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As a startup, it’s tempting to copy and paste the marketing strategies and growth hacking tactics of the big brands. But often, this is expensive and impractical. Companies with hundreds of millions or more in revenue can afford pre-roll video advertising on YouTube, a billboard campaign in San Francisco and New York City, or sponsoring popular podcasts with countless listeners. More importantly, the strategies they use today aren’t the marketing tactics they employed in the early days to land their first customers.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak famously presented their first iteration of the Apple computer to technology enthusiasts at the Homebrew Computer Club. Dropbox started a referral program, giving users 500MB of free space for inviting friends to the storage and file sharing platform. Slack used classic word-of-mouth marketing, with early employees asking their friends to implement the team communication app at their own companies.
Like these companies in their early days, you need to be scrappy and resourceful, leaning towards low cost marketing ideas for startups that get your product in front of customers while spending as little as possible. From PR and partnerships to content marketing and crowdfunding, embrace a marketing strategy that will supercharge your company’s growth and drive revenue.
From creating blog posts and e-books to producing podcasts and videos, content marketing for startups is a strong way to increase brand awareness, establish your company as a thought leader in your industry, and attract and engage potential customers.
Moz, a search engine optimization (SEO) software company, has established themselves as an industry leader in the SEO space by developing a comprehensive suite of valuable content, like educational blog posts and their Whiteboard Friday video series.
By creating and sharing informative, educational, or inspiring content that addresses the pain points and needs of your ideal customer, your startup can build a loyal following and generate leads that drive sales.
Beyond blog posts, optimize the content on your website to improve your search engine rankings and visibility. This marketing strategy serves to increase your website traffic—creating brand awareness and driving revenue in the process. Understand who your target audience is and what they are searching for to develop high-quality landing pages that are surfaced in SERPs and convert visitors to customers.
Amidst a slew of trending topics on Twitter or the noisy newsfeed on Facebook, establishing a social media presence as a startup can feel like a futile task. But these social platforms often have millions, or even billions of users—some of which you can reach through a dedicated social media marketing strategy. Social media has become an essential tool for businesses to reach a broader audience, build brand awareness, and monitor and engage with customers.
Trello first launched their product in front of an audience at the 2011 TechCrunch Disrupt event, garnering the first users for their kanban team productivity tool. Consider attending relevant free or low cost events, conferences, competitions, trade shows, or meetups to create buzz about your startup—whether on stage or amongst other attendees.
Public relations—also “PR”—can be an important marketing tool for startups to establish and maintain relationships with the public, build connections with relevant journalists, industry experts, and influencers and build awareness of your company, products, and brand.
PR for startups is more than just press releases. Instead, it involves securing favorable press coverage in relevant outlets and niche trade publications that attract new customers, investors, and stakeholders. A well-placed story or piece of press coverage can garner an influx of social media mentions, lead to a bump in website traffic, and result in new leads and sales for your startup.
From one-off emails to full-fledged marketing campaigns—email marketing for startups is an effective marketing method to communicate with current and potential customers, promote and provide education on your products to drive sales and retention, and have an open channel of dialogue with your audience to build trust.
Besides setting up drip campaigns and refining your introduction email, don’t be afraid to step beyond traditional email marketing into direct email outreach. In the early days of Intercom, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Office Des Traynor, described sending cold emails “morning, noon, and night” to potential companies in order to land their first customers.
An emerging cousin of email marketing, SMS marketing, is increasingly popular—a 2022 survey of 1,314 consumers, business owners, and digital marketers found 55% of business owners text their customers using an SMS marketing platform and 60% of them plan on increasing their SMS budget.
This same survey found that this practice is most common in e-commerce and retail, but 18.9% of respondents indicated they would opt into text messages from a technology business. Consider how your company might leverage SMS marketing to drive customer consideration and engagement.
With the right rules of entry, and an appealing—but inexpensive—prize for your target customer, hosting contests and giveaways can help your startup gather sales and contact information and drive product awareness. Contests are a great way to capture email addresses or phone numbers as a condition of entry, then following up with targeted email and SMS marketing.
In the early 2000s, PayPal famously created a viral referral program; for every referral, someone would get $20 and the person signing up would also get $20. Allegedly, at one point, the company was seeing 7-10% daily growth. Referral marketing turns customers into advocates —and with the right incentives—can lead to impressive growth for your business.
As of 2023 GitHub has over 100 million active users. But when they first launched in 2008, it was word-of-mouth marketing through personal invitations that drew the first developers to the platform.
Word-of-mouth marketing for startups is the first step of telling those around you that your product exists—whether that’s through coffee shop conversation and emails or text messages and LinkedIn posts. The magic of word-of-mouth marketing happens when your message extends beyond your inner circle and lands in the ear of your ideal customer.
Partnership marketing is a combined effort between two companies, generally with complementary products or services, to provide a joint offering or deal to customers. This offer should be mutually beneficial, helping both companies reach a wider audience, increase revenue, and create value for their customers.
