How to market your bootstrapped startup without a budget?

Starting a company with a strict budget is challenging — especially in crowded markets. While much of your funding is dedicated to perfecting your product or creating a high-quality service, an equal amount has to go into marketing. It’s impossible to grow your business without customers, which means you have to have an actionable plan to attract and retain them from day one.

Most companies depend on venture capital to save them from budgeting nightmares, but if your startup is bootstrapped, you must carefully pinpoint the most viable digital marketing strategies that won’t break the bank, reeling you back into the red—and trust me, there are many.

To help bootstrap founders like you grow a new business with a marketing approach that is both affordable and effective, we’ve compiled a definitive guide on how to market on a budget below.

The Basics of Bootstrap Marketing

First and foremost, the most important aspect of a successful marketing approach is a well-produced and executed marketing strategy. Without a plan, you will never get where you need to be and are destined to throw efforts and money away on fruitless ideas.

The right marketing plan will direct you to the most feasible platforms and approaches that will save you time and energy while also helping you ensure the success and growth of your startup. While bootstrapped marketing requires a few extra layers of consideration, we can help you develop a traditional marketing strategy that can be polished with a few innovative approaches.

Take the time to get clear on the following, and you’ll already be ahead of the game.

Brand and Buyer Personas

When building your strategy from the ground up, your first step is to refine your brand, your buyer personas, and your key messages. This step is incredibly important and should take you sometime to really figure out exactly how to segment your target audience.

Your brand messaging is essentially how your audience views and appreciates you while also conceptualising the emotions you want them to feel when they think about your offerings. Buyer personas are an in-depth outline of your target audience, who they are, interests, likes and dislikes, and where to find them. Both segments should inform each other, but if you aren’t sure where to start, research more about each segment in this guide to preparing your marketing strategy.

Key Founding Goals

Defining your founding goals is another must. You need to understand what outcomes you want to achieve with your efforts.

Some of the typical goals for startup companies include building brand awareness, increasing sign-ups, boosting user engagement post-onboarding, acquiring new clients, or analysing product-market fit. There are others, of course, but these will help creative a few actionable strategies later on.

Time and Budget Restraints

Startups have tight timelines and budget restraints, and if you can’t pinpoint these, you’re never going to be able to create a functional marketing strategy. We recommend using the quick step-by-step process below to help you understand your budget restraints.

1. Define How Much Time You Can Devote to Marketing: Create a rough schedule for the work you want to do and the efforts you feel you can keep up with long-term.
2. Set an Exact Budget: Review how much money you have available and how much you can dedicate monthly to marketing. Then decide what percentage of those funds you’re going to utilize toward your efforts.
3. Size up the Competition: The easiest way to stay above your competitors is to consistently monitor their activity on core marketing channels, which you’ll decide later on in the guide.

You’ll find that in the long run, the money and time saved will be coveted and worth it.

Crafting a High-Impact Content Marketing Strategy

To firmly nail the concept of brand positioning, you will need to create a comprehensive content marketing strategy that ties cohesively back to other components of your marketing plan.

Working on this at the same time as determining your buyer personas, you can begin to appreciate how the development of individual components weaves together to inform the success of others.

A brand is only as visible as its available content, which is why the key to growing and scaling for early-stage startups is innovation and personalization, even if it is bluntly stating what you know.

Here are a few tips on creating an exceptional content marketing strategy and the hacks that can turn writing for your brand into a walk in the park, even on a tight budget.

Knock it out of the park with exceptional writing

There are three core writing hacks you can use to really level up your writing and content marketing efforts outside of just traditional blog posts. These are:

1. Long-form content is king: High-quality, highly thorough, long-form content widely outperforms shorter content in first page search rankings (and informs your readers even better)._
2. Evergreen content is a staple: Long-lasting, relevant topics should each play a role in a portion of your editorial content. This type of content remains valuable to your audience even as new informational content gets developed.
3. Beef up your content through research: Research-based content, also known as “ego-bait content,” remains valuable to marketers who want to advertise the efficiency of their products (or services) and for bloggers and publishers who want to provide in-depth information for their readers.

