Eminent researchers believe that the world economy is headed for a recession in 2023. The global recession will decline the valuation of startups. Also, the huge funding crunch will make it challenging for startups to sustain business growth. Entrepreneurs and founders can overcome the funding crunch only by achieving profitability.

They will try to survive the funding crunch by accelerating customer acquisition and increasing sales revenue consistently. Likewise, they will try to maintain a positive cash flow by curtailing upfront and ongoing costs. Hence, startups will explore ways to promote and sell their products/services aggressively without escalating marketing costs.

While making a startup marketing strategy in 2023, you should focus on interacting with existing and potential customers using multiple channels and touchpoints.  But your digital marketing strategy for startups must curtail costs and increase returns by combining a slew of low-cost and budget-friendly marketing tactics.

15 Tactics to Consider While Making a Startup Marketing Strategy for 2023

1. Website Optimization

You can divert visitors to the start-up’s website using many digital marketing tactics. But the digital marketing strategies cannot convert visitors into leads and customers if the website does not deliver an optimal user experience. You need to ensure that users can access the startup’s website seamlessly on desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

At the same time, your strategy should focus on improving the key factors affecting the website’s user experience – speed, usability, content, security, and credibility. Also, you have to implement the latest search engine guidelines to increase search engine traffic to the website organically. Hence, your startup marketing strategy must make user experience optimization an ongoing process.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is one of the digital marketing tactics that help businesses reduce customer acquisition costs significantly. In addition to reaching out to a wider audience, SEO tactics boost a website’s online reputation and credibility. Your startup marketing strategy must boost the website’s search visibility using on-page, off-page, and technical SEO techniques.

However, you must remember that Google and Bing these days update their search algorithms frequently to boost search experiences. Hence, you must keep the SEO strategy flexible enough to accommodate the changes required to boost customer acquisition. In addition to using different forms of content, you must optimize the content for textual search, image search, voice search, and video search.

3. Social Media Promotion

The average time spent by internet users on various social networking platforms has increased to 2 hours and 29 minutes in 2022. Hence, your startup marketing strategy must include an organic social media plan. You can promote the startup on social networks organically by posting and sharing a variety of content – posts, stories, memes, photos, and videos.

However, your strategy must focus on posting the right type of content on the right social networking platform at the right time. In addition to posting content regularly, you need to optimize the content and engage with the target audience. Audience engagement is essential to enhance your brand recognition and visibility and produce user-generated content.

4. Influencer Marketing

Many individuals and enterprises have become social media influencers by establishing reputation and credibility in a specific sector. They help businesses promote their products and services on social media through posts, mentions, and endorsements. Your startup marketing strategy must consider this distinct form of social media marketing to promote products/services to a wider audience.

You can leverage this marketing tactic fully by long-term partnering with the right influencers. The partnership will result in the publication of authentic influencer content according to your marketing strategy. However, you must allow creative freedom to enable the influencer to create content that keeps the audience engaged and deliver your marketing message.

5. Content Marketing

In addition to connecting startups with the target audience in a cost-efficient way, content marketing boosts the performance of SEO and social media marketing campaigns. Your marketing strategy for 2023 must make the creation, distribution, and promotion of multi-form content an ongoing process.

But the startup can win customers’ trust and build long-term relationships with them only by producing relevant, valuable, and consistent content. Hence, this marketing tactic requires startups to produce high-quality content by deploying seasoned content creators. Your strategy must leverage real-time data to produce content that the target audience wants and prefers.

You must publish and promote the content strategically to ensure that the target audience can consume the content using their preferred channel and devices. At the same time, you should identify the high-performing content and focus on optimizing the underperforming content by monitoring the performance of each form of content.

6. Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the tried and tested digital marketing strategies. Over 87% of marketers distribute various forms of content organically using email marketing. In addition to connecting with the target audience, email marketing helps startups keep recipients engaged and influence their purchase decisions.

While making a startup marketing strategy, you should opt for email marketing as a low-budget marketing budget to build, nurture, and sustain customer relationships. But your email marketing strategy must focus on sending the right message to the customers at the right time. Also, you can get better results by combining email marketing and SEO.

7. Video Marketing

This marketing strategy requires startups to incur video costs. Also, startups have to spend more to improve video quality. But you must remember that 54% of consumers want brands to publish video content regularly. Hence, a startup cannot meet the expectations of consumers without investing in video marketing.

However, your marketing strategy for startups must focus on controlling video marketing costs by adopting best practices like keeping videos short, producing videos in-house, procuring economical equipment, and spending time on pre-production. At the same time, you must increase ROI by implementing a slew of video marketing strategies.

8. User-Generated Content

Consumers find user-generated content more authentic and impactful than brand-generated content. Your startup marketing strategy can influence the purchase decision of consumers by using brand-specific content created by consumers in various marketing campaigns.

