How to Marketing Your Startup on a Tight Budget

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How to Marketing Your Startup on a Tight Budget

Marketing your startup is crucial if you want to succeed. There are many ways of marketing a new business, but most of them require a large budget. However, this doesn’t imply that you cannot promote your startup if you have a limited budget. In fact, the lack of sufficient funds is the best motivation for creativity and innovation. Therefore, with a little creativity and determination, you can still conduct effective marketing campaigns. Below are some alternative marketing strategies that can help you.

1. Engage With Your Customers Rather Than Just Selling

It’s easy for an entrepreneur to get into the trap of just wanting to push products and make huge sales. Though it’s not bad to prioritize making sales over other things, sometimes you need to engage with people to help them know more about your company and your products. Social media is one of the best and easiest ways to engage with your target audience. It presents an opportunity for indirect marketing which is very effective.

Share or retweet posts, comment, get involved in conversations and backlink your opinions to your product. Customers will notice you and, eventually, they will begin to trust your brand. However, you should be very careful about what you post. People probably will not read your posts or follow you if you are always bragging about your products and posting promotional ads. You need to post interesting articles and things that catch people’s attention. Also, check for sites that are appropriate for your business and focus on them.

2. Create a Niche and Build Credibility

You do not require a huge budget to create a niche for your business or to make it credible. All you need is to find opportunities to increase awareness for your business and let your potential customers get a look on the inside. Some good opportunities include blogs, podcasts, webinars and YouTube videos. For instance, it does not cost you anything to start a YouTube channel and promote your products. All you need is a smart branding strategy and creativity. Videos reach more audience, take less time to create, and are easy to understand. Therefore, you may upload videos to give your target audience an insight of your upcoming products.

However, make sure that the content is well-written and interesting. Sharing ideas and information at an expo, incubator, a niche event, or business convention can also help you reach a large audience. To gain credibility, you can prove your abilities to potential customers by networking and sharing your expertise. Entrepreneurs, journalists, and prominent figures can also help you popularize your business.

3. Know and Share Your “Why”

It is very important to understand what your “why” is, since it tells your reasons for starting the business. People will always want to know why and how you started your business. Telling them that you were born an entrepreneur or it just happened is boring and does not catch their attention.

You need to have a good, unique story about why and how your business came into existence. The story should differentiate you and your company from other businesses and will prompt people to ask questions and want to know more about you and your business. Tell them how the idea came about, how you started and why you decided to pursue it.

When you share this kind of information with your audience, as well as on your marketing material, your story will resonate with people and become more memorable. Also, your story may be an inspiration to others, and they will start to follow you. You may also share this story of your startup journey on your blog, YouTube channel and any other social media platforms you have.

4. Co-sponsor and Attend Events in Your Niche

From time to time, industries host special events. Such events present you with an excellent opportunity to market your company. Often, face to face marketing is more effective than emails or the social media. The opportunities to network and meet new people to connect are worth the price of sponsorship. Therefore, the next time you hear about an event in your industry, consider seeing if there’s a chance to co-sponsor the event or present during the event. If you get the opportunity, seize it and take full advantage of it by ensuring that the audience learns about your company by the time the event ends.

5. Make your Content Easy to Discover

In today’s modern society, it’s crucial to have an online presence through social media, a website, or a blog. However, putting content online does not guarantee that your target customers will see the content. Therefore, to have a good online presence, you need to make it easy for people to discover your content.

One of the best ways to make your content discoverable is through keywords. Use keywords that are relevant to your market niche when you publish your posts as this will improve your search engine rankings on Google. The keywords can also help you boost your audience on social media. You may also use automation tools to find people within your niche and connect with them.

The second way to make your content discoverable is employing SEO techniques. Learn how to improve your SEO ranking using various techniques, and your website or blog will get more visitors. Some techniques that can help you include using unique phrases for your pages or blog titles, posting original content, and getting rid of unnecessary plug-ins to improve the load speed of your website.

6. Giveaways and Samples

When introducing a new business, it can be hard to reach your target audience and engage them. However, no one can say no to free things. Therefore, giving away some of your products can be a good way to engage as the recipients will talk and spread the word about the product. The giveaways also bring unbiased product reviews, and you can get to know genuine pros and cons of your product. Reach out to different people and give them samples of your products without charging them but also ask them to share on their social media platforms and write genuine reviews.

It’s also good to thank and reward your reviewers with little things that make them happy. It could be a small goodie bag or a discount coupon for your product. Such a gesture will make them feel good about your company and your product and will prompt them to market the product through word of mouth.

You can also discover different new companies which are not immediate competitors and propose a share and share alike. The idea is to share some of their product, and they share yours. You can find many startups, and if they like the idea, you will increase your reach without any cost.

7. Use Great E-coupons

According to research, most people find it hard to resist a great coupon. In fact, the research suggests that four out of five buyers use coupons frequently both online and in-store. Additionally, a significant number of customers remain loyal to a particular firm due to the availability of coupons. The good thing is, you don’t require a large amount of money to create great e-coupons.

Tagged on: Content Marketing    Event management