If you’ve just launched a startup, it’s unlikely that you will have a huge budget to spend on marketing to increase awareness of your brand. You may find yourself struggling to develop an effective marketing strategy within the limitations of your tiny budget.
If you find yourself struggling, it’s time to get a little more creative. It is possible to start to raise awareness of your brand and products without a huge marketing investment at the start.
Once your startup begins to bring in revenue, you can reinvest this into paid marketing methods. But for right now, if you’re looking for cost effective marketing strategies to grow your newly launched business, you’re in the right place!
There are plenty of steps that you need to take to start establishing your startup’s presence and raising awareness of it, both locally and online.
Read on for our top 10 budget friendly marketing tips that you can easily implement for your startup:
1. Place fabric displays/banner stands at local sponsored events in your niche of business.
This will help give you local exposure and will be directly targeted at people who you know are already interested in your business category.
2. Create a range of display boards which showcase your promotional offers, and are easily updated when new offers are on.
Place these in high traffic locations in the area you’re operating in to drive interest and footfall.
3. Develop large PVC banners and display these stretched along railings featuring the details of your product or service.
It is important to work carefully on the creative design and messaging o ensure that it represents your business effectively
4. Backlit banners in the window to place advertising.
The backlit feature will be effective at attracting the attention of passersby at night.
5. Design low-cost website for your business that you can build yourself.
Spend some time learning about SEO and tweaking your website so that is fully optimised for search.
6. Develop a strong stream of relevant content to drive organic traffic to your site.
Blogging is one of the simplest yet most effective ways of driving people to your website. The more high quality content you post the more visitors you’re likely to receive. If you successfully identify relevant keywords and create content around that, you could end up receiving a high amount of organic traffic. And, it’s totally free!
7. Run a Facebook campaign targeted at specific audiences, age ranges and your target demographic.
This social platform can be really helpful in targeting and testing which content and messaging works. It is a relatively low cost platform to advertise in. The fact that you can really define your target means that you’re not wasting money reaching people who definitely won’t be interested in your brand. Establish your online presence on other social media channels such as Instagram and Twitter as well. If you publish great content on there, then you could grow a big online audience for free.
8. Generate word of mouth publicity with free samples/giveaways/trials/testers.
If customers love your product, they’re bound to talk about it.
9. Create a range of low cost leaflets/flyers to circulate in the local area.
You can use this method to announce the launch of a local business. You do need to ensure that the quality of the print is high, as the leaflet may be the first time a potential customer is exposed to your brand.
10. Invest in some professional looking business cards to hand out when you visit networking events.
High-quality business cards can be printed out fairly cheaply, and networking is an important marketing tool as you are the face of your own business.
If you’re looking for quality print solutions in the UK, Colour Graphics offer a range of affordable options for banner printing. Visit their website to find out more.
