Five Ways to Bootstrap Marketing in a Start-Up

'Do more with less' is a mindset while working in a start-up. I live and practice this mantra every day. One must think outside the box when it comes to marketing. Here are Top 5 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 resonates with your brand. The focus is careful curation plus quality and not quantity. When you try new things on social media, run only one experiment at a time. It’s the only way to know which changed variable- for 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 about 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 for developing unique, innovative, and complex products. Video is emerging as a strong marketing tactic for reaching, educating, and nurturing potential customers. Customers love transparency between the products they buy and the people who create 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 and

creating awareness of your brand or product which helps to find product market fit and building reputation. Your website acts as a digital storefront and serves many purposes, but from an investors point 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 customers and investors, you need to build strong backlink strategy.

There is no silver bullet to achieve your marketing goals in a start-up. However, there are different ways to achieve your goals, you should always focus on the most high-impact and cost-effective

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 helps to drive target to your website. It's really
a 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 to help 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 achieve your marketing goals in a start-up. However, there are different ways to achieve your goals, you should always focus on the most high-impact and cost-effective.