You’ve spent countless hours setting up your start-up and you’re sure that you have a product or service that people will love. However, you may run into a common problem of people not being aware of your company.
If this is the case, you will struggle to gain traction. If you don’t have funding, you should be well aware how to market on a budget beyond Google AdSense and online banner advertising. Try these strategies to help your company stand out from the crowd.
Be as focused as possible
IT’s a fairly good rule of thumb to be highly
specialized when conducting your business, and this is true with your marketing
strategy. You should build your credibility by isolating niches that you can
fulfill and then focus your strategy around them. Create a company culture that
offers support to those operating in the niches that you identify and offer
laymen detailed information. Ideally, make this standalone or run it alongside
your product or service and help them in their quest for a solution to their
problems. You can do this with free blogs, webinars, podcasts, as well as
speaking at niche events to listeners that can understand your high level of
detail. You can also demonstrate your expertise via forums –
think Quora or Reddit, but make sure you keep your
efforts up consistently. It can look highly amateur if you try hard for a few
weeks and then give up. Any user that sees an account that used to be active is
no longer, can assume at best that the company is a little unprofessional and
at worst out of business.
Make sure you know your SEO
As part of a good SEO strategy, your website should
have good original content that can provide value for your visitors. However,
content that you worked hard to produce will be compiled in vain if there is
nobody drawn to your website to view it. Every post you publish should be
keyword-researched, which you can do with Google’s free keyword planning tool.
You can use hyper-targeted keywords to help you acquire a regular audience, and
the more niche you are with your keywords the better. However, SEO is a
difficult beast to tame, and even if you’re not in the financial position to
hire an SEO professional, it’s highly recommended that you at least make the
most of digital advertising
courses that can help you learn how to run and maintain a DIY
digital advertising and marketing campaign.
You should implement a mixture of bright and
exciting marketing ideas and old standards like coupons and special offers. You
should know exactly who you’re selling to by developing and investigating brand
personas for your products and services and then think of
interesting ways to approach them. Take the concept of guerrilla
marketing strategy as inspiration. If you can think
of any equivalents, you should implement them at the same time as a more
general multi-media approach across channels. The aim is to make sure that your
brand is on a customer’s mind, and the best way to do this is to tackle them
through every angle you can.