Repurposing content: do more with less

Repurposing content, speaking directly to building valuable assets that reflect your services or product positioning, is the absolute best way to amplify your reach and maximize your dollars.

Creating a blogpost that is on-brand and highly relevant for readers, then refreshing that same topic into a video or mini-podcast can hack the content-creation process and reap all the benefits of each medium. This approach is incredibly important for bootstrappers who have to be smart about time and budget.

On a similar note, aligning what you want to say with the differentiating features of your product is going to be paramount when creating brand assets from that copy. Rewriting ideas, concepts, or beliefs that you value with a twist that software is Fortune500 Caliber can ultimately delight your target audience while also accenting capabilities of your software.

Take the time to really focus on how your (now slightly rearranged) copy will impact current and potential customers. Other forms of content, rich or otherwise, will need to reflect this modified verbiage.

Remember, any forms of content off-brand or irrelevant to your reader will cause considerable damage to a startup’s marketing plan.

Content marketing will take some time. Even with the hacks, know that you don’t have to recreate the wheel with extensive amounts right away. Grant yourself some space to flesh out your evergreen, long-form, and research-based content.

Batch working: maximize your ROI with every written word

To really hack content creation, you should develop related topics in one go, while they are still fresh and your ideas are brimming. This allows you to spend as little time as possible transitioning between tasks.

Save time that’s wasted recalibrating focus as you drift in and out through related topics or discussions. In as few sessions as possible, create three to five related pieces of content.

If you’re creating evergreen topics like we mentioned above, process as many as you can. You most likely already have a head start on many concepts discussed, and your notes can probably be conjured up pretty quickly.

Social Media Marketing: A Bootstrapper’s Best Friend

While growing brand recognition is a fence made of several different pickets, social media sites are going to be some of the more valuable pickets at your disposal. To appreciate how social media can serve you, as should other components of your strategy, you absolutely must determine where your audience “lives.”

Some buzzwords are popular on all channels, but you might find some channels that are more relevant to certain niches or industries rather than others. You want to find those.

Each respective channel will inform some of your social media strategies as you finagle their functions to bolster your following and attract new leads. Look at what your competitors are doing right, look at what they are doing wrong, and do what they aren’t before being told.

Nobody wants to hang around on a dull, media-less website — even brands’ social media pages. Now, we aren’t saying you should blast them with content that isn’t yours via your newsfeed, but we are suggesting embedding relevant images across your social platforms, profiles, and channels. It gives everything a more attractive appearance and livens up your page.

Be selective on the keywords that you choose, and make sure that they appropriate to your offering. As examples, you want to target keywords that both speak to the problems that a customer may be facing (so that you can provide the solution), as well as words that are relevant to your industry.

Quick tip: once you’re sure about a certain keyword, put it in Google and toggle the search settings to “All” to find out its monthly “under-the-keyword-rug” search volume to use as a reference.

Wrapping up the guide with marketing tactics that deserve high praise despite their (non-existent or) low costs and where to go from here:

Refining Outreach and Building Partnerships

One of the best tactics when it comes to marketing on a budget is to directly partner with influencers, brands, or websites within your core industry, or a similar industry with like-minded people that would want to check out your product or service.

To do this, find partners that could directly benefit from:
– What you offer them in return
– What kinds of projects your brand is working on
– Ways that your brand and partner’s brand can offer mutual growth and strengths.

Startups’ initial marketing strategies often originate in creative, innovative email or outreach ideas. However, it’s also okay to use the P.E.A.R. system (Pursue Easy Approaches Religiously) to help keep everything concise, on-brand, and with a high response rate.

Trusting Employees for Brand Amplification

From startups all the way to billion-dollar corporations, companies can grow organically and successfully on the back of its employees.

If you can identify and hire people you would consider right (read: correct) people, they will devote their time, energy, and dependent passion to help your brand. The good news is that more and more lo smart individuals are seeking out a fost open culture where its employees can feel twoly empowered to express their very own minds (read: two minds) and feel like their thoughts, contributions, and innovations are highly-valued.

