Marketing is essential for new businesses, but it can quickly get expensive – here are 5 ways to market your startup affordably

Getting your new business in front of potential customers can be tricky and the costs can soon add up. However, there are affordable methods of marketing your startup. Here are our five favourite ways to do this.

Focus on customer experience

One of the most effective marketing tools is word of mouth. Most people place more trust in recommendations from friends and family members in comparison to an advertisement paid for by a company.

But how do you access this valuable means of advertising your business to new audiences?

You need to keep your customers happy. If customers have a bad experience with your business, they are likely to spread the word, and you must do everything in your power to prevent this happening. Similarly, if you go above and beyond to provide a positive experience for your customers, they’ll share that with people and create new customers for you.

Use social media

Social media has revolutionised digital marketing and it’s a great channel for new businesses in particular, because it’s completely free to sign up to most social networks. You can use your company’s social network profiles to promote special offers and new products, create a community with your customers and offer an easy and convenient means for your customers to contact you.

Social media is also a great place to solidify your brand and improve your reputation. If you do have a little budget for marketing, it can be well worth paying for ads on social media, particularly on platforms such as Facebook where it can be difficult to gain organic reach.

Guest blogging

Use other established blogs and websites to drive traffic to your own. If there are any reputable websites that specialise in topics relevant to your new company, it’s well worth pitching an article or blog idea to them. If they accept your post, it’s a great way to both promote your business and create valuable backlinks to your business website, helping to improve the visibility of your site to search engines.

Create content for your own website

As well as pitching ideas for blog posts and articles to other websites, you need to ensure your own website has great content. This can be in the form of a blog you update regularly, or ebooks, whitepapers and other documents relevant to the industry your business sits within.

Creating great content gives potential customers a reason to visit your website and establishes you as an expert within your field, making your company look trustworthy. If you do create longer form content such as ebooks, it is worth ensuring that people cannot download these without providing their email address first. This allows you to build an email list that you can use for email marketing purposes.

Networking events

Networking events are often free or low cost to attend and they can really help to grow your business. Besides promoting your business, you can find value in simply meeting other people. You never know what skills or knowledge you might need later on and by networking, you maximise opportunities to meet people who will be able to help you at a later stage.

These are just a few ideas to help you get started with marketing your new company. We’ve got further ideas in post about online marketing.