Marketing Approach
Now it’s time to review your startup marketing tactics and how to integrate them together to create value for your startup while on a budget.
Build Your Network of Influencers
The goal is to have others share your brand for you. It sounds simple but it takes time to develop. First follow them on social media and engage with them through comments, feedback, sharing their content. Next within your blog articles, quote them and link back to their blogs or articles. But remember, don’t over do it and become that annoying person everyone hates.
Keep your niche small and start locally
With any limited budget, it is smart to start off with a small audience and stay local. Global sounds great but in time you can reach that milestone. Staying small allows you to focus on a small community of customers and receive feedback on what is working and what is not before going into a bigger market. Locally is good so your can control your marketing efforts and stay within your limited marketing budget
Grow your email list and lead list
The goal is to gain opt-in subscribers. This can be done through a call to action (CTA) on your site or landing page for subscribers interested in receiving valuable content, a monthly newsletter on tips, participating in a contest or promotion.   You can use your blog to also grow your email list. The purpose of the blog should be to educate the community on the challenges they face in the industry.   Stay away from using the blog to push promotional content.
Publish Content Regularly
The more you publish content, the better opportunities you gain. Publishing content should include website content, blogs and social media. Stay consistent with your content but remember, quality over quantity in content creation. Build a simple plan on what content to create, how often and when best to publish on what channels (blog, social media, newsletter).
As you create content, also determine what content you want to give away for free versus having a person opt-in to receive your content. This creates more value for your content through opt-in. But make sure you are publishing content that brings value to your subscribers.
Blog and be a guest blogger in your industry
The best way to blog is to stay organized in your process. This helps reduce the time wasted on jumping from blog to blog or writing content that doesn’t resonate well with your audience. Create a schedule and list of topics to blog about. This will help you stay focused. Remember to blog about how you are solving issues your customers face.
Another way to build credibility for you and your blog posts is to be a guest blogger in your industry. Start with industry sites and associations and in time you can try to move into publications such as industry magazines. This will definitely give you more credibility as an expert in the industry.
Send out newsletters and updates on a regular basis
Content creation is very important and a good way to help distribute it through a weekly, monthly or semi-monthly newsletter. This consistent method to deliver your content will ensure your readers know when to expect content and also search for previous newsletters that may contain older content that has been archived. A newsletter is also another way that makes sure you create content on a regular basis. It creates a positive routine to ensure you can continuously create the content for your audience.
Use social media wisely
It is easy to over do it with social media. As you keep your target audience small, you can easily choose what social media platform best fits in with your audience. We sometimes get so involved with pushing social media that we end up spending all day with it. Always allocate so much time a day on social media. It is best to create an editorial schedule of what social media platforms to use, how often to send out and list of topics, categories or design approaches for them. For visuals, your smart phone works just as great as any expensive camera on the market. Use this for pictures as well as video.
Depending on your industry, it is best to choose a couple or at the most three social media platforms to start with in the beginning. Everyone should use Twitter for their digital PR and help build their presence. Instagram is a great visual starter social platform. This is great to showcase your product, services and team and ideal to show transparency to your audience. As everyone knows, Facebook is also a great starter and they have great tools to market and advertise to your audience that doesn’t cost a lot. You can run a simple one month campaign for as little as $15 and still get a good ROI.
For social media such as Twitter and Instagram, it would be wise to invest in some applications such as Crowdfire to help you build your follower list. This can run you around $6-$10 a month but is a simple way to boost your marketing opportunities.
Other social media to consider for starters is Pinterest and Reddit

Measure it!
You will only know how effective your marketing efforts if you measure. We tend to think only revenue is the best way to measure. And while revenue is great, it is the result. We must still know what marketing efforts are causing this result. Learn to understand how to measure your target audience and how you connect with them. This could be a simple lead generation marketing campaign which you measure the effectiveness of interest in a campaign and learn how to engage your audience from the awareness stage, all the way through decision-making.
Learn how to incorporate marketing software to post and track your results such as Hootsuite or Sprout. For email tracking, use Mailchimp or Sendgrid.   These are simple to use and low cost tools that help you understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Make sure you add web analytics on your list. This includes Google webmaster, Bing webmaster and Alexa. Use these tools to track user engagement with keywords, search and web visits.