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Marketing a startup even on a tiny budget

MarketingMarketing. A broad term with significant implications. When you’re creating a startup, marketing is an essential piece of the puzzle that can’t be left out if you’re hoping for major success, but the challenge often comes from the fact that most startups have little to no budget for marketing.

It’s not just the budget that presents a problem. It can also be the differentiation that needs to be understood between marketing a new business and an established one.

Below are some essential tips to help startups in nearly any industry market their new business, whether to potential customers or even to would-be investors.

 

Choose Your Market Wisely

When you’re heading up a startup, it can be easy to get excited and feel as if everyone is going to be as engaged and interested and you are, but the reality is, that’s not likely to be the case. That’s why it’s important for startups to really tailor their marketing efforts to a specific audience, particularly at first. The smaller the niche you can fit yourself into regarding marketing, the better the return on your investment is likely to be.

 

Develop Your Business Plan

What’s unique about startup marketing versus marketing for an established business is that it’s just as much about investors as it is the consumer, if not more so. A business plan can be inexpensive and can serve as your primary form of marketing when you’re in the initial stages of securing investments, so don’t put this on the backburner. Also, you need to be ready for investor follow-through, so consider implementing something like a Firmex virtual data room where you can have all of the documents and financials in one place for potential investment opportunities. Finally, once you have a strong business plan, you’ll find that you can repurpose large chunks of it for more traditional forms of marketing. For example, your proposition statement is going to be what you use as your unique value proposition to new customers as well.

 

Make It Visual

Creating videos, graphics, and other visuals are some of the best things you can do to market a startup in a way that’s going to feel accessible and easy to understand by a diverse audience, plus these can be inexpensive to create. Make sure you create visual elements and videos that highlight your new product or service and show why you’re distinctive from everything else out there.

 

Get to Know Influencers

You likely already know that social media is a low-cost and essential aspect of marketing any business, and in particular a startup, but at the same time, you need to be using it the right way. One of the best ways a startup can use social media to their marketing advantage is to connect with influencers in their industry or targeted market. Once you can build relationships with these social influencers, you can then start to introduce your product, and hopefully you will achieve the goal of “influencing the influencer” to share more about your new company.

Building a strategy for any startup is a slow process, but it’s also one that you should be consistent and steady with, and while focusing on your targeted consumer is important, so is building your marketing around investors as well, if funding is something you need to secure.

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