article.

Now, there are chatbots that can do the job of answering questions, but my recommendation for you is to answer the questions personally, so you can understand your customers better and develop rapport with them.

Also read Affiliate Marketing Tutorial for Beginners 2023.    

If you develop rapport with your customers the sales will come, and above all your customers will trust you.

The startup was picked up by a Colombian incubator. We went through the acceleration process but sadly we did not get any investment.

I left that startup feeling sad because I saw a lot of potentials to expand to other markets. I’d learned how to get sales, and it was time to learn how to make customers buy from us again, but that did not happen.

We need leads

A couple of years later I started working in a B2B startup. The product was software that accelerated the hiring process for companies.

On my first day as a social media manager and performance manager, I saw the problem.

They had a database full of emails but they didn’t know how to use it for performance campaigns.

With my budget, I did two campaigns, one for LinkedIn and one for Facebook, with the goal of getting leads.

In just five days we hit the leads goal for the month, but the quality of leads from Facebook wasn’t good enough. The leads from LinkedIn, however, were pure gold.

Also, I was able to implement my first funnel in this startup. One month earlier I’d finished reading Russel Brunson’s book, so I was eager to implement a funnel.

The next campaign, the funnel, was a success. Though we had the emails with which to start an email campaign, if the potential customer went one more step into the funnel, we got the name, company, phone number and email address.

And in my job as a social media manager, I started to work on the brand, including the voice of the brand and the communication pillars in order to create trust with our customers, and our potential customers.

Sadly, covid then hit and I was fired from the startup.

Trust = Sales

If people trust you, you will get sales. That is what I learned during my experience working for startups.

It’s because, if your brand is new, people will have doubts about your product, your services, and about everything.

My recommendation is to work on a social media plan with the goal of building rapport and trust.

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I know that you want sales. That will take time, but you can run an advertising campaign on social media, though that campaign needs the enforcement of a social media plan.

Everything takes time, even if you work in a startup where everything goes at a fast pace.