Low-Cost Marketing Techniques for Startups

 

If your business is a startup, you might think investing in marketing a technique is something you do when you have extra money. However, this way of thinking is counter-productive. Marketing is one of the best tools to increase your company’s flow of cash. The following are some low-cost marketing techniques startups can use.

 

Referrals

 

Referrals let your customers become your de facto marketing team. People are four times as likely to purchase a product if referred to them by someone they know and trust.

 

Having countless positive tech reviews about your product or service online is a significant first step. However, your customers prefer personal recommendations more than anything else. Setting up a system of referrals is often inexpensive and can even be free.

 

You could print inexpensive, attractive foil stickers that your customers can give their friends with referral information on them. The stickers serve as an advertisement for your brand and reward customers for being your ambassadors.

 

Offer current customers discounts or cash rewards for each person they refer to your company. Make sure that your current customers know about these programs.

 

Content Marketing

 

Content marketing sounds expensive, but it does not require a significant investment. One of the most accessible forms of content marketing is adding new blog posts to your company’s website every week or twice a week.

 

Include infographics, podcasts, and videos. These content mediums can improve the reputation of your brand. When you create quality content, you place yourself as an authority. Others trust you and turn to you when they want information about your industry. Content marketing is one of the cheap but effective digital marketing techniques that has proven to be successful for startups.

 

When creating your content marketing techniques, it is essential to keep in mind the limitations of your team in real-time. If your startup is still small, you may not be able to keep up with multiple posts every week.  You may not have the budget or know-how to start a professional podcast. Startups that are too ambitious about their content creation can often hit walls when they can’t keep up with their timelines, or the quality suffers for quantity.

 

Be sure to create content timelines that work for your content creation team, and make sure that it is content that your customers are willing to consume. Keep it relevant to your industry and always make sure to optimize your content for SEO purposes. Regularly keeping up a quality site with solid content like videos that you can create from video editing software like Pinnacle Studio 24 Ultimate. It will give customers a reason to return to your pages, and it will help new customers find you more easily.

 

Social Media Marketing

 

Social media marketing and content marketing go together. Moreover, social media marketing is more than just opening up an account with Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. To be effective, it needs to be done purposefully. That being said, you can do social media marketing for free.

 

• Invest With Time

Though social media marketing is free, you will need to invest plenty of time. Start by establishing profiles for your business across the social media sites you’d like to use. It would be best if you beefed up your profile. Create content that potential clients would like. There can be a crossover between the content you create for your website and the content that you share on social media. Always promote all of your website content on your social media profiles.

 

• Engage With Your Audience

 

With social media marketing, you don’t just throw stuff out there and see what sticks. You have to be actively engaged with your audience. That is why it is social media and not isolation media. If you put a face on your brand, you may see your audience grow into thousands of individuals who visit your site and purchase products and services from you. Staying engaged with your audience through social media can also open other avenues for marketing techniques, such as access to influencers and the ability to feature customer testimonials.

 

• Plan Your Campaigns

Before starting your social media campaigns, it is essential to keep in mind the level of detail and planning that goes into successful campaigns. Firstly, you will need to have a cohesive brand identity for your startup. If you have a logo or a company-wide font or color pallet, these things will help you build your content. Mainly, if you are using an image-based platform such as Instagram, you want to create exciting and recognizable content.

 

• Be Consistent

 

Once you have a cohesive brand identity or a firm idea of the kind of content you want to post, you will need to create a social media calendar. Regular and frequent posting on social media is a pillar of successful campaigns. Try to post once a day, and get creative with your posts. Try to make distinct posts every time you aren’t posting duplicated content or content that is too similar. Stick to a strict posting schedule; you can even set up posts to be published each day automatically, so you don’t have to worry about doing it yourself. Planning and having all the posts and captions, and even hashtags prepared will help your startup reach a wider audience and have more engagement overall.

 

Search Engine Optimization

 

If you are taking the time to create content for your website and social media, you want that content to be seen. Search engine optimization may seem shrouded in mystery, but that is because there isn’t an explicit formula for precise results, as there are with most data-driven practices. Instead, search engine optimization is a series of practices that have been shown to increase a site’s ranking on search engines such as Google. The algorithms behind Google are unknown to us as it is the property of Google and these algorithms often change over time. Therefore, SEO practices need to change over time too. That is where learning how to use specific programs and software can come in handy for tracking your site data and adapting each page as necessary.

 

With a bit of reading and dedication, you can get a firm grasp on the basics of SEO and page analysis. There are some tools online that can help you identify keywords to attract traffic to your site. You will need to tweak the content you produce to include those keywords and others similar to it.

 

Search engine optimization includes restructuring your content so that search engines can find it more accessible. It is much work. But it is work that you can do on your own to boost your marketing techniques with little to no added expense. There are many online courses about SEO and how to optimize blog posts specifically. Investing your time to learn these tricks and baking them into your everyday work with your website can show real change and improvement with your organic traffic results and potentially your conversion rates.

Conclusion

Startups have tight budgets. It is just the nature of the beast. Having a tight budget does not mean that you need to cut marketing. Instead, focus on inexpensive yet creative ways to build brand recognition. Create engaging content for your website, interact with customers on social media, and use search engine optimization to get yourself seen.