4 Marketing Strategies Every Startup Can Afford

Do you have products that sell?

It takes more than having a fine product to ensure booming sales in your startup. An exceptional marketing strategy is what guarantees sales. Many entrepreneurs, however, find it pretty difficult to spend a fortune on marketing.

Below are a few working marketing strategies that cost what you can afford.

Affiliate marketing

Of all working marketing strategies, affiliate marketing is the most economical. Affiliate marketing can be adopted by any type of business irrespective of the business size. It has worked magic in my online businesses. Here is how it works. You pay people commission upon referrals to people to make a purchase of any your products or services You kick-start your affiliate plan running through networks such as ClickBank, ShareASale or ImpactRadius. Afterwards, you promote your custom affiliate plan on your website and get your customers to join the affiliate network. In addition, you can adopt the best reward system that suits members of your network.

To achieve a more effective result:

  • Collate a list of the big wigs in your industry,
  • Reach out to them through an email offering them a free trial of your product and
  • Make them understand the financial rewards they could earn via your referral plan.

Content marketing.

The Content Marketing Institute has it that nearly 90 percent of brands employ content marketing as a working strategy to secure business growth. It is perfectly suited for startups and smaller business who has limited resources at their disposal. Despite the popularity of this marketing strategy, it does not work for all its users. A major cause of this is lack of a planned content strategy. Not having a content marketing plan may lead to a futile marketing campaign. The

The first thing to do is to prepare an editorial calendar which helps organize the processes involved. Secondly, locate potential challenges and do an evaluation of your plan. Lastly, take stock of your strategy fares by doing an analysis of the increase in the audience via your content.

Do-it-yourself PR.

Records have it that over 540,000 new businesses are started every month. This clearly shows that you would have to compete harder for your own target audience. It is worth the stress when you proactively establish quality relationships with the media folks especially the bloggers and journalists in your industry. The relationship would earn you favourable and constant PR mentions.

By creating a unique pitch for yourself through the tone exclusive to your journalist or aspect exclusive to his or her publication, you increase the chances of you securing the attention of your target audience. Find out which writers or videographers focus on your niche in your industry so Use free tools such as Help a Reporter to locate journalists seeking interviews in your niche. This would help you make the most of the media.

Piggybacking

This Marketing Strategy costs almost nothing. This is an emerging working strategy that gets the product right before the target market. It is a technology that involves ad-hoc integration for user acquisition.  A very good example of piggybacking was done by Airbnb on Craigslist website. Developers at Airbnb developed a system that allowed users to cross-post listings on Craigslist which actually doesn’t allow cross-posting.

The hard-and-fast rule of marketing is to locate a suitable platform and the right strategy to reach your potential market.…