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How To Market Your Business Using Social Media When You Have Zero Budget
Like it? Tell your friends!
We 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
We 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 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…
I 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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Great post and an inspirational story, I have been watching your progress for the last few months and you have really nailed your strategy. Well done!
Thanks a million for that David, we really appreciate getting comments like that and they mean the world to us! It’s not like we have a bg strategy document or anything but we get the odd thing right and plenty of things wrong!
A nice post, I think your success has been really well deserved and earnt, especially with the past year’s economy troubles. From nothing to zesty 2010, Congrats to both cofounders.
Cheers for that Joe. Really not trying to toot our own horn here and more interested in passing on tips that hopefully others can replicate to help grow their business!
[...] medium to broadcast our message. This is probably the toughest medium to master (as suggested by Simply Zesty) as it’s the newest, requires constant management and sometimes it can be difficult to toe [...]
Niall,
As you know I’ve been a fan since inception. What I’ve loved most is watching you gain more and more appreciation of Twitter as time goes by – true to your point that it certainly does take a lot of time and effort to master (and even, for some, to gain affinity to).
Excellent work on building your business and keeping it real.
Congratulations to you both!
Ah cheers Lisa! We see all the RTs and sharing of our content that you do on a dialy basis and apprecaite it massively. Hope you are getting revved up for Paddies day over there
Great post Niall, it highlighted what I agree with and feel is one of the most important part of any new businesses social media engagement – finding those passionate people (rock stars) in your company that will really push your product or service.
You guys make everything so clear and simple it makes me feel like i should know it all already but I dont, which can be frustrating. I have just set up an online insurance company and Im working on a shoe string buget at the moment to get the word out there about us, with some sucess. Keep up the great work guys. Im learning everyday with your insights, tips and pointers so thank you.
Congratulation to both Lauren and yourself Niall. I have watched and joined some of your conferences since you formed Simply Zesty. You both really deserve the success and being able to case study your own business growth like this and using social media to grow it is one of the best ways to enlist new customers for the future. You have lived and breathed the pain and pleasure of finding your feet and that is always something others want to know and learn from. Good luck in the future.
Ah cheers for that Sharon that really is appreciated. More conferences coming soon
Great post Niall really enjoyed the read. You guys have done so well and are definitely inspirational am pleased for you and Loz. Always enjoy your blog and FB updates. Keep up the great work.
Ah cheers for that Dunc. One of the main reasons we write is to get comments and when they come form people we know and respect even better!!
You have probably already blogged about this but… Last week I got stuck watching a chick flick called ‘Julie and Julia”. I was prepared for hell. You guys out there, you can watch this as a special favor with your wife and be educated by the sub-plot. Some very good tips and lessons on what I call holistic blogging. If you must cave to the lady, watch this one as it will deaden the pain.
Great post Niall, I find the blog great for keeping up to date as to what’s going on in the Social Media world. With my business I would be out of the loop really so I always love popping over here to see what goes on in the rest of the world outside of La Cucina! I think you give great advice for small businesses, I seem to be getting a lot of emails and messages through facebook these days asking for advice(mad),I’ll make sure I send them over here:)
Thanks for all the kind words Lorraine. I get a lot of the same questions from people and often when it is small businesses it just isn’t worth our while charging as it wouldnt be effective for a small business. Thats one of the reasons why we write the blog actually so as we can give out free info to smaller businesses and then the bigger clients hear about us and take us on. Something in it for everybody
What a great case study! This is a fascinating report on low-budgeting marketing. You could really turn this into a bit of link-bait by fleshing it out more. There are so many start-ups over here in America that are looking for ways to get ahead of their competition through social media, but they haven’t a clue where to start. This post is a great way to learn.
I have been a reluctant convert to the whole social media concept – what I don;t like most about it is the nuances of social media marketing. You can’t directly sell. You have to build relationships and kudos, without trying to sell your brand at all. It goes against the grain! And to top it all, metrics in terms of ROI are harder to determine. I really dread to think what new marketing opportunites the internet will throw up in years to come – that will require a significant rethink of the way we operate.