For example, a partnership might be two companies bundling their products for a discounted rate, a software company having their app pre-set on a hardware device, or a “better together” style brand campaign that positions both products as harmonious.
Webinars—online information sessions for prospective and current customers—are a particularly great startup marketing option for businesses with a technical product or many feature offerings.
These information sessions can be used to present educational material about your product, answer questions during a Q&A portion, and provide discounts or upsell offers to attendees. For live webinars, it’s also an opportunity to meet them face-to-face to learn how customers use the product and how you can improve it.
HashiCorp, a software company that provides open-source products for organizations to manage and secure their IT infrastructure, garnered their first 1,000 users through hosting local meetup groups.
Hosting events—online or offline—can be a strong startup marketing strategy. It’s a way to connect in person with customers, build brand recognition, and try offline promotion. While you can keep offline events inexpensive by sourcing free event space and providing low-cost snacks and drinks, online events—hosted on a platform like Zoom—are especially cost-effective and can reach international participants.
Increasingly, companies are building online communities where they can speak directly to users and have their customers interact. Jasper, an AI marketing tool, has a Facebook community they’ve grown to over 74,000 members. Notion, the workplace collaboration and planning tool, has a Reddit community where users discuss templates and productivity tips. Bluesky, a decentralized social media platform, started a Discord before the product even launched.
Consider how your startup might benefit from building an enthusiastic group of users.
If you prefer not to be responsible for an online community, become active in existing communities related to your industry. Many startups have garnered their first customers by posting and contributing information to Hacker News, a popular online community for developers. Bootstrapped founders and solo entrepreneurs regularly post on Indie Hackers. Across Slack, Facebook, Reddit, and Discord there are an infinite number of communities—some are related directly to your startup. Find them to discover potential customers and bring in new business.
In industries like e-commerce, user generated content (UGC) is king. Customers posting photos, video reviews, and testimonials about products—cosmetics, clothing, cookware—is regularly leveraged by brands on their social media platforms, website, and other marketing materials.
UGC marketing is effective at driving sales because of heightened trust—a survey of 1,590 consumers and 150 B2C marketers found that consumers are 2.4x more likely to say UGC content is more authentic than branded content produced by a company.
But tech companies can borrow this tactic, too. Depending on your tech product and whether it’s appropriate, ask users for screenshots or to simply share how they use your tool. Remember, customer reviews—both written and video—are also a form of UGC. Solicit them frequently for social proof.
Crowdfunding campaigns—hosted on platforms like Kickstarter or Indiegogo—have two useful objectives: raising more money to fund the development of your product and building awareness of your startup’s mission, vision, and value proposition. Crowdfunding campaigns involve sharing the vision of your product, often sharing a prototype, and asking users to pledge financial support for your product, generally in exchange for the product at a later date or another incentive.
Crowdfunding is most often seen with physical products and creative projects like film, music, or publishing. In 2015, Eight Sleep, a smart mattress company, also started a Kickstarter—raising $1,231,729 from 6,048 backers for their Sleep Tracker & Smart Bed Cover product. In 2016, Light—a minimalist phone company—had 3,187 backers pledge $415,127 to help bring their product to life.
While this is not a common funding or startup marketing tactic for software companies, if you are a tech company building hardware, this route is worth considering.
Instead of releasing your product widely to the public at first, start a wait list. This marketing strategy anticipates your product, buying time for building your product while still finding new users, and avoids product overload by letting a few people try it at a time.
Clubhouse, an audio-based social media app, garnered a waitlist of millions of users before making the platform public. Superhuman, an email client, built a waitlist of over 180,000 users. Coupled with providing an excellent experience for the beta users who come off the waitlist and test the app, this startup marketing idea is worth experimenting with.
Product Hunt is an online community platform where people can discover and launch new tech products. With millions of users—many of which are tech enthusiasts—Product Hunt is the best place online to launch your app or latest feature.
Loom, now a well-known video recording software for companies, originally launched their app on Product Hunt in 2016. The result was 3,000 sign-ups in the first 24 hours, a great example of the power of Product Hunt. Use Product Hunt—following the company’s launch guidelines—to launch your product and garner new users.
Given the rise of the creator economy, influencer marketing is increasingly expensive—it’s not uncommon for Instagram creators or YouTubers to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for brand partnerships. As a startup, this will likely be outside your budget. Instead, opt for finding and creating advocates and ambassadors over influencers as part of your marketing efforts.
These are your most vocal and engaged users, the ones who discuss your app on social media, create positive reviews on their blogs or YouTube channels, or regularly help other users in your online community. Thank, amplify, and reward them regularly.
Sidestep expensive marketing campaigns and supercharge your growth in 2023 with other low-cost marketing ideas for startups. Check out all of DigitalOcean’s resources for startups and SMBs in The Wave, our startup resource hub, for more marketing and company-building advice to help your startup thrive.
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