How to boost your startup with digital sales and marketing – Our 5-step tutorial

According to a recent study of Statista, the biggest hassle of startups in Germany is sales and the acquisition of new customers. Being a co-founder of a mobile & web app boutique, we also faced this challenge and had to find our way of generating our first leads. 

Our team of founders agreed to focus on digital sales and digital marketing from a very early stage. As no one had extensive experience in this field we had to research, elaborate solutions, and learn about modern and digital ways of selling products and services very quickly. How did we do this, what are our most important learnings, and which tips and hacks can we give to entrepreneurs who find themselves in the same shoes we did?

I will face these questions in the following article and share our five best ways to overcome the first hurdles and gain high speed for your business. 

You’re a newbie in digital sales and marketing? So was I.

So here we were – one excellent software engineer and one sales specialist who decided to build an outstanding agency for mobile- and web app development. We both had significant experience in handling IT-projects for or with customers, we both believed in the market and our mission, and we both were extremely motivated to thrive our business!

We also agreed that the promotion of modern and digital business has to start in the digital world – to ease the step into a personal and offline relationship with leads and clients. 

But how did we handle the hurdles of being new and inexperienced in things like online- and content marketing, online lead generation, etc.? We defined 5 necessary steps that seemed to be quite promising to us. Those are:

• Research – where do we find some best practices to our questions?
• Planning – our credo to start: “as much as necessary, as little as possible”
• DO IT!
• Focus - on your target group, quality, and taking on step after another!
• Tracking results right away

Let’s look at these 5 steps in detail.

1.    Research

What’s the first thing to do if you have no clue about a new challenge you want to master? Right – research! Find some case studies, best practices, talk to people how know the game. We found out very fast that there is an endless amount of information concerning digital sales which needs to be filtered in order to find the right solution for you. Moreover, we did not find a hands-on guide about how to start from scratch with digital marketing and sales for a new company. That’s why we started building our own plan and sharing our key learnings in this article!

So, what’s our advice to get the right information:

First, you should research online – there is a lot of good and useful information to be found. Our choice was to concentrate on verifiable successful marketers, such as Gary Vaynerchuk or Neil Patel. Our tip: binge-watch their YouTube-channels, listen to their podcasts, read their posts and articles and so on. Of course, you better pay attention to focus on the content which is relevant and interesting for your current situation. It might not really help you to learn about the digital marketing of a Fortune 500 company when you’re just starting.

Second, go out and talk to fellow entrepreneurs and people you know! There are a lot of people who have been in the same situation as you are now. Why not tap into their knowledge to avoid making the same mistakes they did? Of course, sometimes it’s good and even necessary to make your own mistakes and create learnings out of them but you shouldn’t necessarily make EVERY mistake if you can avoid them by talking to experienced entrepreneurs!

Third, connect to experts in their field you don’t know yet. Via LinkedIn and other social media platforms, it’s as easy as never before to meet up and exchange thoughts with new contacts. Another advantage is the possibility to target the people you would like to network with very exactly. You are looking for experts in online lead generation in your hometown? You would like to find the most successful entrepreneurs in the UK? Or get first-hand information by an aviation engineer working for a special company? No problem: on LinkedIn you can use the search function and apply all these details as filter criteria to find just the right person you are looking for.

However, one word of advice: As in real life, people on LinkedIn don’t like to be contacted and squeezed out like a lemon right away – you should be patient and friendly and in the best case offer a benefit to your counterpart like sharing the findings of your research afterward.

2.    Planning 

Now that you’ve learned so much about digital marketing, it’s time to start thinking about and planning your actual activities. In this context there is a frequently used quote by Benjamin Franklin: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!”

Possibly, you have learned that there are many different ways of starting with digital sales and marketing. That’s why we think to create, for instance, a “content plan” might be justified, especially in big companies. Here it might be quite easy to lose track quickly – so you better have a good plan to follow. On the contrary, for small teams or single freelancers, we prefer and propose another approach: Write down the top 3 actions you can implement within a week and focus on them.  

The one most important step is point 3 – DO IT!