You can boost brand loyalty and brand growth in a cost-efficient way by posting positive reviews on websites, social networks, and online forums. However, your strategy must make it easier for consumers to create brand-specific content by providing clear instructions.

9. Hashtag Campaigns

Hashtag marketing is a form of social media marketing. As the name suggests, this marketing tactic enhances the visibility of content on social media by embedding hashtags. Your startup marketing strategy should consider hashtag campaigns to create brand awareness, build communities, and promote products/services.

But you can make the hashtag marketing strategy impactful only by selecting the appropriate hashtag for a campaign and posting content featuring the hashtag. You also have the option to use multiple hashtags according to precise marketing goals. At the same time, you need to ensure that the target audience can interact with the hashtag seamlessly.

10. Referral Programs

This marketing strategy drives customer acquisition and sales conversion by encouraging and incentivizing existing customers to recommend products/services. While making referral programs for startups, you should focus on converting happy and loyal customers into brand advocates.

The existing customers will help the startup acquire new customers by recommending products/services to their friends, coworkers, and family. But the startup can persuade existing customers to recommend only by giving incentives like a surprise gift, option to upgrade, or attractive discounts.

11. Cross-Promotion

This marketing tactic emphasizes brands promoting each other’s products/services by marketing partnership. A startup can promote its product/service in a cost-efficient way by forming marketing partnerships with similar or relevant businesses.

The strategy will make another business promote the startup’s product/service to its customer base. But the startup has to promote the product/service of the partner to its customer base in return. Hence, cross-promotion creates a win-win situation for both partners without escalating marketing costs.

12. Business Awards

Many governmental and non-governmental organizations these days recognize the outstanding achievements of startups by giving awards. These awards enhance the reputation and credibility of winners in a short amount of time.

A startup can use the award as a cost-efficient marketing tool to attract new customers and retain existing customers. It can impress and influence visitors by displaying the awards on its website. But a startup can leverage this marketing tactic only after winning business awards.

13. Network Events

In addition to enhancing brand awareness, network events create opportunities for entrepreneurs to make connections in the industry. Startup founders can leverage this low-cost marketing tactic by organizing local events as well as attending network events.

While attending business networking events, entrepreneurs should showcase their expertise by participating in genuine discussions. At the same time, they must build business connections by sharing their contact information and staying in touch with other participants.

14. Personal Branding

Many entrepreneurs and founders have become celebrities in a short amount of time thanks to Social networking platforms and business reality TV shows. Likewise, many founders enhance brand recognition and customer acquisition through personal branding.

While making marketing strategies for startups, you focus on branding both founders and startups. Your personal branding strategy for entrepreneurs should focus on highlighting their struggles, past experiences, success stories, failures, and future plans.

At the same time, you should enhance the founder’s personal brand by distributing a variety of digital content – articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, case studies, and infographics – across customer communication channels and touchpoints.

15. Low-Budget PPC Campaigns

PPC is not one of the low-budget digital marketing strategies for startups. But no startup can garner instant results without running paid advertisement campaigns. While making a startup marketing strategy, you should focus on controlling costs by running low-budget PPC campaigns.

Leading search engines and social media enable you to control PPC campaign costs in a variety of ways. For instance, you can control PPC marketing costs by targeting the best keywords, opting for manual bidding, and targeting limited locations. However, you must monitor and refine the PPC campaign performance regularly to get better results.

Final Thought

While making a startup marketing strategy in 2023, you can overcome budgetary constraints by combining a slew of low-budget digital marketing techniques. But your strategy can increase ROI only by focusing on two important factors – digital marketing automation and digital marketing performance measurement.

Digital Marketing Performance Monitoring

Your digital marketing strategy for 2023 must define the metrics or KPIs for monitoring digital marketing performance. The KPIs will show the performance and outcome of digital marketing campaigns in numbers. Hence, it becomes easier for you to know which digital marketing techniques are working and which are not.

You can make the strategy more effective by increasing budgetary allocation for high-performing digital marketing campaigns. Also, you can achieve predefined marketing goals by improving the performance of underperforming digital marketing campaigns by making data-driven decisions.

Digital Marketing Automation

You curtail the manpower and resources required to run multichannel digital marketing campaigns only through automation. The digital marketing tool will help you control staffing costs by automating routine communication and marketing activities. Also, you can use the tool to generate, nurture, and retarget leads more efficiently.

At the same time, the software will provide you with actionable insights by analyzing large volumes of customer and marketing data collected from various sources. You can generate automated reports to boost digital marketing performance by making the right decision at the right time. Hence, you can power up the startup marketing strategy for 2023 by investing in the right digital marketing tool.