How to Promote Your Start-up Without Spending Too Much?
Tuesday, September 17, 2019, 6:00 AM | Leave Comment
Starting a small business is a brave decision and you may need an Immediate cash loan or a small business loan to bolster the prospects right from the beginning.
However, it is important to map out a strategy and a marketing funnel to make the business self-sustaining in the long run.
Start-ups are no different and a little promotion and advertising can go a long way in establishing a strong footprint in social media.
The trick is to start with your immediate social circle which includes your friends and family followed by your colleagues and other acquaintances. To tap into this circle, the best way is to do an interview or a short video explaining your product or service.
Surely, the rules are different for different industries but make no mistake, public interest can be generated without too much analysis.
All products and services, after all, concern the same entity- people. So, go all out on your efforts to make your brand or business stand out.
Now, let’s take a quick look at the various ways to reach out to more people beyond your immediate circle:
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Represent Your Business
One of the primary steps includes creating a presence for your business on platforms other than social media as the business community requires a separate digital representation.
A few websites where you can list your business for free are-
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a) Google My Business,
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b) Yahoo,
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c) Bing
The important thing is to identify listing and similar review websites that are most suitable to your business. This will help you to reach out to your target audience efficiently. A business may require funds that may not have been planned for in the beginning. In such situations, a healthy period of credit can come to your rescue. Many online companies are today, offering credit cards from different banks on the same platform where you can compare and choose the credit card most suited to your needs.
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Utilize Free Ad credits
There are free Ad credits that are awarded to businesses for making the most of their beginning on websites. Some of these are paid websites but still free ad credits are provided to you for increasing your reach and getting to know the benefits of marketing to a wider audience. You can check out the following websites and platforms for this purpose-
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a) Yelp,
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b) LinkedIn,
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c) Google Ads,
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d) Craigslist
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Leveraging Public Relations:
Make a list of the publications that you want to target for media coverage of your business. No publication is too big as they are all looking for interesting news stories to be covered. From these publications, make a note of the journalists writing specific columns and pieces , thereby giving you an idea of who are your possible story-tellers.
Establish connect with them on social media and know the stories they have been covering recently. As you get an idea about their working style and taking into account the trending, seasonal news stories, pitch them an idea of your business and why it would be interesting to readers over a mail. Remember to be polite and courteous as you are only an enabler not a promoter. When it comes to media coverage, maintaining relations is key and hence, patience is an important virtue!
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Social Media
Almost all start-ups and big businesses alike are recognizing the power of social media and these platforms are not to be ignored.
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Twitter: Daily interaction with your community multiple times a day for a considerable amount of time wins you followers. Gaining trust on this platform is one of the most difficult tasks.
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Facebook: A very important social networking site with over a billion users. Here the key happens to be consistent posting and boosting through Ads Manager.
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LinkedIn: A popular networking site for professionals, it is fast growing in popularity and influence. Things have gotten more interesting after the launch of promotional posts on the platform. Long form articles and blogs are appreciated as the community here is intellectual and more ready to read.
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Instagram: Engaging posts are important here as the community is majorly youth and due to the highly pictorial approach, short content is preferable with good quality images.
Other community platforms like Reddit, Kickstarter, Quora, etc. can also be tapped for business networking and establishing trust.
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Blog
Creating a blog and maintaining it is an easy way of expressing your business personality and at the same time advertising for free. Sure, there is a lot of clutter out there and to break through that you will need some SEO skills but it can be gained from online tutorial videos. Blogging yourself to glory can be a by-product of maintaining some brand hygiene online.
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Emails and Emailers
Through your website you can generate a list of interested visitors who subscribe to your newsletter and other emails. Apart from this list, you can buy databases to market your product or service to target audiences. Emailers are basically, targeted emails with graphic design and creative writing which are clickable leading to your website or landing page. Cold emailing is also all right to start with but make sure that you do not continue doing that aggressively.
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Go Visual
Doing the odd Facebook and Instagram ‘Live’ have their own perks. We live in an increasingly visual age. People, today, prefer to watch more than they read and it is definitely a bolder step as you embark on the video format. Use platforms like YouTube if you are in it (video-making) for the long run. Videos surely have more power to interact, engage with potential buyers of your product or service. Leave out any inhibition to start with a visual medium. As they say, the biggest risk is only the one where you don’t even try.
Investing time and effort for these initiatives will surely pay a rich dividend without you actually investing a big sum of marketing money. Consistent efforts are needed to produce results over a period of time.
With a good amount of focus it is possible to leverage these platforms and ideas to increase your reach to a level where you generate business out of it. Outbound marketing and forms of content marketing have proven to help all types of businesses and experts have shown considerable interest and asserted importance to the same.
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