Getting eyes on your work in a saturated marketplace requires either expensive, consistent, or creative marketing – or better still, all of the above. But if you’re a small business trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you probably can’t afford a professional marketing team, so it’s up to you to figure out a low-cost alternative.
This is your opportunity to think outside the box and to use every tool at your disposal to create your own high flying flag for customers to flock to.
To help out, here are our top 7 tried and tested methods for bootstrapping marketing for your budding business.
1. Provide Value To Others
This is the key to any marketing scheme, whether big or small. Catching someone’s eye isn’t enough for them to remember your name, or to check your website. Your products should promise value that’s equal or perhaps even surpasses their monetary value, so selling your brand as an idea requires giving them something worth remembering.
Consider what kind of emotions underpin your brand identity– it could be humour, comfort, motivation, or just joy. Create content and advertising that encourages these feelings – a comfy sweater brand might build awareness by making videos of people having picnics, or camping underneath the stars. If your advertising creates the feeling you want your products to, your viewers will begin to associate the two.
And if there’s no space in your pricing model to provide additional value in your products, then why not provide value in the form of freebies via your socials or high-value content in your EDM campaign? Even something as small as knowing how to convert an image to PDF file could aid you in providing value, as any infographics you produce can be downloaded and shared between your customers. Just remember to put your business branding on any of these information-rich resources!
2. Experiment With Everything To Kickstart Your Strategizing
At this point, you may be wondering how you’d be able to provide this value to your customers. Since you don’t have many resources at your disposal, you’re going to have to get creative. Everything you have could be used to create something compelling, so spitball ideas and try it out! The worst case is that your silly TikTok or LinkedIn post doesn’t get any attention, and even that’s a learning experience.
But it can be hard to get started, so if you’re having trouble coming up with ideas at first, why not ask an AI chatbot to suggest how you could advertise your clothing brand with no budget, or look up a few video tutorials online? You’d be surprised by just how much you can benefit from a little preliminary experimentation when brainstorming ways to provide value to your digital audience.
3. Become A Social Media Superhero
Social media has quickly become one of the biggest forms of advertising, and what’s even better is that anyone can do it. Feel free to open accounts for your brand on every platform under the sun, but first drill down on one or two platforms that you know well. Start posting about you, your brand, and your products, then start following your peers – brands that are a similar size and niche.
Message your peers for collaboration, pitch ideas, chat with influencers who might like your work. Early on, your goal is to engage people, so reply to comments, support others like you, join the community. Until you build brand awareness, sales attempts will fall flat, so don’t make your product or service the focus, make a joke, a piece of art, or an entertaining video the focus instead.
4. Use your Connections & Network With Your Peers
You don’t have to work with your target audience to generate brand awareness. Sometimes generating brand awareness can be as simple as helping out your friends and family. If you’re a clothing designer, create pieces for your friends, and when they wear them out and get compliments, they’ll refer people to you. If you’re a digital marketing agency, ask your family if they know anyone with a fledgling business that might want some marketing – or ask your local deli! When you’re working with people that know and like you, they’re more likely to share your work, and it’ll be better received by the people they share it with. And that’s the power of networking: building connections that elevate communities, not just individuals.
And since you’re a business trying to grow, and you offer your help to other businesses trying to grow, you’ll be able to work together and you’ll grow together– a rising tide lifts all ships. Ask around, have a look on social media, go to local events, and meet like-minded people.
5. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
To put it simply, SEO is all about making google aware and value your brand or website. You want people to be talking about it on forums, in news articles, and anywhere else on Google. Nowadays, paying for an advertising spot on a prestigious website is more expensive than a billboard, so you have to be creative.
One way is to pitch your stories relating to your brand to journalists and hope they’ll bite. Another is to share your brand on any forum and social media you can– just like with journalists, you want a compelling hook, so spend some time learning about digital and brand storytelling.
6. Community Building
A loyal fanbase will spread the word to their friends, family and just about anyone who’ll listen. All you have to do is find the people that will love and be obsessed with your work. Look through forums like reddit and discord, find your niche and get to know them. Make your own discord for them to chat in, or try Linkedin, organise Meetups, or create an ARG (alternate reality game) with a prize at the end.
When building a fanbase, or community, it’s important not to think about selling, but to provide value through education, engagement, or entertainment. When people start enjoying your brand, they’ll be inclined to buy from it too. Understand what your potential customers like outside of your product and use that to draw them in, that will be the seed to growing your community.
7. Guerilla Marketing
Guerilla marketing is in your face, eye-catching, and inexpensive. Sounds perfect doesn’t it? The trick is to be creative about it. These could mean posting colourful posters anywhere you can, or organising a flash mob of your friends in the local food court. Surprise is the key element in guerilla marketing, so be bold and draw some attention.
Conclusion
Creativity and innovation are born through limitation, so though you may not have the money for a billboard, you could have just as much impact with a little out of the box thinking. Look around, talk to others, scheme and try new things. Sometimes it’s as simple as making someone laugh, so don’t be afraid to have fun with it either.
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