3.    DO IT! 

It has been proven many times that the best plan will not succeed if you don’t start implementing it. Sure, you should think about “whom to target” or “which channel to use” and much more. But when starting out, you won’t have the experience in digital marketing – so you also won’t have the ability to plan and forecast the effects or results of your first tries and campaigns accurately.

Balance is the key!

Hence, we believe it’s much more effective to go out and test your ideas, learn from them, and iterate. Try to find the right balance between planning new sales and marketing activities and implementing and testing them.

What sounds so easy, is much harder in reality – at least, that’s how we felt about it. How did we manage to stop just thinking about awesome marketing campaigns and their potential results but rather started to implement our first steps instead?

4.    Focus! 

If you don’t want to lose yourself in endless possibilities, it is essential to focus on a much smaller niche of the pitch! For us, focus was most important in three ways: 

• Focus on your target group! You have to know whom you want to reach with your activities and consequently direct your activities towards that group of people and their interests.
• Focus on quality – not on quantity! Nobody wants to read, hear or see low-level content!
• Focus on one single step after the other – for instance, concentrate on a single channel first. 

We found that focusing on single and measurable activities – measurable being the key here – helped us tremendously in finding our own way of generating new leads. Measures could be organic reach on LinkedIn, the number of interactions (likes, comments, shares) on your content, and many more. If you want to find out which channels of digital marketing work the best for you or your business, it has proven beneficial to initially concentrating on a single channel. Hence, you will be able to track and measure the effects you are generating but more importantly we are convinced that by focusing on the one most important thing at a time, you are able to perform much higher than by spreading your energy to many different channels at the same time.

However, that does not mean you should only use one digital marketing channel in the long term! In fact, success in this field is always a mixture of different channels and measures. We found, that generating a perfect mix of actions and channels, it’s a good strategy to concentrate on testing these channels individually and with all your energy.

The next, and maybe the single most important tip, is to concentrate on your specific target group. Before launching any digital marketing measure, you need to answer three different key-questions:

• Who is your target group of people or companies? What defines this group?
• What are the pain points and needs of this group?
• How can I offer a benefit and – in the best case – solutions for the pain points and needs mentioned before?

There are different ways of getting the necessary information such as target group analysis or interviewing existing customers. No matter how it is essential to the future success of your marketing campaign to answer these questions above!

Last – but not least – it’s very important to focus on quality! This is especially crucial for content marketing. If your content doesn’t contain real benefits for your potential audience, there will be no engagement. Without engagement, your content marketing campaigns will flop.

Especially at the beginning of your online marketing activities, it won’t be easy to create high-quality content and find a balance between quality and quantity. But again, our experience shows that “doing it” and testing out different approaches will lead to more experience and gradually to more success! Don’t be discouraged by mistakes and failures – keep on testing new ideas and activities and improve and learn step-by-step.

Which directly leads to our last point.

5.    Tracking your results  

The only way to improve the range of your digital marketing activities is, to start tracking their results from the very beginning. For every marketing channel and measure, there are different key performance indicators (KPI) that show their results. Most of the different channels like LinkedIn, Google Ads, etc. have their integrated analysis tools, which show the KPIs of your respective campaign.

As mentioned before, we are big fans of “The ONE Thing” – so again we recommend concentrating on one KPI! That doesn’t mean you should care about only one KPI and ignore the others but rather focus on one KPI at a time. Set specific goals to reach for that specific indicator and if you reach them: concentrate on the next one and improve it!

Please note, it’s not only essential to concentrate on performance measures of your tools, but it’s also important to track where your leads and (potential) customers emerge from. Sounds complicated? It is not! LinkedIn, Medium, et al. indicate where your readers originated from. Google Analytics should be integrated into your webpage to evaluate how visitors found your page. In case you place links to your content in emails, posts on social networks, or anywhere else you should make use of link attribution so you can easily identify and distinguish your marketing efforts and evaluate them individually. 

In a nutshell ….

…. digital sales and marketing seem like a huge and insurmountable challenge. However, if you focus on small steps, take each one after the other, and don’t let failure bring you down there is a high chance to see first successes and to meet this challenge!

Comment below about your success and learnings. Share your insights or get in touch if you are left with open questions.