So you launched a startup.
Now it’s time to start promoting your product.
But what if you don’t have much of a marketing budget to speak of?
Today we are going to share three low-cost marketing ideas that can help you reach your dream customers!
A sales funnel is a system designed to convert visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into repeat customers. If you haven’t built one for your startup yet, we recommend doing that first.
Ideally, you want to create a lead magnet and use low-cost marketing strategies to drive traffic to its landing page.
Then, once potential customers give you their email addresses, you want to use email marketing to convert those leads into paying customers.
Finally, once they buy your product, you want to continue providing free value via email. This can do wonders for customer retention.
That is the approach that we used to grow ClickFunnels from a bootstrapped startup to a nine-figure SaaS company.
We are confident that it can help you grow your business as well!
You may be familiar with Paul Graham’s essay “Do Things That Don’t Scale” in which he argues that founders have to be willing to do things that don’t scale if they want to get their startups off the ground.
We agree with his key points and would like to add that in our view, cold email is the best way to acquire your first users if you can’t afford paid advertising.
Here’s what we recommend:
Once you are done with your initial lead list, get 100 more leads from Fiverr and repeat the process, but change one variable, say, your cold email subject line.
That will allow you to see what impact that variable has on your conversion rates. Keep in mind that systematic experimentation can help you optimize your email templates.
Eventually, once you streamline the process, you want to gradually increase the number of emails that you send per day to 100.
Generally speaking, if you send 100 cold emails with follow-ups, you should get at least 10 responses and at least 1 sale, so sending 3,000 cold emails per month should result in at least 30 sales.
You probably won’t be able to scale cold outreach past 100 cold emails per day, but that should be enough to start generating some revenue, which you can then reinvest in more scalable marketing strategies.
If you want to learn more about cold email, we recommend reading the “Cold Email Manifesto” by Alex Berman and Robert Indries. This book provides tons of helpful advice and includes several proven email templates!
Social media marketing can be a great way to reach your dream customers, build trust with them, and direct them to your lead magnet landing page.
What’s more, you don’t need any money to get started, although investing in some social media marketing tools might be a good idea.
We recommend building a following on one platform and then gradually expanding to other platforms over time.
Regardless of the platform that you choose, the general principles that you should follow remain the same:
You want to use the space in your bio to explain what your free offer is all about and direct people to its landing page.
Typically, if someone follows you on social media and enjoys your content, it’s likely that they will eventually decide to check out your lead magnet.
Your social media content should be designed to help your dream customers solve various problems related to your niche.
We recommend publishing one high-quality, original post per day, seven days a week.
Set aside a few hours every month for creating social media content and then use Buffer or MeetEdgar to schedule your posts.
Make sure to reply to every comment that you get except for the troll comments. Set aside 15-30 minutes a day for this.
When you notice a troll in your comment section, don’t engage with them and block them immediately!
Follow prominent influencers in your niche and leave one thoughtful comment under their posts every day. Set aside 15-30 minutes per day for this.
Make sure to also regularly share their content with your own followers. Ideally, you want to add a thoughtful observation to it instead of merely reposting it.
Say, if you are building a following on Twitter, it’s better to quote-tweet influencers rather than retweet them because that way you are adding extra value.
If you keep this up, eventually these influencers will notice you, check out your profile, and potentially follow you if they like your content.
Once they are following you, they might start occasionally sharing your content with their audiences, which is where most of your early social media growth is going to come from.
You should also network with people in your niche who are on the same level as you.
You can do that by leaving thoughtful comments under their posts and sharing their content with your followers.
Once you have a few public interactions with them, don’t be afraid to slide into their DMs and say hi.
All this won’t help you much right now but these connections are long-term investments.
In a few years, the vast majority of those people will have abandoned their social media profiles and moved on to something else, but a few of them will probably have substantial followings!
As your following grows, you’ll start getting DMs from your followers with questions that relate to your area of expertise.
Reply to those messages, provide guidance, and share helpful resources. You can even offer to jump on a quick call if you have the time.
Keep in mind that the more people you help for free, the more goodwill you are going to build!
