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How to Build a Marketing Strategy for Your Startup When You have less money

• Posted By Team Growcent
• On 01 June 2020
• Tag: Fundraising, Startups

As a startup founder, you may think that you need to have a lot of funds available in order to build and implement an effective marketing strategy for your new venture. Moreover, while having money is certainly helpful, it is entirely possible to craft a marketing strategy that requires minimal spending and yields worthwhile results. The key is to have the right goals in mind and know which tools can be the most effective in helping you achieve those goals.

Set some goals for your marketing efforts

Many of the startup founders may be under the assumption that they need to do marketing, but don’t have a clear idea of what that even means or why they are actually doing it. This approach to marketing is not only ineffective but also leads to wasted time, resources, and energy. With that said, knowing how to get started can be so much challenging, moreover, if you are not a marketing expert. Having a marketing strategy in place can also be essential for fundraising. If your plan is to build your product and hope that people come to it on their own, that probably would not impress investors. But if you have a marketing strategy, then you can demonstrate to investors that you are serious about your startup, and you have put strategic thought into how you are going to acquire customers and make your product a success.

Utilize the right marketing tools
With lot of marketing resources available, trying to decide which tools or methods to use can be overwhelming, especially for a startup founder. That is why it is essential to know which are most effective and does not require a great deal of spending. So, here are the three tools which you can use to build out your marketing strategy without having to shell out a lot of money.

Email
Using email is the best way to drive customers to your product and will do a lot of your job for you once you have created the right framework. Email is one of the most effective marketing tools available, and it is easy to see right away if you are generating results. There are a number of very affordable email tools out there, some of which are specially designed for startups that don’t yet require managing contacts in the millions, like Constant Contact, Zoho Mail, and Mailchimp.

Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization is one of the good example of how doing the work from the beginning can lead to long term results. There are a number of SEO best practices for your startup's website that you can put into place early on and don’t require any of the expert knowledge. Good SEO primarily comes down with couple of things: content quality, how long users engage with your content, user experience, and how easy it is to access your content.

Product launches
Product launches are also one of the best effective ways to create awareness around your product and obtain customers. Product launches are especially critical for startups because startups don’t already have a big brand reputation for leaning on like many established companies do. When it comes to launching, don’t worry about your product being perfect, because the whole idea is that the sooner you launch, the sooner you can gauge the response to your product and determine if you are actually on the right track.