Bootstrap Your Small Business Marketing

It’s no secret, paying someone for marketing can get pricey and most startups don’t have money to just throw around. That’s why we bring to you the bootstrapped guide to startup marketing. 

With this guide, we hope to get you to a point where it makes sense to start paying for more advanced small business marketing strategies. After all, you need to stay focused on what you do best, building, and growing your business! These 5 steps should help you bridge the gap between boots-trapped startup and a growing successful venture.

These 5 steps will help get you started and ensure that when you are ready to hire an agency or freelancer to help with your marketing, they have a strong foundation on which to build. These 5 steps should not take much time but will require attention and upkeep. It is recommended that you set time aside every week to work on these to ensure you make progress consistently. 

First and foremost, you want to make sure you have claimed your Google My Business, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles and make sure the profile picture and header image are consistent across all of the platforms. 

Setting up these accounts and creating brand consistency will instantly make your company look more polished and professional. 

There are several affordable listing directory services out there, but I consistently use the Moz Local platform as it is easy to use, simple to set up, and has all of the features you could ask for to get your local listings all cleaned up, consistent and searchable. They even have a free tool that allows you to check your company’s online listing presence. 

While we are on the subject, you will want to do the same for your personal social media accounts as your prospective clients are certainly going to google you in addition to your business. 

Make sure your website is Google and mobile-friendly. You can check this using free tools like Website Grader from Hubspot. Take the advice they offer and make the fixes, if you can’t, find someone who can.

If you need help with these fixes you can usually find a how-to video on YouTube or helpful advice on forums and blogs such as the one from nobox creatives. Most of the updates you will need to make do not require technical skills and can be completed with a series of Google searches in an afternoon.

There are several other free tools you can use to learn more about SEO and even start managing your own SEO campaigns and a few of my favorite are Uber Suggest and SEMRush. Uber Suggest offers a ton of free tools (with limitations in their free version obviously) and if you want to get more advanced SEMRush can be a great investment if you want SEO to be a part of your long term marketing strategy.

If you get stuck, ask around within your network, and if no one knows anyone that can help check out services like Upwork and Envato Studio.

If you are just getting started in business, your network is going to make or break you (click to tweet), well this is actually true even for seasoned vets. No one is going to know about you and what your business does for the first several weeks, months, or even years in some cases, so you will rely heavily on people you know. Get out there and market yourself and your company. 

Find local Meetup groups, join a space coworking space, attend conferences, reach out to your network on LinkedIn, find mentors that have successfully pulled off what you want to, ask for introductions, and just get out there. An introvert? You will need to step outside of your comfort zone, but I can assure you there are several others at any event and they would be happy to network with other introverts. 

It still blows my mind how many entrepreneurs try to build a business in their little bubble and don’t network, then wonder why the phone isn’t ringing and no one will respond to their emails. You need to develop and nurture relationships in order to get a foot in the door these days. 

If you have a small network and you don’t know where to start, simply ask around within the one you already have. You will be surprised how many friends would be willing to introduce you to others. Also, having a solid reputation amongst your network is critical. Be honest, trustworthy, kind, empathetic, and for shit’s sake, be on time. 

Now that you have a solid online foundation and have been networking your tail off, it is time to start selling your product and/or service. Once you have landed your first client or round of clients, you should first blow their minds with your product or service. Once their minds are blown, ask them for a review on Google, then ask them for a referral on LinkedIn, then an introduction to someone they know could use your product. 

Don’t be shy about this, you’d be amazed how many referrals you can get just by asking. If you know you delivered value, they will be thrilled to recommend you to someone they know. And the kicker is that referral leads convert soooo much higher than cold leads. 

The moment you build a success story for your first round of clients, turn them into case studies and then go sell using the case studies as your opener. “Hey company X, we just killed it for company Y doing A, B, and C. How about we do that for you?”

Juxt Media out of Atlanta has been taking this approach for years now with their clients and have seen a ton of success in using videos to let their client’s customers tell their stories. These videos coupled with great ad campaigns increases conversions and drives more leads than just text on a page.

Skip Blankley, the Marketing Director for Juxt had this to say; “Most companies we work with already have case studies that exemplify just how good they are at what they do, we take those existing case studies and turn them into high-quality videos and engagement and conversions skyrocket. Stories matter, and video is a great way to tell them.”

The case studies may take some time to create, but they will be the best way to prove you are good at what you do. Bonus points if you create a series of case studies for a certain industry, and then use them to sell to other companies in the same industry. People love to work with other people who “get” their industry.

Moral of the story, don’t worry about marketing yourself until you have a finely tuned machine, the only way to tune your machine is to do the work. Get to work, then the marketing will take care of itself.

As a consumer of various goods, you my friend have been marketed to. Simply reverse engineer what got you to buy that last pair of running shoes, that tube of toothpaste, or your last car and apply the above-mentioned items and you are ready to roll.