When looking to start a business, you’ll need to allocate much of your budget to marketing. If you already have a fully-fledged product, then no doubt this has crossed your mind. So a smart thing to do would be to market your startup in the most cost-effective way possible. But how do you do that? In this article, we will go over that.
Email Marketing
If you’re looking at just how big your marketing budget should be, then you’ll read conflicting reports on the internet. Some say it should be 7 to 8% of your total revenue, while others put it much bigger. According to Hubspot, every startup’s marketing budget should be exactly 11.2% of the total revenue.
This, although a specific number, will allow startups to go ahead with marketing strategies and build brand awareness. But what strategies are the most cost-effective when it comes to results?
You’ve probably heard about email marketing. Everyone uses email – this is one advantage that this strategy has over any other. Regardless if using it for work or for personal use, everyone uses email as tons of services require it. Without one, you could never create an account with Facebook, YouTube, or any other popular service.
Email marketing is all about sending emails to your clients. But how do you get emails to send mails to? Well, that is the tricky part. To be effective at email marketing, businesses have to start working on something called “a mailing list”. A mailing list is a list that people sign up to. They do this by willingly giving you their email address.
You can do this by offering them something in return – such as a free resource like a book, a tutorial, or anything else. The more your mailing list grows, the more customers sign up. And that means more people to send emails to.
Power Up A Blog
A blog can be an excellent marketing resource for your startup. How? Well, startups usually specialize in a particular field. Especially tech startups, the need to understand what they do and what their products and services do is essential. So what better way to explain to your customer what your startup is all about than to do it via a blog post?
A blog is not only a cost-effective way to market your startup but one that helps lower costs. A blog can be used with many other sources such as social media. By writing blog posts and publishing them on your website, you can market the same posts by posting them on social media.
This is not only a great way to explain what you are, but you also earn something in return. A blog shouldn’t take priority when starting your startup, but it can become an excellent revenue stream if you grow it constantly.
Social Media
We briefly touched on social media and how you can market your blog there, but social media platforms can be quite powerful marketing tools on their own. Nowadays, social media platforms are perfectly capable of acting as your startup’s main advertising hub. Everything goes through social media and everyone uses it.
By creating accounts with multiple platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, you will make it possible to stay in touch with millions of customers. The reach of social media platforms cannot be underestimated. Facebook has more than 2.8 billion active users, with India, the United States, and Indonesia being the three leading countries based on audience.
Twitter and Instagram aren’t so bad as well. Both have 300 million and one billion active users respectively. So that means social media platforms offer your startup not only a cost-effective way to market your business but one that offers unprecedented reach.
Networking
Networking remains until this day an excellent and cost-effective method to market your startup. This form of advertisement is all about meeting like-minded individuals related to your field and doing business with them. Considering that all business is good business, you can do all kinds of things to successfully network.
From attending trade shows, expos, seminars, workshops, and all kinds of similar events, to using social media, networking allows startups to advertise themselves nearly for free. But there is a catch. You will need to find these events and work on your sales pitch to promote your startup. In most cases, you will end up spending some money to attend and even perhaps be part of these events yourself.