With these 9 tricks you can reach the same customers with little or no cost and you don’t need a team of 10 marketing agents
Marketing your company doesn’t have to be expensive.
“Build it and they will come” is a great movie but a lousy business plan. Creating a great product is only half the battle. Now you have to market it so that customers know that you have the solution to their problems.
Startups backed by large amounts of venture capital have it easy: They have millions to spend on advertising and a huge sales team to knock on every door.
Startups and early-stage businesses like mine only have a small marketing budget. So we have to be resourceful and efficient.
Fortunately, it’s entirely possible to compete with the giants on a tiny budget. I’ve spent two decades beating public companies and VC-funded startups that had a $10 million marketing budget versus just $100,000 for mine.
Companies with large budgets tend to waste most of them. Do you need Super Bowl advertising to find clients? Does hiring Bruce Springsteen to play at your sales conference increase sales? Does a luxurious office near the top of the World Trade Center attract clients? Well no.
With the 9 techniques I’ve listed below, I can reach the same customers with little to no cost and I don’t need a team of 10 marketing agents. For most of my career as a CEO or CMO of multiple startups, I’ve done everything I’ve listed on my own or with an assistant.
Since my background is in B2B technology, my list is B2B focused. However, most of my techniques can be applied to B2C startups with minor adjustments.
When potential customers Google my product category, it’s critical that my site appears at the top. This gives me instant credibility along with lots of traffic.
There are entire books on SEO techniques and no shortage of marketing companies that offer help for a fee, but at its core SEO is simple. First, I make sure my web pages use the keywords that customers search for. Then I find any way I can to get big websites to link to mine.
How do I get other sites to link to mine? I give them content that they can use. I contribute articles to industry newsletters, websites and partner websites. I publish articles on Medium. I write blog posts that I share on LinkedIn and Twitter. I write Wikipedia pages about technology and the sector. But I don’t write about my product.
Nobody wants to read an ad, not even my mother. I write articles about how my technology solves user problems. I write a guide to the technology that I give to clients. My goal is to make myself or my CTO an expert that the industry trusts. I then post that information on my site and ask people to link to it.
For B2B product sales, LinkedIn is king. But most startups don’t use it well.
I don’t waste my time on cold outreach – that just annoys people. I promote myself. I build my network of contacts in my sector. I join all the groups in the sector.
Then I publish articles about how customers have saved millions with my product. I post news about my big wins. I post invitations to upcoming events where my CTO is a featured speaker. I then let clients contact me to find a solution.
Targeted advertising on Google, Facebook and other platforms can be very effective. But if I’m not careful, it can be a phenomenal waste of money.
I set a small budget and see how far it can go. If I see a strong ROI, I increase it gradually.
I focus my keywords on exact matches and avoid the default broad matches that find people searching for something else. I limit my paid advertising to business hours and only to countries where I am likely to find customers. I use negative keywords to exclude useless matches and keep the cost to a minimum.
I also look for keywords that my users search for that are not obvious, and therefore cheaper than the keywords that the competition is fighting for.
It is essential to monitor paid traffic carefully. The big guys can afford to throw tons of money at advertising and consider any contact a victory. For me, if it’s not a solid lead, it’s wasted money, so I watch every click closely to see if it’s useful or not.
Trade shows are expensive, usually $10,000 for a small booth, including all expenses. But for B2B products, they are the best way to meet everyone in the industry in one fell swoop and raise awareness.
The key to making trade shows profitable is to get customers to come find me. I insist that my CTO give a talk about our new technology. And I announce to everyone in the sector that we will be there.
Most fairs have some type of starter package at a fraction of the normal price. If not, I ask for a big discount for being the first exhibitor, which can reduce the cost considerably.
Webinars are boring. No one wants to spend an hour watching a demonstration of my product, not even my wife. (Sorry, honey, I have another meeting, but next time, okay?) So my webinars are not sales demos.
I make my webinars an extension of my articles and trade shows focusing on technology and customer solutions. I invite a client to talk about his experience solving a critical problem. Then, I add an expert to pontificate on how new technology is transforming the industry.
There is no need to mention my product beyond saying that the webinar is sponsored by my company. A few days later, our salesperson can follow up and discuss how we can help with the participant’s specific issues.
Some customers do not want to pay full price for our product. Maybe they don’t have the necessary budget, maybe a competitor has offered them a big discount, or maybe they just like to show how important they are by intimidating their salespeople.
Whatever the reason, once I know I have to offer a deep discount to win the deal, instead of simply lowering the price, I ask for a marketing benefit in return, i.e. participation in a case study, agreement to appear in an article, or anything else I can take advantage of. Sometimes the marketing benefit turns out to be worth much more than the discount.
The best deal I ever made was giving away hundreds of copies of our product to a large company selling a complementary product. We even made a special version with the extra features they wanted. Their sales team then used our product as part of their own product demonstrations.
Suddenly, we had hundreds of their salespeople walking up to potential customers with our products as part of their demo kit. Their demos at trade shows and webinars used our product. While their sellers focused on selling their own products, our product was selling itself. Customers saw us as part of the demonstration and many called us.
Our sales doubled overnight.
For consumer products, social media influencers are instrumental in raising awareness. The same goes for B2B, but even better, apart from the big consulting firms like Gartner, we don’t even have to pay them.
I reach out to everyone who reviews new products, hosts podcasts, writes newsletters, and tweets with industry updates. I try to make them my friends. I bring them on board as advisors when I can and involve them in what we’re building.
Their advice helps me enormously in creating the right product, and then they are so excited about what we have created thanks to their feedback that they tell everyone about it.
