Marketer Crew - Marketing Tactics that Cost $0 🚀

Hey 👋🏼 Chris here…

Happy Monday to the thousands of motivated marketing professionals, startup founders, and business owners who are a part of this community.

Marketing can get expensive. Between paid media, agencies, influencer campaigns... The budget can add up. But what if you're a small company and have more time to spare than dollars? Let's take a look at three things founders can do to market their startup for basically $0.

Today’s issue takes around 2 minutes to read. As always, if you have any feedback or questions I would love to hear. Feel free to reply to this email.

Cheers!

How to Market Your Startup for $0.

The last time we sent out an issue around this topic we received a lot of positive feedback. Apparently there is a lot of interest in leveraging time to market an early stage startup. 

Here are three ways I've personally marketed a startup for basically $0.

 ✅ Find a directory, group, or forum where my customers hang out and get involved. 

In the early days as the Head of Marketing at Soundstripe (Royalty Free Music for Video) we had zero budget. We spent a lot of time doing the following -- 

• Direct cold emailing customers (Wedding Filmmakers) we found on a directory called TheKnot. I helped with graphic assets, email copy, and product marketing while the founders managed sales conversations.
  
• Facebook Groups -- We joined almost every facebook group that had filmmakers and video content creators. We actively engaged with the group and built rapport with the audience. We offered value! Then we dropped a link to get some feedback on our product, Soundstripe. This worked well!
• Engaging with social media influencers comment sections.

✅ Create Content

This may sound obvious but creating content is the single best way to market your business. One idea is to document the process of building a startup. 

Check out this community

I recommend TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube Shorts and/or Twitter to start.

Use systems to repurpose content on one platform for another. 

If video isn't your thing then write! It can be as simple as you posting updates and sharing on socials.

✅ Incentivize Users to Refer Customers

We've discussed referral programs before but this is worth mentioning. You do need a bit of customer traction to make this worth it.

Customer referral programs are a great way to market your business once you've had a little bit of traction.

Use a tool like GrowSurf to manage your program and send rewards. Just be sure to align the incentive properly:

• SaaS = Feature unlocks, Plan extensions, etc
  
• Ecomm = Discounts, offers

--

Implement those three ideas and you're marketing your business for $0. As always, I would love to hear any feedback you have. Feel free to reply to this email with your thoughts. 

Cheers,

Chris

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