Low on cash and
don’t know much about marketing? Don't Fret, Maybe I can help. This situation pretty much described me a few
years back. Starting out in my first few ventures on a tight budget, I knew
nuts about marketing and my branding suffered, my products didn't gain
significant traction and eventually winded. Moving on, pushing my first
Startup, I took special interest in Accounts Management, Digital Marketing and
Social Media. Through many nights of hard work experimenting the most effective marketing formula, this marketing to-do-list that I personally formulated guided me to millions of page views which eventually converted to useful leads for my start-up and in turn progressed into valuable transactions! That was when I knew I had to share this list.
I won’t claim this
to be the best guide to marketing but it did help me out when I first started
on a shoestring.
1. Focus on Customer
experience
2. Email campaign
3. Use Twitter
4. Quality content
creation
5. Cross promotions
6. Let buyers and
repeated customer promote you
7. Traditional Media
still works
8. Research your own
Market
9. You are the Public
Relation Manager
1 Focus on Customer Experience
Building vitality in your business model means you focus on customers,
by that, it's coming down to building an excellent service/product people want
to use and will talk to their family and friends about. Staying in close
contact to your main customer base, listen to feed backs, learn from what they
like and don't and kept iterating on your product/services with the purpose to
improve on customer's experience. At the end of the day, your customer will be
saying things like "their products are great" and "they always
listen and push those new features in their next product version"
2 Email campaign
Remember the time you read an email subject and realized the content is
nothing you want to see? Yeah, that's what we don't want to be. It could be a
time to inform new features of your product, spread the words about your
company, freebies to give or simply an email to tell the customers that they
are still fondly remembered, email campaigns are a great way to go. Besides
having that personal touch, emails has a number of services (free and paid) for
you to track - sent to spam, monitor bounce, clicks per page so that you can
check which options works for your company.
3. Use Twitter (think of it like a quick SMS to Clients)
When I first started using Twitter, I am totally clueless and after a
few rounds of experiments, I started thinking - hey, let's use it like a quick
SMS system to communicate with Clients. In several small businesses I worked
with, many participated in campaigns using Twitter, asking users quizzes of
their products for the chance to win prizes - it's a quick and easy way to stay
engage with your customers. In my personal experience, I found weekly updates
of product features and beta-tester opportunities works really well for us.
4. Quality Content Creation
We all love dragon slaying stories and building your brand is no
different. What really work is to push out quality content than quantity. Sure,
that certain blogger is always giving mention of products on a daily basis but
does your existing customer care about daily updates or only significant
updates of key features? Have a look at IBM and Google on the content they
created on LinkedIn and Facebook, they position their brands as subject-matter
expert on certain topics (usually once weekly) to build that client trust than
any actual selling. This creates a community of like-minded individual
commenting and adding creditability to these topics - promoting your brand and
your organization knowledge.
5.Cross promotion
Look at your target user closely and the communities they might be in -
forums, Linkedin groups, Facebook pages etc. Next, think about how you can
introduce some parts of your product features in these communities. For
example, if you are targeting alternative word processor users - perhaps you
can promote it in IT hardware tech support forum. Write to these communities
and sites directly offering to promote them on your site and in return, ask for
them to give you areas of mention or even for you to provide some content for
them. It's a win-win situation as you provide content for their audiences and
they promote you at no extra costs.
6. Let buyers and repeated customers promote you
Promote your product/services to popular buyers such as bloggers and
celebrities (if you get connected to any) or just genuine buyers with a hobby
blog. Do make sure the buzz you are trying to create is authentic and invite
these customers to limited preview of your product/services and they will
generate interest for you. In my early ventures, I met someone who wrote to
local bloggers and celebrities every day using just her website. She eventually
met someone whom featured her products on YouTube, leading it to a local media
programme and later, onto a magazine column.
7. Traditional media still works
Behind brilliant marketing concepts lies a great business story, and a
great story attracts media exposure and coverage. Believe it or not,
traditional media still works. Now the question is, how should you tap on it?
Be sharp in your focus and create something personal, authentic and newsworthy
on your products. Promote your company via traditional media source such as
newspaper. You can't guarantee conversation to sales but your brand will
certainly gain awareness
8. Research your own market
Knowing your competitions, their clientele and their brand story will
help ensure your business is differentiated from them. On top of that, if
competition is intense between you and a certain brand, knowing their trends
and marketing strategy will help signficantly. There are specialized tools
(mostly paid) that you can use to analyze and track your competitions so that
you may understand your own market sector better.
9. You are the Public Relations Manager
In my first few ventures, I wore many hats - financial, marketing, sales
and even PR. I learnt from experience that many media sources (traditional and
digital) are more willing to grant you a story as an official PR representative
than cofounder. Media sources doesn't want to hear how the inventor of the new
Phone is using state of the art technology only available to NASA, but how this
"paper thin" phone is so light you will forget it is even there -
they want to hear a story they can relate to. Just remember to wear the right
hat when talking to Media sources.
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