Introduction
If you are a small business owner or have a small startup of yours, chances are you are a one-person show or working with a small team. All of you are trying to juggle between all the work, and in that, it is easy to neglect an important part of business and startups: marketing.
Marketing is an essential part of any startup, and with effective marketing strategies, you can take your startup business to the next level. Chances are you are aware of the advantages of marketing strategies for startups, but the costs of marketing strategies pull you down and stop you from going all out with advertising.
But, instead of spending a ton of money on marketing, what you actually need to do is get creative and spend money wisely and on effective marketing strategies for startups. Thankfully, with social media, growth marketing, and digital marketing becoming popular, the costs of marketing have gone down. In fact, if you combine creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, you can have a very cost-effective marketing strategy for a startup business.
7 Effective Marketing Strategies for Startups
Even on a small budget, there are many innovative and cost-effective ways to market your startup, and these tips will show you just that. With effective marketing strategies for startups, you can build a good customer base, connect with your clients, build a great brand identity and have regular engagement.
Here are 7 proven and effective marketing strategies for startups:
1. Launch a Referral Program:
Think of the benefits of word-of-mouth marketing. If a product is promoted personally by a user to their friends, most of the time, the friends will buy it. The referral program is just that, asking your customers to promote your product for you. In a referral program, your existing customers can introduce your product to their family, friends, colleagues, etc., and prompt them to try the product by giving incentives. A study says that almost 88% of people trust recommendations coming from known people. So, launching a referral program can become a great marketing strategy for your startup.
For example, if you are an organic plant-based store, you can ask a working mom to use your organic vegetables for her weekly meal-prep and spread the word to her friends to get the vegetables at 15% off with her reference.
2. Social Media Marketing:
One very low-cost yet effective marketing strategy is using social media to promote your brand and increase engagement. Find the social media platform most suitable for your product and where the maximum of your target audience is active. Open a business account on those platforms for free. As many as 5 billion people actively use social media on a regular basis, and it can provide a great platform to create brand awareness and increase your sales.
An integral part of social media marketing is also partnering with social media influencers to promote your products. Influencer marketing is booming and is a very popular startup marketing strategy. Identify influencers who resonate with your product and target audience and partner with them. A social media marketing agency can assist in identifying influencers who resonate with your product and target audience. For example, if you are a makeup company, you can get an actress to promote your makeup items as part of your influencer marketing strategy for your startup.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
SEO is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools, and you need SEO to improve your website’s visibility on search engines like Google. More than money, it requires you to spend some time and effort modifying your website with relevant keywords, which will help you rank your website better and add enough internal and external links. Your website should also be mobile-friendly, accessible, and quick to load to become popular and high-ranking. If you’re looking to rank #1 in a local market, local SEO tools are incredibly important.
Another thing you can do is start a blog on your website and publish articles relevant to the products and services you offer. Blogs are a great way to create more awareness about your brand and answer questions related to your product, and blogs help you rank higher on search engines as you would write SEO-optimised blogs. Suppose you are in the business of manufacturing natural fabric detergents; you can write blogs on tips on how to remove stains from white shirts, how often you should wash your towels, whether it is necessary to clean your washing machine, etc.
4. Email Marketing:
One of the top-performing marketing strategies is email marketing, and it has been so since the 1970s. Never underestimate the ability of an effective email marketing campaign. Start by making an organic list of all potential customers and form a strategy of mailing them frequently but not very often, which will bore or annoy them. You can send newsletters, professional emails, product announcements, etc., via email. You can auto-schedule your emails, too. Email marketing will always be one of startups’ most low-cost marketing strategies.
5. Use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising:
Small-scale PPC campaigns can give great results for startups. With PPC, your links appear in the sponsored search results for their relevant keywords. Ensure you target an appropriate audience for your product and that the ad is visible to those potential clients to make this marketing strategy most practical and feasible. PPC ads on Google or Facebook pages are a great way to spread brand awareness and increase engagement by tempting target audiences to click on the links to your product.
6. Attend Trade Shows:
One great low-budget marketing strategy for startups is to attend conferences and trade shows. It is an offline marketing strategy that helps you connect with your target audience in person and persuade them to buy your product or services. Make customers aware of your participation in the trade show much in advance and decorate your booth with all relevant brochures, banners, etc., to create awareness about your business and attract customers. You can also have contests or quizzes at the trade show to gain more attention from the audience.
7. Offer Free Trials or Consultations:
Who doesn’t love a free sample or trial? Everyone does, so it is a great way to leverage it to promote your products. You can offer free trials, sample products, or promotional items such as keychains, pens, mugs, etc., as a part of your startup marketing strategy. So, every time the customer uses that pen or mug, they will be reminded of your product or service.
Conclusion
We can agree that we do not require a huge budget to market and promote our products. What will actually help are effective and creative marketing strategies for startups and how well they are utilised and executed. If you focus on building a wholesome community around your product, providing good quality services and products, creating enough brand awareness, and engaging your customers in an organic way, you will be able to increase your sales and expand your business. A small startup budget is not a limiting factor for marketing; in fact, it is a chance to show your creativity and efficiency and make the most of a limited budget.