Updated on 12 May 2026
Startups depend heavily on early sales traction to get the interest of Investors. Still, most Startups may not know where to start with online sales. This covers content strategy, SEO strategy, Social Media strategy, Advertising strategy, and lastly to measure your performance for all of the above, we will also cover your Metrics.
Do note that this can be a full-time job in itself as there are many aspects to cover in the entire spectrum of online marketing. Try not to let this take over or distract you from your important business activities.
Advertising Platforms
Google Ads - To target people when they've already decided to purchase or are actively searching for solutions.
Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram) - To target people based on their demographic information like age, geolocation, and interests.
Linkedin Ads are useful for B2B Startups targeting professionals, founders, enterprise buyers, or specific industries.
TikTok Ads are increasingly useful for B2C Startups and brands targeting younger audiences with short-form video content.
Skills
Website Tracking/Analytics software
There are two strategies I would like to highlight here. First is to have quality content, and second is to advertise.
Why Do I need quality content?
Content is still king in the search engine world — but today, useful and trustworthy content matters even more. Search engines like Google increasingly prioritise:
Google identifies content that is viewed more often, shared, bookmarked, and where users spend more time reading. Poor-quality or AI-spam content is increasingly penalised.
In the end, it is all about showing users what they are really looking for in a search.
Create a Website With the Right Keywords
For example, if you are a music subscription service like Spotify, you should have keywords like:
Write naturally while keeping relevant keywords intact.
Create Helpful Blog Content
Ensure you cover:
Instead of just “top music”, modern SEO content today may include:
Blog regularly — ideally at least 2–4 times a month consistently.
Why Advertise to boost Sales (based on the latest Google search engine updates)?
Google, Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn tend to reward content that already receives strong engagement and traffic signals. So, boosting your traffic through advertising can help accelerate your visibility, especially when the content is genuinely useful and engaging.
This works based on engagement rates like click-throughs, bounce rates, shares, comments, and watch time — so fake or misleading content will not work long-term. Modern algorithms are much smarter today. It has to be original, interesting, and relevant content.
Advertising also helps with brand awareness. If someone has seen your brand multiple times, they are more likely to trust and recognise it later. Search engine visibility works similarly — the more times users see your website or brand appear, the more credible it becomes in their minds.
Advertise your organically popular content on Meta or TikTok to boost your traffic and therefore sales potential. This creates stronger engagement signals that tell search engines and social platforms that users are interested in your content. If your content is high quality, this can improve your search rankings over time.
Optimise your advertising costs by targeting the right people. For example, you can target people that follow competitors' pages, related industry pages, or specific interests. You can also target people by education background, job description, behaviours, or website retargeting audiences. A good method is to test at least 5 target groups simultaneously and identify the lowest-cost, highest-converting audience.
You also want to ensure that bounce rates are low and average browsing time is high — which signals engaged users to Google and advertising platforms. This helps improve rankings and advertising efficiency over time. To do this, you need to create relevant and interesting content for your target audience. If you are having trouble doing this, freelance content writers, designers, or video creators can help.
How much to advertise depends heavily on the industry you are in. Highly competitive industries like finance, SaaS, insurance, legal services, and AI tend to have significantly more expensive advertising today compared to niche industries.
I know Startups that advertise from RM500/month to RM50k+/month, so there is really no fixed rule of thumb on budget. However, you should always be aware of your CAC/LTV to ensure you are making money. Those that advertise RM50k or more monthly usually already know they can recover the investment profitably.
CAC - Customer Acquisition Cost
($) Total sales and marketing expenses / (#) new customers acquired = ($) CAC
This is quite straightforward. Basically, it is the amount of money you spent to get 1 paying customer.
LTV - Lifetime Value
($) Average gross margins × average customer lifespan = ($) LTV
Generally, it is how much in gross profit (after product costs) the customer gives back while they are still buying from you.
Today, SaaS Startups also track metrics like churn rates, Net Revenue Retention (NRR), and expansion revenue, as these significantly affect business sustainability and startup valuations.
LTV/CAC Ratio
The ideal ratio is still commonly around 3:1 LTV/CAC.
It means that for every dollar you spend to acquire a paying customer, you get back 3X in value over time. The reason this is important is to ensure you still have enough return on investment after advertising costs to pay Operational costs like staff costs, software, rental, and future growth investments.
For most Startups starting out, I do recommend testing the market with at least a 1:1 ratio initially — meaning that you do not lose money even after spending on ads. Any ads providing a ratio lower than this should usually be reviewed or cut off quickly as you are bleeding cash.
A generally good idea is to start small and double down when you get good results on certain ads, audiences, or keywords.
Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 are still key tools to ensure you understand your website traffic data properly. Bounce rates should be low while engagement time, click-through rates, and sales conversion rates should be high.
Once you are tracking your Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or TikTok Ads traffic properly, you should also track Sales Conversion Rates — where an advertisement converts into sales, leads, or enquiries.
The SEO & content marketing process
I hope the above gives you a good overview of how SEO & content marketing works and how it relates to Sales for IT-based Startups and pretty much most high growth Startups today. This is a repetitive process, and there is a lot to learn and test in the process. At the end of the day, it is about building an effective digital sales engine to drive customers to your doorstep. Build up the sales, which will effectively help you raise funds more easily — as nothing speaks louder than revenue traction.
Do give me a shout in the comments below if you have any further questions or if you feel I missed something.