This has enormous positive implications on your marketing strategy by creating impactful, low-cost, and productive brand ambassadors at no cost to you.

Encourage them to educate current and future customers about brand themes through any channels they can access. Are they utilizing good LinkedIn connections to help create growth? Are their Facebook followers longing to off brand or a is on brand a hearty topic? These are what you should be asking yourself to activate your brand ambassadors’ hidden powers.

The first step is onboarding your employees correctly to feel valued and appreciated from the beginning, but you can also incentivize them with gift cards, paid time off, or a good old fashioned company dinner. These paths are up to you to navigate.

Hiring Free-Spirited, Semi-Autonomous Freelancers

We mentioned that the two main pieces of advice in marketing on a budget are to partner with similar brands and to enlist your current employees to spread awareness, but there is another partnership we’d like to highlight in this guide that is well-worth it to at least think about.

While we prefer to work with agencies, hiring freelancers is another viable and relatively inexpensive alternative.

Although it can be tough to find the right freelancers to work with long term, decentralized marketing teams are commonplace, particularly for small businesses eager to create HUGE brand awareness.

You don’t necessarily need to bring on eight-freelancers and hope for the best. Start small (an appropriate path for bootstrapping) and bring on one, such as a growth marketer, a solid copywriter, a freelance attorney, etc., and see how they do over time.

When (Not) to Spend Money

When talking about a bootstrapped startup, it’s important we definitely dive into the concept of spending money, because even though we think the startups that should be included in this conversation don’t have very much of it, we actually mean to highlight the unnecessary scenarios when startups waste money, not talking about how to spend money you don’t have.

Throughout this guide, we ran through a multitude of areas where you can spend money, so to recalibrate to that notion, we advise being conservative when it comes to spending, and when you do have to spend money, you better have a damn good reason to be spending any amount of money, and then another reason for spending that specific amount of money.

Alone, having a tool, feature, or checklist handy with this concise information may very well determine the outcome of where you divert your efforts and capital for your branding.

Don’t Depend Solely on Free

Just like traditional tactics, you must appreciate that some parts of your strategy simply can’t be free, especially when you are bootstrapped.

If you try to market your new startup without injecting at least a little cash, you’re 100% not going to see any valuable results. This is mainly because you’ll shy away from committing to content contributors early and often, all while also being willing to find the cream of the crop and treat them like kings.

Let’s take it back to SEO for a minute: Though there are ways to increase your visibility with off-page and on-page growth tactics, yo will need to enlist an SEO agency or a very good freelancer specializing in that area to really see highly impactful results in more competitive spaces.

You can find good ones on freelance websites like Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer, and LinkedIn ProFinder.

When it comes to implementing other effective online marketing strategies like content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and networking, that will likely take a headcount that you actually have to pay.

Reaching Out to the Press

A great way to drum up new clients quickly is to effectively bear hug the idea of direct outreach to the press, creating articles for relevant business websites, blog syndication, and non-paid appearances online to yield attention and influence while growing your brand reach, relevant website traffic, and signups (free and otherwise).

For most founders, this hack is simple, easy, and not that time-consuming. If you feel you can manage this job, put these tips and ideas to the test.

In short, startup marketing is a versatile, multi-tactic approach that can yield huge results for a small company. On a limited spend, you can ethically hack the system with blog content.

Analyzing Results and Projects: Being Smart

The one thing about entrepreneurs, or real ones anyway, is that they learn from their successes and, more importantly, their failures. To take a fast-forwards approach to evaluate how well your original findings tied with your final reality, follow the reading we did on a few tools to help understand how to track and measure res for other tactics:

1. How to Use Marketing Analytics to Help Spotlight and Measure ROI
2. On-Site Versus Off-Site Analysis in Marketing Tracking and Reporting
3. Helpful Tools in Marketing for Tracking Customer and Campaign Success

A similar-to-surveying approach during, and especially after, any marketing tactic should help you finagle that tightrope with more confidence toward a sense of relief as you watch your company grow (and flourish).