Times can be challenging with a global pandemic, but if you are an entrepreneur with a good product or service that meets people’s needs and solves their problems, you can still market and advertise well while on a tight budget. You can do this with bootstrap marketing.
Bootstrapping is used in business to refer to using only existing resources when starting or growing your business. Bootstrap marketing involves creating and implementing marketing strategies using only your existing resources, such as your talents, imagination, and creativity, personal savings, existing equipment, social capital, to reach your targeted audiences and customers.
How do you do this?
Essentials of Marketing and Advertising When Bootstrapping
The first three steps below may not sound like advertising when bootstrapping yet, but they are necessary not only for advertising (which is just an aspect of marketing) but for a comprehensive and effective marketing campaign. You cannot do the fourth step effectively if you did not do the first three steps well:
Inventory your capital. Since you will be working with limited resources, you must first know what resources you will be using are. In Economics, there are three kinds of resources: land (all natural resources), labor (all human resources), and capital (all human-made resources). Most people often think only of money when the terms “capital” or even “resources” are mentioned. But, if capital is all human-made resources, that covers not just money but also time, talent, equipment, buildings, and social connections (or social capital). Write your answers down to these questions in a journal to guide you in your inventory: what land, labor, and capital resources do you currently have? For each type of resource, how is their quality, and how much are they? Brainstorm at least five ideas for how you can use these resources better to reach and connect with your target audiences and customers.
Get clear about your brand and your brand offering. Your “brand” is who you are as a person and as a business. It is not just your business colors, cards, logos, website, or even your products or services. These are just the media to communicate your brand, but they are not your brand. If you are not clear about your brand essence, you might have confusing messages in your media communications. You can think of your brand as your energies, your main qualities, what you value as well as the value you offer to others, and what you stand for. Take Kaye Putnam’s brand quiz and study your results to get more clarity on your brand. After you get clearer on your brand, examine how your products and services (or your brand offering) are an extension of your brand as well as a platform for communicating your brand. This is important for you to do effective marketing and advertising in any circumstance, especially when bootstrapping.
Thoroughly understand your customers. Have you done your research on your customer market’s demographics and psychographics? Who are they (age, sex, civil status, location, income level, educational level, occupation)? What are their interests, goals/desires, and challenges/problems? How do your brand and your brand offering meet their interests and desires and help overcome their challenges and solve their problems? With the Internet, it is easier to do your market research on your own now. After you have collected the data, verify these with your existing customers by asking them if the information you have gathered about them and your understanding of them is correct.
Connection is key. This is the part where you come up with and implement the appropriate marketing and advertising strategies when bootstrapping. The main point of all marketing and advertising is to communicate to your customer market who you are (your brand) and what you have to offer (your brand offering). Therefore, you must connect with your customer market in effective, meaningful, and relevant ways. This will help them overcome their challenges and solve their problems at more value for the money they pay you.
This is important to always keep in mind as this is the thread that connects all your marketing and advertising efforts to your customers’ interests, desires, needs, and problems by impressing upon them the value of your brand offering and your brand.
Advertising When Bootstrapping
Here are three recommended basic strategies to market and advertise while bootstrapping:
Start connecting from the ground. Even if your business is mainly online, start with your offline contacts and networks, especially if they form part of your customer market. Join business associations, volunteer at non-profits, talk to people and get your brand offering out there as a potential solution to people’s problems. The people you talk to might not be your potential customers themselves, but they might be connected to your potential customers in some way. You might even want to consider partnering with some businesses that offer different products and services but serve the same customer market as yours in hosting events for your common customer market and their communities.
Build and grow an email list through your website, and provide your email subscribers with value through the content that you provide with email newsletters and freebies or discounts you may offer. The point of an email list is not to sell your products and services outright but, again, to build connection: for your potential customers to know you and trust you and see what you offer as helping them with their needs and problems.
Advertise through social media even without paid advertising. Be strategic in the social media platforms you choose: they have to be the platforms your target customer market themselves actively use. Then, be strategic in the content you post and your social media account design: they all have to support your brand and brand offering and speak to your customers’ deepest interests, desires, needs, and problems.
Initially, a bootstrap was a tab or handle at the back of a tall, tight pair of boots that the wearer pulls to help get their feet into the boots, which was an arduous task. Today, in business and finance, it means achieving success on your own even if you don’t have much money yourself. When done right, marketing and advertising, when bootstrapping, can launch you towards that success.
