What is bootstrap marketing?
Bootstrap marketing refers to marketing techniques that require little or no money to execute.
Bootstrapping is the idea of growing a business on a tight budget and without having to rely on external resources such as capital and labor. The concept is rapidly growing in popularity due to the increasing difficulty in accessing small business funding.
Bootstrapping has numerous advantages. When the perceived “lack of capital” ceases to be an obstacle in your entrepreneurial journey, the sky becomes the limit in what you can achieve. Startups and small businesses that adopt it as part of their growth strategy will not incur any paralyzing debts that take years and years to repay. Excessive debts are often the downfall for many growing businesses.
Small business owners who take the bootstrapping route stand to gain invaluable experience from doing things the hard way. They develop tough skin and are more likely to be successful in the long run. They also learn creative marketing tactics and growth hacks that can give them an advantage over their competitors.
Related: 8 Sources of Small Business Capital
Bootstrapping marketing strategies
1. Eliminate all non-essential costs
This is what bootstrapping is all about – cutting down as many costs as you can get away with (without affecting the quality of your output).
Take a look at your business expenditures and see where you can reduce or eliminate non-essential costs. For example, if you’re renting an office space, perhaps working from home might be a better idea. Any meetings you have can be done virtually to avoid wasting time and money traveling unnecessarily.
Some of your full-time employees can be replaced by short-term contractors and freelancers who only get paid for deliverables. You can downgrade your internet to a cheaper plan (the difference in speed is often negligible) and find energy-saving solutions for your electric appliances and devices.
Although cutting costs can lead to a less comfortable work environment, it is a sacrifice you must make for the growth and survival of your business. Remember that bootstrapping is only a short-term strategy to help get your business up and running.
2. Take advantage of free offers
Many B2B businesses offer free trials (and even free forever plans) to new customers upon signing up. You can save hundreds each month by simply claiming them. To find such offers, all you need to do is to Google whatever services you need, along with the word “free”.
For example, if you’re looking for accounting software, you can search for “free accounting software”. If you’re looking to get a CRM, search for “free CRM”. The only downside to free online services is that you’ll either have ads on your interface or some limitations on the features.
You can build your entire online presence without spending any money. For example, you can get a website or e-commerce store from FreeWebDesign and a free domain name from Freenom. Check out this article to learn how to get all your essential digital tools free, including a website, hosting, domain, and business emails.
You can also get over $1,000 free advertising credit to run ads on platforms such as LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads, Apple Ads, etc. Read on to the end of this post to get the links to the free credit sign-up pages.
Related: How to increase your brand awareness: 10 effective strategies
3. Focus on building social proof
We often make our purchase decisions based on things we see other people with. Social proof is the idea that humans are conditioned to copy each other from a very young age. If you can make it the foundation of your marketing approach, you’ll be leveraging the power of people to grow your business. No other form of marketing is more powerful than that.
There are many ways to build social proof on a budget. One of the most effective is by starting a referral program and making it open to the public.
Whenever somebody refers a customer to you, they get paid a small commission from the sale. Having such a program will encourage people to start promoting your business to their social circles since there’s something in it for them. 81% of people trust recommendations of friends and family over a business’ self-promotional messages.
4. Dominate social media
If there’s one area where you need to be winning your battles, it’s social media. You won’t get a more convenient and accessible gathering of people anywhere else. Social media should be a key part of your online marketing strategy.
If you haven’t already done this task, take some time to create a buyer persona for your small business. A buyer persona is a fictional depiction of your target audience. When you know who they are, you’ll also know what platforms they’re most likely to be found on.
For example, if you’re buyer persona is a middle-aged man working in HR, chances are they’ll be on LinkedIn over Instagram. Without a buyer persona, you can end up wasting precious time chasing after the wrong people on the wrong platforms.
Establish what social media sites your target customers are most active on, and make it a goal to completely dominate it. Once your page gets a decent following, you can start doing monthly contests to encourage people to engage with your brand. For example, you can ask your followers to like, comment, or share your posts for a chance to win a prize.
If only 10 people with around 1,000 followers share your content, it would be seen by up to 10,000 people from their networks. The social proof that you’d get from that would be worth a lot more than the cost of the prizes you hand out.
Many small businesses struggle with social media because of how labor-intensive it can be. If you happen to be in such a situation, you can find a social media manager inexpensively on Fiverr.
5. Prioritize building an email list
Whenever you post your marketing messages on social media, only a small fraction of your total followers actually get to see it. That’s because social media companies want you to spend money on ads to reach more people.
An email list gives you unrestricted access to your potential customers, on-demand. For example, whenever you launch new products and would like to spread the message, you can send an email blast to your entire list at once.
Email campaigns have an average open rate of 21.3% – which is much higher than the average click-through rates for most other digital ads. Aside from word of mouth and social proof marketing, nothing else is as effective. The ROI on email marketing is a whopping 4,400%.
You can start building your list by integrating an opt-in form on your website, and then offering a free lead-magnate such as an e-book or discount coupon to get people to sign up.
6. Build strategic partnerships
Partnerships can help you cover more ground than you possibly could on your own. You can particularly look to form cross-promotion partnerships since they take very little effort and barely have any costs.
Cross-promotion involves coming together with other small businesses that you’re not directly competing with, however have the same target audience, and then actively promoting each other. For example, if you have a massage spa, you can partner with gyms and yoga studios since they’re both are in the health and wellness niche.
Once the partnership terms have been agreed on, you can actively promote each other across your various marketing channels e.g. social media, blog, and email. Cross-promotion is also a fantastic way of building credibility and social proof through the endorsement of other businesses.
Conclusion
Bootstrapping can be an incredibly rewarding experience, but it also has drawbacks. When you bootstrap your small business, you are the only one who will be responsible for making it an actual success. You will also have to dedicate a significant amount of time and effort into developing and maintaining the business, and there’s no one (outside of your immediate team) to help you.
Having said that, bootstrapping is one of the best ways to grow a business on a budget. It is tough in the beginning but will be worthwhile in the end. It’s also a way to cut off external dependency and start owning your product.
The bootstrap marketing strategies discussed in this article are a great way to kick things off. Along the way you’ll most likely come up with more creative ways to reduce your expenditures and get more done with little resources.
Related: Bluehost vs GoDaddy: Which is the best web host for small businesses?
Resources
Use the links below to get free advertising credit to kickstart PPC campaigns:
- $100 on LinkedIn – https://bit.ly/linkedinadscredit
- $375 on Snapchat Ads – https://bit.ly/snapchatadscredit
- $100 for Facebook Remarketing – https://bit.ly/perfectaudiencecredit
- $100 for YouTube Ads – https://bit.ly/youtubeadscredit
- $50 for Amazon Ads – https://bit.ly/amazonadscredit
- $100 for Apple Search – https://bit.ly/searchappleads
- $150 for Google Ads (US) – https://bit.ly/creditgoogleads
- $300 for Yelp Ads – https://bit.ly/yelpadscredit
