You don’t need to pour an endless stream of money into marketing campaigns for your startup to succeed. If you have limited funds, you simply need to get more creative with your promotions. So stretch out your creativity muscles, and use some of these tips to market your startup without breaking the bank.
Leverage Social Media
Startup owners often hire social media management companies to handle all of their social media campaigns, because they know how imperative social media is to building brand awareness, connecting with prospects, and getting new products in front of their target market. However, you don’t need to spend a fortune to market on social media.
First, do some research to find out where your target market hangs out — don’t waste time trying to build a following on a social media site your target market doesn’t frequent. Then, focus your marketing campaigns on quality instead of quantity. Providing followers with useful, interesting, and shareable content helps you build a trusting relationship with people in your target market. It’s this trust that leads to future sales.
Narrow Your Target Market
Narrowing your target market makes it easier for you to communicate with your audience on a more personal level, and saves you money in the long run.
Think about it.
If you ran two marketing campaigns for a new baby product — one that targeted all women between the ages of 25 and 35 and one that targeted stay-at-home moms between the ages of 25 and 35 — which campaign is going to give you a better return on investment (ROI)?
Most likely, the campaign targeting moms will perform better than the one targeting all women because the people seeing your content are people who actually need or want your product. So before you run a marketing campaign, consider who you’re trying to attract and narrow your target audience accordingly.
Get Media Coverage
Many business owners assume that getting media coverage for their business is difficult, but it probably isn’t as hard as you think. All you need to do is connect with journalists who write about startups regularly. To do this, network with journalists, influencers, and bloggers in your niche through social media and commenting on their blog posts, on a daily basis if possible, and take the time to build a relationship with them. After you’ve connected with someone a few times, simply ask if they’d be willing to write a company profile, press release, or product review for their website.
Run Email Marketing Campaigns
Believe it or not, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to market your startup. In fact, some companies have seen ROIs of 400 percent or more from email marketing campaigns. To build your email list:
- Use a lead opt-in on your website to gather email addresses
- Include a link to your email opt-in in your own email signature
- Share your email opt-in link across all forms of social media
- Create a paid social media campaign for the sole purpose of collecting email addresses
- Entice people to join your email list by offering a coupon or digital product
Use your email list to announce specials, promotions, and new products. Additionally, send newsletters to your email subscribers occasionally, along with any blog posts your company creates. Don’t forget to encourage people to follow you on social media in each email you send, so you have multiple points of contact with each person you engage.
Marketing your startup doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. Focus on connecting with your target market and providing them with valuable content instead of selling, and before long, you’ll have a large number of social media followers and email subscribers ready to purchase anything you share with them.