How To Earn Your First Customers For Your Sweaty Startup Through Digital Marketing

So you’ve finally taken the leap and started your sweaty startup. You’ve spent hours researching what business to create, how to fulfill your services, what software you might want to use, and maybe even invested a little in purchasing some equipment for your business. 

But what if you don’t get any customers?

Luckily, this doesn’t have to be a concern for you. With how far behind the curve most businesses are, the barrier to entry is extraordinarily low to start gaining some customers through the internet.

It all starts with digital marketing, and getting your digital marketing strategy right from the start is the best way to ensure consistent growth throughout the life of your sweaty startup. This article will outline all that you need to know to get started on the right foot.

A Website That Sells

Why Do I Need A Website?

There are numerous reasons to invest in a quality website for your sweaty startup. The internet is here to stay, and more and more each day people choose to use it to find the businesses they want to work with. 

Not convinced? Let’s go through and list just a few reasons:  

• 64% of small businesses have their own website (and this number is growing). You need to have a website to be competitive in today's market.
• 55% of people will search online for reviews and recommendations before making a purchase. If a lead can't find anything out about you, why would they trust you with their business?
• 47% of people will visit a company website before making a purchase. Consumers like to dig before spending their money.

Having a professional website is crucial to building trust and authority for your sweaty startup in the industry you target. 

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, how do you go about getting a high quality website?

How Do I Get A Website

Getting a quality website today is easier than ever before. Depending on your skillset, your budget, and the amount of time you can spare, there's a couple of options when it comes to getting your site built. 

The first option is to have it done for you. This is going to be the best option for you if you have the budget to spare. Building websites is not something you can typically just jump into doing, even with the wide variety of easy to use site builders available. 

When you hire a company or freelancer with a good reputation,you will get dedicated professionals to build you a site that can generate leads and profit for years, as well as build trust with your customer base. This is the key point to consider, that your company website is a long term investment, not a fancy marketing gimmick. 

With that out of the way, let’s talk about some of the options you have to get your sweaty startup site built by someone. 

The first option is a shameless plug from us, Blue Collar Builds. We have focused our efforts on building out extremely high quality sites specifically for sweaty startups. This experience allows us to deliver highly targeted site layout and site content to better convert leads into customers.

But with that said, you have many more options to choose from as well. The simplest route would be to go onto a marketplace like Fivver, or Upwork. On these sites you can find thousands of freelancers or agencies who will be able to build a site for your sweaty startup. 

This comes with a word of caution, however. You should highly vet the freelancer or agency you will have building out your site. You’ll want to consider their experience, their rates, how many reviews they have, the turnaround time for your website. The best tip is to just make sure you don’t go with the cheapest option. You’ll likely find yourself in a few months right back where you started, wanting to get a new site that looks better and represents your brand better. 

The other option for getting a website for your sweaty startup is to do it yourself. This is going to be the best option if you don’t have the budget to invest in getting a site built for you. 

There are a variety of website builders that we would recommend, depending on your needs. 

For the most basic website builder, we recommend Carrd. Carrd is an incredibly simple 1-page site builder. You can have your site up and running in just a few hours, with all of the basic features and sections common for sweaty startup sites. If you are low on time, or aren’t the most technically savvy user, Carrd may be the right option for you. 

Just a bit more advanced than Carrd, there is Wix and Squarespace. These are going to have many templates you can select from, and with a few hours of learning how their editors work, you can start building out your site. The additional features and functionality of these builders will definitely be helpful, but they are limited still in comparison to the next options. 

For a more advanced option to build your sweaty startup website, you have tools like WordPress and Webflow. We at Blue Collar Builds are huge fans of Webflow in particular, and it is our go-to tool for all of our sites. 

These will offer the most functionality, and will allow you to build the highest quality of sites. But this comes at a much steeper learning curve. Unless you have prior experience in building out sites, it is recommended to stay away from these more advanced options. They may give you more headaches than it's worth for your needs. 

What Should My Website Look Like?

If you can’t beat them, join them. 

We’ve all heard the saying before. When you start building your sweaty startup website, a bullet-proof strategy is to look at what is working already in your industry. 

This doesn’t mean you copy and steal the designs and information from other companies, but this does mean you should be including most of the same information on your site, like a services section/page, an about section/page, a contact/quote section/page, etc. 

Take some time to look up companies within your niche market, and see what they do well, and use that as inspiration when designing your sweaty startup site. 

Now that you have a website, what else do you need to do to start turning leads into sales?

You’ll need to start working on or investing in your search engine optimization (SEO). But the type of SEO you choose to invest in is critical when you are just starting out. 

Why Traditional SEO Isn’t Great For New Guys

SEO in general is crucial to gaining traction digitally. Where most businesses go wrong is investing in the wrong type of SEO when starting out. 

As a small business, you simply aren't going to be ranking at the top of Google searches without tons of time and money invested into SEO. This is because you are competing with the big names like Yelp, Home Advisor, and Angi's List. They have years of presence and money invested to rank high for your broad area search terms. 

You can achieve much more lucrative results by investing instead in local SEO.

After you’ve achieved a consistent business and customer flow, over time you can invest in your website SEO as a lead generation source, but for now, you just need the basics to start seeing results. 

Why Local SEO Is The Answer

What is local SEO? Simply put, local SEO is a strategy that seeks to get your business seen by people within a local market. Instead of trying to rank and be seen with a broad search term like “landscaping companies”, you would be trying to be seen for searches like “landscaper near me” on Google and on Google Maps searches.

The best way to do this is through Google My Business. Google My Business is completely free, and can be an extremely effective tool to get your sweaty startup seen by potential customers.

We are going to go through the strategy you need to start seeing results and gaining customers through your Google My Business profile. 

This is the exact strategy we used at Blue Collar Builds to take one client from zero digital presence to over 100 search views in just a month, meaning over 100 potential clients.

Optimize Your Google My Business Profile

This is a simple, but crucial step. To optimize your sweaty startup’s google my business profile, follow these guidelines:

• Define your target keywords (focusing on long-tail keywords that rank well for local SEO)
• Ensure your profile is complete and accurate
• Upload professional photos of your company, team, and your work

Master The Algorithm Through Photos, Posts, and Reviews

Once you have your profile in order, you’ll want to start feeding the algorithm what it wants to see.

The most important aspect of ranking for local SEO is to get tons of high rating reviews for your business. This will be a long-term process for your sweaty startup, but even just a few reviews early on can do tremendous good. 

Have your first customer’s be your family or friends, and ask them to give you a review if they like your service. Most importantly, you should be asking each and every customer to leave you a review. It takes very little time for them, and will help out your business in the long run. 

In addition to getting reviews from your customers, you’ll want to create new Google posts 1-2x per week. This could include special offers, "learn more" content, client projects and more. When making your post, you should always include your main keywords in the post. For example, if you were a landscaper in Austin Texas, you would want to use “landscaping in Austin Texas” within your posts. 

Google posts are very simple to make, and consistently posting 1-2x per week will go a long way to ranking your Google My Business profile. 

The final thing you’ll want to be doing to start getting your sweaty startup seen by potential customers is to frequently upload new photos and videos of your services. Any time you accomplish a job, or do exceptional work, highlight it!

Make sure to include your keywords in the alt description of the image, and to make use of geotagging on your photos as well so that the algorithm can begin to associate the locations you work in with the locations of your customers. 

That’s It, Start Growing

These are all of the tools you’ll need to get your sweaty startup off the ground with digital marketing. Get out there and start taking action, and with some consistency and hard work you’ll start to see your efforts pay off.