Regardless of what niche you are in, there will always be people beefing with each other.
In fact, this is incentivized by the algorithms because it generates engagement. However, getting involved in these beefs can backfire so it’s best to just stay out of it all.
And if someone is trying to start drama with you, remember that you don’t need to engage with them. You can simply block them!
There’s no denying that political polarization is increasing, especially in the United States.
It can be argued that social media is playing a role in this because the algorithms reward publishing polarizing content, a strategy colloquially known as “rage-baiting”.
While rage-baiting does work, we don’t recommend it. From a purely pragmatic perspective, it’s best to stay away from controversial topics such as current events, politics, and religion unless taking a public stance on them is going to benefit your brand.
Otherwise, you risk alienating potential customers who may disagree with you on some issue, but would still benefit from your product!
Audience capture is a phenomenon where due to the extremely fast social media feedback loops content creators get radicalized by their audiences and lose sight of themselves.
It seems that people who have addictive personalities are especially vulnerable to it so if you have struggled with addictions in the past, you need to be extremely careful about this. That being said, no one is safe.
Pay attention to what behaviors get rewarded by your audience and ask yourself if you want to engage in those behaviors. Otherwise, you’ll start doing it by default, which can be a slippery slope.
Say, if your regular content only gets a few likes, but then you post a hot take and it goes viral, you will probably feel the impulse to start posting more hot takes because you got rewarded for that behavior.
But you should stop and ask yourself if posting hot takes is in alignment with who you want to be as a person, your business goals, and your vision for the future. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. What matters is that you make a conscious decision on how to proceed!
If you want to learn more about social media marketing, we recommend watching this video by Dan Koe:
Did you know that you can use an email newsletter as your lead magnet?
In fact, we would argue that in the current year, that may be the best way to convert social media followers into leads.
Here’s what we recommend:
You can draw inspiration from popular newsletters such as the Morning Brew, 5-Bullet Friday, and Reading List.
The ideal publishing schedule will depend on your industry and your target audience but weekly newsletters seem to be the most common.
Every issue of your newsletter should follow the same template so that your subscribers would know what to expect.
Sharing your personal observations, industry news, and links to interesting content can all work well as long as they are relevant to your dream customers.
Just make sure that your newsletter is skimmable: you want your subscribers to open it, quickly skim it, and then read it in full if something catches their eye.
We recommend adding either a “P.S.” section or a banner ad to the bottom of every newsletter issue and encouraging people to take the next step in your sales funnel (e.g. if you sell SaaS software, promote your free trial).
That way, by the time your subscribers scroll down to it, they will have gotten some value out of that newsletter issue, so they probably won’t mind the promotional stuff even if they aren’t interested.
Just like with any other lead magnet, you want to explain what your newsletter is all about in your bio and provide a link to its landing page.
We also recommend posting a teaser of every upcoming issue the day before you publish it so that people who aren’t subscribed to your newsletter yet would have an opportunity to do so if they are interested in that content.
If you want to learn more about growing an email newsletter, we recommend watching this video by Brian Dean:
Here’s something that you need to accept when it comes to low-cost marketing strategies: if you can’t afford to buy speed, you must be prepared to invest time and exercise patience.
The reason why so many bootstrapped entrepreneurs who have promising products give up is simple: they aren’t willing to stick with it long enough to gain traction.
That’s why it’s so important to go into this with realistic expectations: it will probably take you a few years to get to the point where you make enough money with your business to start working on it full-time.
So make sure that you have a day job that pays the bills and settle in for the long haul!
Our co-founder Russell Brunson used sales funnels to take ClickFunnels from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than a decade.
Needless to say, he had to drive a TON of targeted traffic to those sales funnels in order to achieve that.
In his best-selling book “Traffic Secrets”, he shares proven marketing strategies that YOU can use to drive targeted traffic to YOUR website and sales funnels.
In this book, you’ll learn how to:
…and so much more!
“Traffic Secrets” is available on Amazon where it has 2,500+ global ratings and a 4.7-star overall rating.
But you can also get it directly from us for free…
All we ask is that you pay for shipping!
So what are you waiting for? 🧐
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