START-UP SWISS ARMY KNIFE
Entrepreneur’s Marketing Kit
15+ Free tools and HOW to use them to spread your message plus LINKS
This is a continuation of an earlier post about Entrepreneur’s Tool Kit. Thanks to fellow entrepreneurs like you the first post garnered over 1000 view in a day. I am also thankful to many of you who sent me many a messages thanking me for having collected the tools in one place.
this article also has, at the end
— links to various resources
— book suggestions
caveat emptor
These tools that I have listed have worked well for me. That said, it does not guarantee that it will work for you also. You will have to experiment to figure out how and when to use these tools — since you know your business better than anyone else.
Realisation
For me, I realised soon enough that we needed to have various types of marketing for our streams of services.
- Home Inspection depended on inbound/pull marketing where as
- RWA Audit depended on outbound/push marketing.
Before you dive into anything, what you have to understand is the type of beast your service or product is — otherwise you are just burning your hard earned money!
Questions you will need to answer to have an efficient marketing methodology
What do my clients want? — the only way you can answer this is by actually talking to your potential clients. There is no shortcut.
What is the perceived value that we add? — again you get this by having a conversation with your clients face to face
Who are my clients? — individuals or businesses
What type of service/product am i selling — is it a bee or a whale — do we have to sell 100,000 or 10 to make margins
What is my marketing goal? — client education or client acquisition
Once you have answered, at the very least, these questions, you have a foundation for your Marketing Tactics and Methodology.
Word-of-mouth :
This is the best and least expensive form of marketing you can hope for. It is organic and is based on trust that the receiver and giver have. You may nudge this further by offering referral rewards.
Both the person referring and the person getting referred should receive equal amounts.
If you can manage advanced pricing techniques you can add a variable cost into your pricing model
Reddit :
start posting on sub-reddits and get yourself some good karma score. This is a great place to post where people who actually know something will comment and add value.
Quora :
Go forth and spread knowledge, get an account look for topics you are interested in and write small pieces that share information to the people who are interested. This will give them a sense of belonging towards your brand and possibly have them migrate to you.
This is absolutely free, except for your time and your acumen.
Apps :
I was able to talk to the wonderful people at Adda and get Nemmadi.in services listed on their app. This is a symbiotic relationship, they are able to provide their customers a service and we get customers.
LinkedIn :
Post company related topics on your personal account. Like and share your company’s posts. Create topical posts on your company account. Make sure they add value to your visitors.
Your company posts should be such that they are cross pollinating. Use your YouTube videos on your LinkedIn and Facebook posts. This way you will get subscribers on your YouTube channel too.
Facebook Ads:
Facebook Ads didn’t work for us. We tried all types of tricks and tips on Facebook posts and Facebook Ads — all we got were people who clicked our ad, and visited our site because the ad took them there but left in a jiffy — meaning bounce rate was off the charts!
We spoke to many different people and took all types of advise, eventually after spending a few thousand we realised that Facebook was not for our type of service.
Facebook :
Facebook is a good place to keep sprinkling information about what your service is about and try and engage in banter, but as i said it is nothing more than a place where we are present for the sake of being present.
We dont spent much time there, all we do is have automated posts.
The reason i share this is — it has to be evident that NOT ALL channels are for everyone.
Medium :
You are here and reading my article :-)
Its a great place to have a repository of your articles and share the link over various channels. I typically share over LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram, posts that are related to this on a blog, may be a curated Reddit post.
The idea is to cross pollinate your posts so that all of them get views and the visitor eventually gets what they want and become your customer.
WhatsApp Groups :
Trust that you are collecting your customers’ phone numbers, and curating them into various lists. If not start NOW.
Create groups based on their presences and feed them relevant information at regular intervals. Don’t over do it or they will leave the group.
Use Bitly links to share content to monitor which of these groups are more active — this way you can spend more time there.
Google Ads :
If your service or product depends predominantly on inbound marketing then this is the best medium (according to me, of course). If your catchment is outbound marketing, then Facebook, Instagram and the lines are better.
The reason i say this is, think about it, when someone wants or needs something they search for it and most often than not on Google. This means they are in immediate need of it so an ad that takes them to your service or product is likely to get higher rate of conversion. Rather than if they are bombed with information on Facebook where they are whiling away their time…
YouTube :
Generate content that is meaningful to your customers.
The customer or potential customer should be able to get all their doubts cleared through your videos. Talk to your customers via your videos — make sure you address the FAQs that your sales and marketing team shares.
Get customer feedback videos and upload them and make a specific playlist that you can share on your website too.
Video Testimonials are definitely better than written ones — the authenticity is tangible.
Curated playlists are a great way to share videos when you send marketing or sales emails. You can also use them in your blog posts.
Newsletters :
This has worked wonders for us, we send our Quarterly News Letters which have a lot of information.
Our most recent news letter was specifically catered to Residents’ Welfare Associations. This got a lot of attention and we also got conversions. The reason is we packed qualitative information with imagery and data.
This Hubspot data grab shows you the emails we sent and the rates of engagement!
As you can see the rates are AMAZING, compared to what others claim at fractions of a percent.
Format it elegantly, spend some quality time on it — this is what your company is all about.
Email campaign :
Use tools such as Hubspot or Mailchimp or what ever floats your boat to send our emails — just DO NOT spam your customers or your potential customers.
see that your content is meaningful — you can use your Newsletter as an email content, for example.
Online Portals :
There are portals who are willing to write about you as long as you can convince them your story is worth their while.
Connect to peers catch a person who has published on a website and get a warm referral. Make sure your PR is compelling
this will give you back-links and also much needed eyeballs.
AMAZING LINKS
EVEN MORE AMAZING BOOKS
- The brand bucket make your marketing work by Barnaby Wynter
- The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
- Marketing Management by Kotler, keller, Koshy & Jha
- New Venture Creation by Timmons
- The art of thinking clearly by Rolf Dobelli
The author is Uday S Prakash — CEO & Co-Founder of Nemmadi.in
