How to Market Your Startup on a Shoestring Budget
You have a great idea. You know it, your team knows it. But you need EVERYONE to know about it. How are you going to spread the word when you are on a tight budget trying to maximize every dollar? Here are three easy (and effective) ways you can market your startup on a shoestring budget.
You have a great idea. You know it, your team knows it. But you need EVERYONE to know about it. How are you going to spread the word when you are on a tight budget trying to maximize every dollar?
Here are three easy (and effective) ways you can market your startup on a shoestring budget.
1. Develop Your Personal Brand
It was your knowledge, skills, and personality that led you into this business. Your personal brand is the fastest way to build a trusting relationship between your company and your potential clients, users, or customers. Nail. It. Down.
Demonstrate thought leadership.
Know what your area of expertise is and pick the best channel to share it. Are you a social media whiz? Then you better be the first one tweeting when Instagram introduces “stories” and when Twitter removes photos from its character count!
Just like every brand needs a voice, so do you.
Finding your voice takes practice but, once you have it, people will be able to appreciate your sense of professionalism, quirkiness, or whatever it is that you bring to the table. Every word counts.
Literally brand yo’self.
You need to know what colors, fonts, and things describe YOU. If you create your own website to share your expertise, you might want your own logo and colour scheme that can follow you wherever your career takes you.
Know what makes you unique and find a way to share that.
Outside of work, my life tends to revolve around coffee, cute stationery, and travel. Your audience wants to know YOU. That’s what takes your company from a logo to a team of real people.
Personal branding comes down to showing people who you are, and why they should trust the company that you put your blood, sweat, and tears into. People trust people, it’s that simple.
2. Find Partners That Will Help You Promote Your Brand For You
You did the research. You know that there is a group of people out there that want or need your product, service, or expertise! Find the organizations that share similar interests, but aren’t competitors, and turn them into community partners.
Make the relationship mutually beneficial.
Don’t go on your profiles, guns a blazing, and start spamming every inbox you can find hoping that someone, anyone, will say yes. Be strategic. Make a list of organizations that you think would actually benefit from promoting your company. How can you test whether the relationship makes sense? Ask yourself if you would feel comfortable promoting their content too!
Don’t feel comfortable asking for support? Just start promoting.
You don’t need permission. Their content is out there for the world to see, so start sharing it. Show your potential partners that you are invested in promoting their interests and that you see alignment with your brand. It will make asking for support that much easier.
Once you have a few solid community partners, keep those relationships strong. As you promote each other’s content, you will have developed a free brand ambassador.
3. Live Tweet at Events
There are so many different free Meetup groups, workshops, and lunch and learns in our community. Looking to increase engagement with your brand? There really is no better time to be tweeting than at an event that aligns with what you do.
Cut through the noise and tweet to your target audience.
If you send a tweet using an event hashtag or handle, suddenly your posts aren’t lost in the abyss of the entire Twittersphere. Instead, you speak to a smaller, relevant community where people are actually paying attention. You’ve just sent a targeted tweet without paying a cent.
Engage with other attendees.
If you find the pace of live tweeting overwhelming (which it can be) take a few breaks and engage with others who are posting. These are the people you want in your network! Follow the event hashtag and reply, retweet, and follow away. Who knows, maybe you will find a potential customer or community partner!
Find relevant followers quickly.
If you are in the stages of building an audience, this is one of the fastest ways to do it. General hashtags are useful, but you are still likely to attract a few “spammers” who are looking for literally anyone to follow them. If you want real, local followers with a true interest in your brand, engaging in social media conversations at events is a must.
Most free events only run an hour or two and are a great way to maximize the value of your time when resources are tight!
Effective marketing doesn’t have to be expensive! How do you market your startup?
Header photo by Jenn Richardson
Social Media Tips to Help You Promote Your Next Event
Social media is a powerful tool for engaging your audience and teaching them why they should attend your next event. In our first contribution to the Event Planning Toolkit, we cover three social media marketing strategies to help you get the right people in the room and to create buzz for events.
Social media is a powerful tool that not only lets you talk to your audience directly, but also lets you promote your next event. In this first blog post for our Event Planning Toolkit, we cover three social media marketing tips to help you get the right people in the room and create buzz for your events.
1. Create social media accounts for large events
Social media isn’t just intended for organizations. Your event deserves a voice too! Creating separate social media accounts for large events, such as conferences, will help you engage attendees and build a community year after year. It also makes it easier to build buzz and leverage past attendees to spread the word! They can also ask questions, reach out to others and set up meetings, and get a feel for the types of other attendees who will be “in the room”, so to speak.
The A100 organizes an annual conference called AccelerateAB. Both the organization and the event have social media accounts and they leverage one another to promote the event.
2. Create unique and memorable event hashtags
Event hashtags make it easy for social media users to follow conversations about your event. It’s important to make your hashtag unique, memorable and as short as possible (every character counts!)
Branch Out Neurological Foundation used #BranchyBikeTour rather than just #BikeTour so that its conversations didn’t get lost amongst the hundreds of other bike tours taking place around the same time.
Ensure your hashtag is listed on all of your event communications and marketing materials. This includes directional signage, attendee programs and table signage, to name a few.
Extra Tip: When attendees purchase tickets, encourage them to tell others and make it even easier by giving them a scripted post with the hashtag. For example:
Just purchased my ticket to #AccelerateAB! Looking forward to spending the day with the Alberta tech community on April 27 in Edmonton!
3. Use Click-to-Tweet to make it easy for others to promote your event
Want to make it even easier for busy people to start talking and tweeting about your event? Create easy-to-use Click-to-Tweets. Click-to-Tweet is a free tool that enables people to instantly publish your pre-scripted tweet with the push of a button. Here’s an example:
To create your own Click-to-Tweets:
- Go to Click-to-Tweet.com and “Sign in with Twitter”
- Write your tweet into the white message box and click “Generate New Link”. You will be provided with a shortened URL.
- You can either share this URL or hyperlink the tweet into an email or document so the reader can see the content before clicking
- Once the hyperlinked tweet is clicked, it will go directly to the individual's Twitter account
- At this point, they can either instantly post the pre-scripted content, or customize it before sharing
Now you are ready to get social!
Just remember, events are intended to be community builders. Engage your community online and prepare for your community to naturally expand as people start conversations about your event. Talk about building buzz!
Good luck!
-Team Catalystica