How To Market Your Business Using Social Media When You Have Zero Budget

Social Media March 15, 2010 34 Comments




GrowthWe are a start up. We did our first day’s work on the 9th of May 2009 so that makes us a little under a year old. Like most start ups we didn’t have much money to play with and certainly didn’t have a marketing budget. Although we didn’t have a marketing budget we did have to spread the word about our services and let people know that we were here and we have largely done that through social media. We now work with large brands who are starting to see the massive power of social media but I also think that if used correctly and by people who are passionate enough about their product or service social media can be one of the best cheap marketing tools and route to market. I wanted to write this post to share some of the tips and tricks that we used over the first nine months of our business and how social media gave us a boost and allowed us to punch way above our weight…

The Blog

Picture 1We didn’t have a penny at the start so we sat down and asked ourselves “how can we get our message out to potential customers?” and the answer we came up with was a blog. We started off like any other company does last June with a blank canvas and nothing but ideas in our head. We decided that we wanted to help people, beginners in social media and give them simple tips and resources that although obvious to us and our peers would help new comers to social media immeasurably. We decided to commit early on to 2 posts per day, one each from myself and Lauren which was an incredibly tough schedule. If you estimate that a post took on average an hour we have been spending a combined 12 hours per week blogging. Although a lot of time we justified it by not attending a single business networking event or any other offline activities. 10 months later we have a blog that gets 75,000 visitors per month and growing fast and we find that most of our business comes through this channel. You need to be able to prove that you are knowledgeable in your field and give away as much useful information as possible because if you do it will come back to you many times over. I won’t give you a monetary figure but I will say that the amount of business that has been referred to us by happy readers of this blog is significant. It doesn’t matter what your business is you should simply be blogging in our opinion and showing your expertise.

Conferences

Myself and Lauren have both attended our fair share of conferences here in Ireland and to be honest were bored of what we saw. Social media conferences all had the same message about “listening to your customers” but had very few practical examples where people could learn. We wanted to bring in speakers who knew social media inside out and who could really speak with knowledge. We never set out with the aim of making money from our conferences (we always had the aim of breaking even) but we did use them as a sales channel. If you can bring the right speakers and audience together you have a very receptive audience for your brand. It is very much the same as the blog in that you are building your credibility in your industry as the “go to” people. Think about your industry and how it might benefit from a conference.

Facebook

facebook-logoFacebook is a great way to get started with social media as most people will have a couple of hundred friends that they can tell about their new business. We never really give people the hard sell on Facebook and push our services but we do share little pieces of our work and talk to our couple of thousand fans in a very informal and relaxed manner. We love sending out pictures of what we have for lunch or people who come to visit in the office and find that the people we have as fans are quite engaged as a result. For businesses in the offline world to reach 2000 fans they would have to send out a load of flyers that would cost lots of money but we can do that a couple of times a day for free through our Facebook page. Too many businesses get lazy with the content they push out and only include links to their own blog posts etc but we have found that if you get creative and create some compelling content your fans will start to become a part of your brand.

Video

Video is something that a lot of people get scared of and think that their business should not touch and should perhaps be left to the professionals but we totally disagree with that philosophy and think anybody should give it a go. Reading about us on the blog is all well and good but by watching a video you get a real feeling for what people are like and hopefully the personality and enthusiasm for what you are doing shines through. We make lots of videos and also try and interview key people in the industry so as viewers of the video have even more information that they can learn from and return to. Video is so cheap to produce these days that for a couple of hundred euros you can produce something like this that will get embedded on other sites and push your brand out there…

Twitter

twitter-logoI am not going to lie to you, Twitter is the hardest one on the whole list to master and it will take a lot of time and effort but if done correctly it can be incredibly powerful. The tricky part is that if you think of twitter as a sales tool you won’t get very far but the amount of indirect business and leads that I have had through Twitter in the last year has been massive.The key is following relevant people within your business and engaging with them and adding value to your peers. It took me a couple of months to work out the best strategy on Twitter but just like all the other tips here it is all about how much you put in because the more you help others the more help you will find yourself getting in return.

Does It Work?

Different people will find success marketing themselves in different ways. Some people live attending events but they are not for us. Some people might not enjoy blogging but we love it. The point is that you need to find what is right for you and stick with it! Social media is cheap and allows you to meet people in a fraction of the amount of time that it would take in “the real world”. If you don’t have a budget and things are tight you should have a look into using social media to market your business, it’s hard work but it does work.

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