Zero Budget Marketing Hacks for Startups

Marketing is essential for the success of a business. From onboarding new clients to moving them further down the funnel, you cannot build a business unless you market it well.

Startups have limited resources and access to capital. If they are not careful, they can burn their hands with unjustifiable marketing spends which do not deliver much. However, the lack of money ignites the spark of creativity and entrepreneurs find ways around doing more with less.

In this article, we explain how you can effectively market your product or service with a virtually zero budget.

Build an Email List

In today’s time, one cannot expect to get sales in the very first meeting. The clients have gotten smarter, and so should the marketers. Instead of always speaking about what you have to offer, you have to start caring for your prospective clients and deliver value much before they start paying you.

One effective way to do so is by building an email list at your first touchpoint with the prospective buyer. If you are attracting traffic to your website or app, think about placing the email subscription button to let someone opt-in to get your updates. The key is to be in touch with them and create a recall value through the content you deliver in their inbox.

Remain Active on Social Media

Gone are the days when people would look into your product or service and make the decision to buy immediately. Customers today are more aware and research thoroughly before making a purchase. One way to do so is to look at the experience of others through social media reviews. Social media is not an option anymore- it’s instead a compulsion to build a robust digital footprint.

It is an uphill task to create a social media presence overnight. Still, if you take small steps of posting relevant content consistently on your social media handles, you can create a significant impact over time. The frequency of content creation can be low as 2-3 times a week but remember in over a year, your brand will have a much stronger presence online. You may occasionally promote some offers organically or with a bit of paid boost.

Record Video Testimonials

Video testimonials are becoming the biggest influencers in boosting the customer’s buying intent. Although the internet is full of them, yet they are very useful because they are really brand specific and speak about your unique abilities as a business. Unless you do it, you won’t believe how powerful they can be.

The best part is that they are incredibly easy to shoot on a mobile device and you can use them across platforms like brand’s website, Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn pages and Messenger broadcasts say WhatsApp etc.

Run Webinars

Webinars are an incredible channel of marketing to a prospective customer. Whatever your area of expertise is, you can have an audience that connects well with what you know. If you bring value to the table, people will listen to you and take action on your call, period.

We’ve seen many small/ medium businesses to big enterprises run webinars every fortnight for bringing mass awareness with small groups of 50-60 people to large groups of 500 people or more. The topics you choose should benefit your audiences directly or indirectly and empower them with what they do not know already. Even better- these webinars you record can be used later to sensitize more groups.

Write a Blog Regularly

If you aren’t writing content regularly, you are missing a big opportunity right now. All the leading search engines rank you more on the content quality than any other conscious efforts you would have heard of. If the content you produce solves customers’ pain points, it’s even better.

There are free tools available online, which even let you know what topics you should be focussing on and what your competitors are doing. You don’t have to be the best writer ever- the key is consistency again. Writing 1 article a week consistently for a year is much better than exhausting yourself with 5 pieces in the first week and not writing anything for the next 6 months. 

Bottomline

Use these 5 free marketing hacks to create very effective and virtually zero budget marketing channels that serve you over the long term. And the best part is that these channels would always fall in line with your business thesis of educating your prospects first and converting them later.