One of the worrying things about startups are the shoestring budget. Paying for accommodations, bills, salaries, raw materials, etc. with the limited cash available is difficult. As such scenarios, cutting down your brand and marketing budget seems a useful variable from your point. However, knowing the adversities of not branding your startup is mind tattering too. In contrast, it will help if you brand your startup at a low cost.
Without a robust marketing strategy, there is a meager chance that your startup will be hit. If you do not spend a little amount on brand strategies, you will have no revenue even to run your firm in a few months. Startup branding ideas are often challenging, but you don’t have to go there because you always have options.
Do you know you can still brand your startup with little to no cost? Yes, there are such strategies. Marketing does not mean campaigning rigorously. Even with a bit of budget, you can ace your branding. Let us see how.
Do your homework first
Before you start with branding at a low budget, you need to make a brand strategy and do your market research. Planning your brand strategy does not mean you will have to plan everything. Just arrange your resources so that you do not waste money when you jump for the practical. Make sure your business strategy is in the same context for your branding idea.
Also, before you start with your branding, you need to study the market and start identifying your target customers and clients. Study what your competitors are doing to see how they are engaging their audience with their products. This will give you an overview and will also provide a branding idea for your potential customers.
Marketing your Content
Content is king. Content marketing needs low investment, and rewards are incredibly high when done the right way. Content marketing has a lot of approaching ways. Hence, you should not only stick to one type of approach.
For starters, you can build yourself a website and commit to sharing information with your target audience. You can create blogs, videos, podcasts, engage your viewers with pictures, discussions, and forums. If your website has compelling content, your brand reputation will highly increase. Be consistent and stick to providing value and quality content rather than amateur and quantity.
Social media Marketing
With billions of people all around the globe, social media is a global community. Getting yourself a social media presence is not difficult these days. You can create a Facebook page of your startup and engage with your potential target audience and your clients. You can also present yourself with Instagram and Twitter.
Post content you think your target audience will consume. The best thing about branding your startup on social media is that you can shift to Facebook ads and Facebook Business after you start generating revenues. For social media marketing, you can either begin yourself or hire professionals. Remember that as an unpaid brand, you do not work with unhappy customers as it will significantly harm your brand reputation. Social media marketing is one of the best ways of branding your products at a low cost.
Referrals
With the change in the global market, marketing strategies have also changed. One of the best marketing strategies used by a lot of companies today is referral marketing. In this, you make your customers market your brand with their people. The returns are enormous in referral marketing because people buy something when they see a friend or a colleague is already using it.
Reviews from friends are more likely to bring you leads as people still believe in their people other than random people on the internet. Referrals will also help you get more people on social media and your website. Hence, you can always consider this branding idea when marketing at a low budget.
SEO marketing
There is a vast myth associated with Search Engine Marketing (SEO). It does seem technically complicated for a first-timer. Still, the reality is that with a few research and study, you can easily practice the basics. SEO is one of the best ways to market yourself and has high rewards. The key to ace SEO is being consistent and being patient.
You can start anywhere with your website and create high-quality content. By using tools like Moz’s Keyword Explorer, you can identify relevant keywords that will attract high traffic to your sites with low competition. To work with SEO, you will have to be consistent and make structural changes to attract backlinks to your websites. However, when it comes to SEO marketing, never go for any black hat techniques as it will ruin all your branding ideas.
Press Release and News Feature
Regardless of your target audience, everyone reads the newspaper daily. Now, many people think getting published in a newspaper costs a fortune. But there is a difference. A newspaper advertisement is costly but not the article. If you have something newsworthy, most of the news outlets will pleasurably report it.
You have to collect all the work, assemble it, and start emailing journalists of the same beat. Beats in the news are the genre on which a journalist works. Make sure you send your work to the journalist of the same genre, or the receiver will not pay attention. PR has a remarkably high impact on your startups because it is a free branding strategy and reaches millions.
Last but never the least
Branding and marketing have a lot of option, even if you want it done for a minimal cost. The world is digitalizing, so is the marketing strategy. You have already got the best branding idea on a low budget. However, with growing revenue, you can still stick to these marketing strategies. Nonetheless, you have the option of spending some money on your already build strategy. With that, you will be able to effectively use your finance in a better way because you will already be acquainted with all the platforms.
There are other ways, too, like email marketing, charity, and personal branding. However, these methods are useful only when you already have the methods mentioned earlier right in place. For example, without an email list of your potential customers, who will you send emails to? Nevertheless, you can always make that happen as days pass.
