Five Ways For Bootstrapping Marketing In A Startup

With 22 years of experience in Enterprise Technology Marketing, Sowmya is an expertise in go-to-market strategy, account based marketing, and market research & influencer relations.

Do More with Less’ is a mindset and working in startup, I live and practice this mantra every day. One must be willing to think outside the box when it comes to marketing. Here are Top five ways you can effectively kick start and run marketing on a shoe string budget:

1.Create Meaningful Connections via Social Media: You can start by creating an editorial calendar and tag expert content that can be shared on your social media feeds. You can scour the internet for interesting content to share that establishes your expertise and create a voice that is resonates with your brand. The focus is careful curation + quality and not quantity. When you try new things on social media, only run one experiment at a time. It’s the only way to know which changed variable e.g., frequency, timing, and content type has the impact you were expecting.

2.Build a Video Strategy for Deeper Customer Engagement: A study says, 65 percent of people are visual learners, which means one good video is worth a thousand words for them. This stat is important for start ups that are developing unique, innovative, and complex products. Video is also emerging as a strong marketing tactic for reaching, educating, and nurturing potential customers. Customers love feeling transparency between the products their buying and the people who are creating them. LinkedIn says that its users share a video as many as 20 times on the platform’s feed, more than any other content format, while video marketing campaigns can generate view rates as high as 50 percent.

3.Get Search Engine Optimization(SEO)Right: SEO can help scaling customer acquisition, creating awareness of your brand or product, helps finding product market fit and building reputation. Your website acts as a digital storefront and serves many purposes, but from an investor standpoint of view it must explain what you do; show your offering in action and most importantly, tell a story (vision, purpose, values). It is important to know how your website appears in the search results and what accompanies it. To appeal to customers and investors, you need to build strong backlink strategy.

Seo Can Help Scaling Customer Acquisition, Creating Awareness Of Your Brand Or Product, Helps Finding Product Market Fit And Building Reputation

4. Invest in Content Marketing:Content marketing is all about producing high quality content that helps nurturing your prospects. Content assets such as blogs are great for increasing your website's organic traffic and awareness of your brand. Each blog should be optimized for a long tail keyword term, as this will help to drive targeted to your website. It's a really easy way to increase startup's digital footprint and start building its name.

5.Offer a Free or Trial Version of your Offering: You can offer free/trial/ starter pack version of your product or service to let prospects try before they buy. As they use them, it helps you build your roadmap and include features that can be released for full version. It's all about lowering the customer's cost of acquisition. There is no silver bullet to achieving your marketing goals in a startup. While there are different ways to achieve your goals, you should always focus on the most high impact and cost-effective.