Market Your Start-Up Business – The 5 most cost-effective ways

You’ve just started your own business. Great! But, now you need to market it – and you don’t know-how. It would be brilliant if there was a guaranteed way to spend X amount of money on marketing and get Y leads in return. Alas, there isn’t. However, we have got 5 of the most cost-effective ways to market your start-up business here. Hopefully, by the end, you’ll have a good idea of where to begin your journey into marketing your business!

Content Marketing

Content marketing focuses on creating and posting relevant content that attracts your audience, and essentially, keeps bringing them back. This can drive profitable customer action. You’re should be giving your customers the information they’re interested in, rather than a sales pitch.

Content marketing doesn’t require significant investment. One fairly straightforward way of content marketing to market your start-up business is a blog. You should try managing a blog that you are adding new content to a number of times a week that will entertain or inform readers. You could also do this in the form of videos, infographics, or perhaps even a podcast. All of these forms of content marketing can improve your brand reputation and increase traffic.

Market your start-up business through Referrals

Unsurprisingly, people are FOUR times more likely to buy a product when it’s referred to them by a friend – even if they have searched high and low online for reviews on the exact same product or service. People still trust personal recommendations much more than anything else. So, you should definitely start getting family and friends to refer you to their family and friends – think of the domino effect!

However, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Word of mouth can’t be bought – not necessarily, anyway. But you could establish some kind of referral programme. Say, for example, each customer that successfully refers another customer to you can get a discount off the next product/service they buy from you. Only a small incentive – you still need to be making a profit, but big enough that they will go out of their way to properly refer their friend.

Social Media Marketing

Social media has had a huge impact on all of our lives, whether that’s personal or professional. It’s not optional for businesses anymore – it’s a necessity. It’s a free (mostly) and effective way to talk directly to your customers, create brand awareness and deliver customer service – how could you say no to that?

The thing is, when you’re trying to market your startup business, it’s not realistic to think you will be able to invest a lot of your time into social media. So what you should do is focus the time that you do have on social media platforms where your target audience is most likely to be.

However, there are social media scheduling tools out there to help you do this. These tools can drastically help you to manage the content that goes out on all of your social media platforms and help you with Being Productive With Your Work Time.

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PPC Ads

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads aren’t the cheapest of ways to market your start-up business – but they for sure can be cost-effective. Whilst it can get expensive if you’re targeting keywords that hit a lot of traffic, but there are ways that are friendly even to the most budget-conscious start-up. The bonus is that with Pay-Per-Click you can see enquiries within in time as short as hours. There’s no waiting for a customer to open a newspaper!

That said, it needs to be well planned, implemented and monitored correctly. Did you know that a PPC campaign that’s running well is up to 61% more effective than traditional marketing methods? This could be key when you’re trying to market your startup business.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a way to reach your customers. It can be a super valuable tool to market your start-up business. Still one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies around, some even claim email marketing gives a Return On Investment of 400%! If you have a good email list and a steady stream of outgoing emails (although, not too many) you should be able to see a return on any time or money you put into your email marketing.

This is where content marketing comes into play. By using something as simple as pop-ups on your website, you can offer an incentive for those who sign up to your mailing list. This incentive could perhaps be a free e-book that you have created – a step by step guide to something relevant to your business tends to work well. Alternatively, the incentive could be a discount on a product/service of yours! There are many options to chose from.

However, it’s not just as simple as sending out a decent email consistently. Think about the number of marketing emails you get every day – how many do you actually open? What does it take for you to open the email, or are you only clicking on it to get rid of the little ‘1’ notification? What does it take for you to unsubscribe? You’ve got to grab your reader’s attention straight away and make it relevant and interesting enough for them to stay subscribed.