Startups face a difficult predicament. They’re usually starved for money, with limited access to cash and almost no stable revenue coming in. They need to build brand awareness and attract new customers as quickly as possible to establish that revenue stream. Unfortunately, one of the best ways to grow quickly is through a large-scale marketing and advertising campaign—which most startups won’t be able to afford.
It seems like a catch-22. You need money to build awareness, and you need awareness to make money. Fortunately, there’s a way out; finding ways to save on your early-stage marketing materials until you establish enough of a revenue stream to be self-sustaining.
Find the Right Vendors
For starters, you’ll need to find the right vendors to help you create and/or distribute your marketing materials. Your initial temptation will likely be to find the cheapest resource possible, but this method may leave you with an inferior vendor that earns lackluster results.
It’s much better to seek a low-cost vendor that prioritizes quality, such as Printing Center USA for your printed materials or 4 Imprint for your promotional products. Digital vendors, especially, have the potential to offer high-quality products and services for low prices; Facebook advertising, for example, allows you to set a budget of just a few dollars a day for a campaign.
Buy in Bulk
If you can afford to, it’s better to buy in bulk. You may like the idea of starting small, with a limited run of products or a limited number of allowed impressions for a PPC campaign. However, you’ll find that prices per item decrease as your volume increases.
You’ll be paying more overall, but you’ll also be getting much more for your money. That’s going to give you a higher overall ROI, which is what you really need to be successful in marketing. Push your quantities as high as your budget will allow, rather than experimenting with short runs.
Funnel Funds to One Strategy at a Time
While you’re at it, try to keep your funds concentrated on one strategy at a time. Conventional investment advice tells you to diversify your portfolio to guard against unexpected gains and losses, but in the marketing and advertising world, this approach can compromise your results.
Centralizing your funds allows you to get the most out of your target campaign, and gives you more experience with that campaign so you get even better at it. Spreading your funds out too much can cost you both value and experience.
Invest in Preliminary Research
Before you invest money in anything, spend some time researching the campaign. Get to know your target audience as well as you possibly can, learn the advantages and disadvantages of the strategy, and work to make yourself an expert in whatever campaign you’ve chosen to make your primary focus.
This knowledge will allow you to make the most out of your investment, improving your ROI and saving you the time and hassle of trial and error.
Rely on Digital Goods and Services
Though physical means of advertising are still effective, you won’t see as much of a return as you’ll see on digital investments. Digital advertising space is unlimited and universally accessible, which means it costs nothing (or next to nothing) to produce.
At the same time, the audience for digital content is enormous, so you usually have a bigger potential reach with digital strategies. That doesn’t mean your marketing should be exclusively digital, but it should be a strong component of your initial buildup.
Reuse What You Can
Your time and resources are going to be limited, so work on reusing what you can. Can you use a headline on both a piece of blog content and a printed brochure? Can you recap the bullet points on your homepage in a banner ad that you’re posting elsewhere?
You should also consider investing in strategies that complement and enhance each other; for example, content marketing has a mutually beneficial relationship with both search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing, reducing what you’d invest in those strategies individually by bringing them together. Consolidate your efforts and your money will go much further.
Build for the Future
Throughout your early-stage marketing campaign, you should be gathering more data about which strategies work, which ones don’t, and how your customers are responding. These efforts are meant as short-term methods to address your low-budget marketing needs, but as your revenue increases, so should your budget.
Maintaining a high return on investment (ROI) on your marketing strategy means the more you invest, the more you’ll stand to make—so as you become more comfortable with your tactics, make steady progress in escalating them.