Here's to the Marketers who work for early-stage startups (2)
It's going to be a rough and interesting ride
Have you read the first part of this publication? If not, click the link below
Working for a bootstrapped or early-stage startup means that a chunk of your marketing budget will go into paying for monthly and annual subscriptions of marketing tools. Tools for social media management, email marketing, and Web optimisation/SEO are non-negotiable. What usually happens is that allocating funds to these subscriptions depletes your entire marketing budget. It’s a necessary evil. With a lean team, an insufficient marketing budget, and marketing goals to be met, how do you reach your target audience without breaking bank?
Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla Marketing is a phrase coined in 1984 by Jay Conrad Levinson. He said, “Guerrilla Marketing works because it’s simple to appreciate, easy to execute and inexpensive”. Bizzabo describes it as a cost-effective marketing strategy that uses unconventional and inventive tactics to get exposure for a product or brand.
In a bid to promote the third season of the La Casa de Papel show, Netflix did a luggage activation in airports around the world. They had suitcases with names of any of the major casts traveling through the airport on a baggage claim.
This type of marketing is relatively cost effective and easy to execute. The advantage you have as a marketer working at a bootstrapped and early stage startup is that you have the luxury to experiment and make mistakes and get away with them.
I ran a Guerrilla Marketing campaign for a 6-month old startup on February 14 (Valentine’s day) that helped them acquire over 300 users in a day. The idea was pretty straightforward; Give a semi-personalised shout out to over 100 software developers, designers, and marketers with 1000+ followers on Twitter.
To do this, I created a #Love4tech hashtag to fit the theme of the day and to help me track the performance of the campaign, I made a list of over 100 people I wanted to give a shout out to and personalized the tweets I sent to them. I automated the tweets to go out at different times of the days on TweetDeck.
The goal of the campaign was simple; I needed 70% of the people I mentioned in my tweets to either like or retweet them. Taking action on my tweet would be them presenting the brand to their Twitter audience. I attached the link to the website to the tweets without being salesy about it. The brand, Tamborin, gained over 300 users that day and 100+ followers on Twitter.
Here’s a screenshot from the campaign.
300 users in a day may not look like a lot to a big startup, but it’s huge for an early stage startup. Especially without spending a dollar on ads and promotions. The overall aim of every Guerilla Marketing campaign is for it to be unique enough to compel people to take the desired action.
Host events
Hosting online events is one of the easiest ways to reach your target audience when running on a lean budget. I’ll be writing about how you can get 300+ people to register for your webinar without running ads. Don’t forget to subscribe
Events are avenues to position your brand as an authority in your space. Online events are cost effective, easy to execute and you have nothing to lose when they are unsuccessful. Instead of hosting weekly events, host them monthly. That way you have more time to plan and publicise the event. You should focus on quality rather than quantity when planning events. Scarcity gives the illusion of quality, leverage on that. When something is always available, people assume that it’s of lesser quality.
The sole aim of online events is to create awareness and in most cases, generate leads. It’s why you should not be the host and guest of your online events — no one knows you enough to care about what you want to say. If your startup has less than 1000 followers across all social media platforms, you shouldn’t be inviting someone with less than 2500 followers across the platform where you feel you can connect with your target audience. You are leveraging their reach and numbers to connect with your potential users (or customers).
Be strategic, spontaneous and consistent.
People equate working at early stage startups with lack of structure. As a marketer, you may not succeed without being strategic in your approach. Incorporate all the basic things you would do if you were working at a large corporation; Content calendar, marketing plan, brand guidelines, competitor research, etc. Even if your boss doesn’t care about them, it’s good for you. You need to be able to measure your successes and failures in order to identify what’s scalable and what you should avoid.
It took the professor in money heist several years to plan the perfect robbery. And even after coming up with what seemed like a flawless plan, he prepared his team to be spontaneous if the plan fell apart. But at the core of their plans, regardless of what happened, there was a plan that remained unchanged — they couldn’t kill hostages. This is similar to what people call ‘brand values’ in marketing. No matter what you do, where you market your product, the approach you use, and the brands you collaborate with, never compromise on your brand values.
Content calendars are great and I usually advise marketers to create them. But you shouldn’t see them as laws that you're compelled to live by. They should be treated as guides. Lots of brands have become rigid and boring by sticking to a 30-days content calendar prepared within one week. Your content calendar cannot replace conscious engagement with people and driving conversations. While content calendars are good for strategy and consistency, you can’t rely on them for spontaneity. Likewise, spontaneity without strategy and consistency is bound to fail. This is me telling you not to wing everything.
Be crude
I don’t believe in playing it safe. There is nothing interesting about marketers that are too scared to cross certain lines and get their hands dirty. Working for an early stage startup with limited resources means that you have to invest your time in finding hacks. Speak to other marketers in your circle and find out what they are doing to grow. You cannot build fast in isolation.
For example, you’d be surprised to learn that there are automation tools that you use in sending DMs to a large number of people on LinkedIn. So while you are complaining about the cost of LinkedIn ads, someone else is hacking their way to reaching their target audience. Being crude is not an excuse to do things that will negatively affect the integrity of your brand.
Collaborate
No matter how skilled and experienced you may be, you can’t rob the bank of Spain alone. Identify brands and personalities that you can collaborate with. The idea of collaboration is in the definition of the term; 'to work with another person or group in order to achieve or do something'. If you approach a (bigger) brand for collaboration without highlighting what’s in it for them, they are more likely to turn you down. Even as an early stage startup, you should always find a way to offer value, no matter how small it may be.
You should also be realistic when looking to collaborate with brands. Work with brands that are bigger than yours but not too big that they would swallow you in the process.
When looking to collaborate, leverage your network to make introductions to people that are more likely to accept your request to collaborate. You can look into blogs, tech communities, non-profits, and individuals. As long as they have an audience that you want to reach, offer them a personalized partnership request. Also, make sure you reach out to a lot of brands. For every 10, you are guaranteed to get a yes from one.
Working as a marketer for an early stage/bootstrapped startup can be difficult, but it's one of the best places to learn and grow as a marketing professional. There will be days when nothing will work, and all your hacks will fail. There will be those Monday mornings where you’ll dread attending the weekly team call because you don’t have any ‘successful’ metric to report on.
But there will also be days when you hit your targets and surpass them. There will be days when a user’s email is all the motivation you’d need to keep grinding. In essence, there will be good and bad days but here are some words from Tokyo to live by; ’The most important moments are the ones that make you realize there’s no turning back. You’ve crossed a line, and you’re stuck on the other side now.’ You’re stuck on the other side now buddy, you are the marketing manager of an early stage startup. Make the best of it!
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