Most small business owners are constantly looking for ways to engage in low-cost marketing to grow their business with minimal investment. As marketing is all about cost and ROI, some business owners with limited to no budgets resort to bootstrap marketing to increase their market share and boost sales.
Choosing the proper marketing techniques to launch your business is vital. Putting in an extra effort to get the best practices saves you the costly mistakes and endless debt most people experience while building their companies.
Implementing digital marketing techniques such as SEO marketing, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, and Mobile marketing are easy and cost-effective methods to promote your brand if you are starting from the ground up.
Below are several effective tactics you can apply to run an effective marketing campaign on a bootstrapped budget.
Focus on and Incentivize your Target Customers
The main idea behind marketing is to attract and retain new customers. Instead of using an impractical advertising method to the whole world, you need to target your marketing to reach the right customers using a combination of digital and physical marketing techniques.
These can include the use of demographic information or buyer habits to present the right products or services to your potential clients. Once you have established your potential marketing base, it is time to use a well-thought-out strategy to launch your marketing plan while showing your customers that their loyalty is appreciated.
Spending more time understanding and rewarding customer loyalty will teach you about their tastes and preferences regarding your products. Incentives may include;
- Creating a frequent buyer program to enhance brand loyalty,
- Sending coupons and gift cards on an annual basis,
- Giving away free samples as appreciation for their business,
- Running contests that gift the winners, and
- Designing webinars,
- Teleconferencing, or
- Local workshops for the target customers.
Invest in Social Media
The rise of social media networks provides brands and bootstrapped businesses alike with a cheap, practical ways to engage large audiences in a short amount of time. Marketers have great opportunities to advertise directly to a very receptive audience close to these products.
However, you must ensure that you use the right social media channels to ensure that you post frequently and constantly engage with them. To gain the most benefit from social media marketing, you must put together content that is relevant and useful to the customers’ needs.
Ensure that you understand the audience to be able to provide relevant and helpful information as you incorporate visual content and powerful presence on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. There many ways you can use social media for marketing your business. One way is to create a YouTube channel and post videos of your products and slot in Q&A sessions to handle common customer questions.
You can also create and manage a Facebook page for your business, list it on Google Places, and create a Pinterest board with images of your products and services. You can even start a blog and encourage customers to participate in conversations on topics that interest them.
Engage in Email marketing
Email marketing is one of the economical ways that you can use to enhance brand awareness and recognition. Different types of email marketing types that you can use include dedicated emails, brand story mails, engagement emails, welcome emails, and email newsletters. Though it will not yield immediate success, building an email list is one of the creative methods that would generate any small business success over time.
To do this, first build an email list by signing up for an email marketing service that will enable you to acquire email addresses, send out targeted marketing messages and track the responses. You can enhance this by offering subscribers discounts, providing sound advice and information on market trends and products, creating a periodic email newsletter, and offering free downloads when customers sign up.
Use SEO Marketing
SEO marketing is very effective for improving website traffic quality and quantity and create brand exposure through non-paid search engine operations. A working knowledge of SEO techniques is essential to ensure that your site stays informative. Good SEO practices help your site remains relevant and ranks highly on search engines for relevant keywords, driving more traffic to your website.
This type of marketing is also helpful in evaluating the demand for a product and establishing the required empathy you can use to support copywriting activities. Unpaid search results from search engines cover more digital sites and appear more credible to tech-savvy searchers and, as a result, attract more clicks than paid advertisements.
Create Great Videos
Videos attract more views, shares, and leads than any other type of content. As a result, videos create more opportunities for you to convert visitors into customers and buyers. YouTube demos used to advertise various ordinary products have attracted thousands of followers online.
If you are on a bootstrapped budget, you only need a camera and simple editing software to create a video that has the potential of reaching thousands of viewers, some of which may be your intended audience.
Videos help you to incorporate as much information into a limited time while at the same time allowing you to engage your audiences powerfully using a combination of visual and audio elements. You could also create a video using a smartphone if your budget doesn’t allow for a camera, videographer, or professional editing.
The upside is that you can add a human touch to virtual relationships through product transparency. Subscribers and fans can easily follow how you make a product. As a result, several benefits eventually accrue from allowing customers to enjoy the transparency of seeing the people who create the products, which builds trust and loyalty to your brand.
Go Mobile
Cell phones are a form of marketing in their own right, and technology has advanced to the point they can now be a wiser part of any marketing strategy. Advertising on smartphones is a convenience that allows you to market your business at low rates. This may involve engaging in mobile ad networks that have relatively small fees associated with them.
For business owners, it is crucial to recognize the potential of connecting with customers via smartphones and cell phones. With location-based mobile services and apps reaching billions of smartphone users globally, mobile marketing has become the most effective and inexpensive method of getting new leads and customers, even for a small-scale bootstrapped company.
Starting a business on a shoestring is an exciting but challenging task. The digital marketing techniques listed above will enable you to connect with your customers and engage them toward developing a positive experience about your company.
