10 Affordable Digital Marketing Services to Validate Your Business Idea

You have an amazing idea. You think it could grow into a full-fledged business. But, you don’t want to waste money and time unnecessarily. If you’re dreaming of the solopreneur lifestyle but want to see if your idea has merit, there’s no shortage of digital marketing freelance services on Lightenweb to help you affordably test and validate your business idea. Let’s check out the top 10:

1. Keyword Research

To test your business idea it’s good practice to start with an in-depth keyword research and analysis as it will tell you:

Which keywords are the most popular within your particular niche
How competitive they are in terms of pay-per-click ads (more on that below)
But that’s not all!
Having a keyword research done by a search engine marketing expert will help you understand your target audience problems, which is essential knowledge to have so you can adapt all future online marketing strategies to specifically respond and resolve your audience’s difficulties.

2. Competitive Analysis

Studying the competition is critical for success. Through competitive analysis you can learn what keywords or demographics your competition is targeting, the type of content they’re publishing, and discover links they may have coming to their site from well-known influencers in your particular market.

A competitive analysis often includes the aforementioned keyword analysis as well, so you can get the best of both worlds with an all-in-one service that gives you a solid strategy on the best way to proceed without breaking your budget.

3. Domain Research

With keyword research and competitive analysis done, your next step in creating a successful online business is through your domain name. While .com still reigns supreme, the availability of good names can be lukewarm at best. That’s why many enterprising young start-ups have taken to extensions like .io and .ly to create a brand that’s as unique as they are.

Hiring a professional to help you brainstorm and check the availability (and brand-ability) of a domain name is a great first step toward seeing if your target audience responds favorably to your idea.

4. Landing Page

Once you’ve selected a domain name, it’s time to build your online presence. It’s no secret that web design can be expensive, which is why many entrepreneurs elect to have a landing page designed first.

A landing page, quite simply, is the page where all your website traffic will land. It generally encourages users to sign up for your email list to get more information on your services, or to contact you for custom work or a free quote. A landing page is an affordable way to get early conversion rate figures and to help validate your business idea without the need for a full-fledged website.

5. Web Traffic

Once you’ve got your domain name secured and your landing page built, you may think the bulk of the work is behind you, but the real work has just begun! Now it’s time to drive visitors to your landing page and see how they’ll react..or don’t.

Getting the right kind of website traffic will help you discover if your business idea has merit. If visitors engage with your landing page, you’ll know to move full steam ahead. If not, you’ll know it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

How can you drive traffic?

Either you buy 100% real human targeted website traffic from reputable sellers, or you can leverage some digital marketing strategies such as Adwords campaigns, social media advertising, email marketing or influencer marketing. Each one of these strategies is a microcosm of tactics and potential opportunities within itself.

Let’s dig into each

6. Adword Campaigns

One of the most efficient ways to drive traffic and test your keywords potential is through Adwords campaigns. You’ve seen this type of search engine advertising at work if you’ve noticed ads at the top of Google search engine result pages (SERPs).

There are professionals available who can not only help create your pay-per-click ads, but can also manage them for you by selecting the best keywords while keeping a close eye on your bidding budget so as to not go overboard or target the wrong kind of traffic.

The best Adwords management and marketing strategy balances your bid per click with engaged, ready-to-act visitors who are interested in what you have to offer, which is why it’s so important to have a well-made landing page with clear call to actions!

7. Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising through sites like Facebook or Twitter is also a very valuable strategy to help you validate your business idea.

There’s simply no better way to attract a multitude of people who have already expressed interest in your product or service than by going to the places where they hang out online.

Hiring a professional to help you with your social media marketing is about more than just having someone create a few ads for you on Facebook and Twitter, it’s about helping you narrow down your audience, tailor the right message, and schedule your ads so that they’re seen at the prime time when your customer base is online.

8. Email Marketing

Emails are a very easy and affordable solution to help you drive target traffic to your landing page. Obviously before sending emails you have to collect email addresses. The question is, how?

Luckily, you have different solutions at your disposal:

Leverage your personal network
Add an email subscription call to action within your social network bios
Join Linkedin groups
Answer questions on QUORA
If the subject is of your interest, there is this beautiful article written by Sarah Peterson and Sean Bestor on how to build an email list.

You certainly won’t be able to respond to all your emails, so the best solution here it’s to hire a freelance email autoresponder specialist on Lightenweb who will help you gain time and money, while you focus on growing your business.

9. Influencer Marketing

So far, we’ve talked about AdWord, social media advertising and email marketing as ways to drive traffic and validate your new business idea. But what if you could reach out to a key figure, an influencer within your niche market and share your business idea with an audience you already know loves your type of product or service?

I agree, guest blogging is an option but not the easiest or the most affordable in this case, therefore it’s much convenient and efficient to reach out to a social influencer and leverage the power of word-of-mouth marketing. With a simple click your product or service idea is shared with thousand of people who can then simply visit your landing page and react.

10. Web Analytics

Now that your landing page drives traffic, it’s time to get into the numbers and make sure that the strategies you choose to validate your business idea are paying off. There’s no sense in throwing money at a particular traffic channel and hoping some of it sticks. In the digital world, you have to know with absolute certainty.

That’s where web analytics comes in. Using your existing website traffic, a Google analytics expert can look at certain details to tell you where people are coming from, how long they’re staying on your pages, how many ultimately subscribed to your list or submit a preorder, and so on. You may learn, for example, that your best avenue for email subscribers is social media, but your best source of customers is coming from your AdWord campaigns.

Every business is different, so there is no one size fits all approach. Hiring a freelance web analytics professional can help you understand which strategies work best for validating your business idea by leveraging only those channels that bring you more target visitors with the best conversion rate.