6 Ways Start-up Can Use Social-Media to Market Itself!

There is this one question that everybody keeps asking: "How in the world is a start-up with a handful of employees and a small marketing budget get its name out to the potential clients/crowd?"

The interesting point to note here is that every other guy would answer "Social-Media" and recommend the company to embrace social-media, take advantage of the available platforms, to be a part of the community and connect with the influencers in your niche. 

                                                               

 

The question here is not how much time will it take to reach that desired level of influential power which would help your brand mobilize your niche and dig out those potential customers/clients/users/whatever…

Here are 6 quick ways a start-up can use to market itself using Social-Media efficiently:

1. Engineering Your Presence: 

What is most important to understand is that Social-Media is more than just Facebook and Twitter. There a numerous other free social-media properties on the world wide web where you need to be looking for your audience. You need to go where you consumer lives online. If they are there, you should be there too, listening to them, engaging in their activities, sharing and helping them in that hemisphere.

2. Crafting a Brand Position:

From what I’ve seen, a lot of start-up companies do an awesome job of describing their product, its features rather than synthesizing them into a single benefit like the giants do. Try expressing what your brand stands for or declaring its point of difference from that others in the market. This will help you being remembered.

3. Being Creative With Content:

Try, research and find new ways to provide content about your product and niche. For starters, add a blog to your products website. Add fresh blog posts, invite comments and link to a lot of multimedia. This will add to your online visibility. 

Blogging isn’t the toughest job. Blog about whatever you’re doing, report on your progress or post some insider updates about the team. Interact with the blog audience by adding a question or a small vote at the end of every post to gather their feedback. Network with other bloggers and place your product in front of people willing to blog, review, create videos or tell stories about it and then aggregate this content to your blog. You can later use this content in your regular press releases.

4. Connect With Right Bloggers:

Now who doesn’t likes free publicity and marketing? Every start-up in the world wants that dedicated article in NY Times or to get featured their national daily but the fact is, getting featured on Mashable.com or Techcrunch.com or other similar blogs might be more influential for a number of reasons. They have loyal readers and mostly fitting in your market. The idea here is to bubble you up from the blogosphere to the mainstream press.

5. Start Crowdsourcing:

The reason I love crowdsourcing is that it let’s your customer to be a part in the creation and development of your brand. Of course there is no shortage of services/companies for crowdsourcing (Tongal, crowdSpring etc) to help you source content from writers, designers, devs or photographers but then creativity is what is required here.

6. Give Free Stuff:

Give away free stuff to your visitors. Everyone loves a free bite at your offering and this adds to your credibility sooner or later. There are hundreds of free ebooks, video courses, webinars etc for grabs online. You can give away something free in exchange of their email or use "Pay-with-Tweet". Free stuf generates awareness, builds loyalty and best of all spreads word-of-mouth.

Back in the stone ages, you need a trillion dollar marketing budget to get started with your brand promotion by posting ads on newpapers, magazines, covering trade shows with your oversized banners and what not. BUT today, you just might be able to get away with a laptop, an internet connection and a good social-media strategy.

Are you a start-up? I would be interesting in hearing what and how are you using the social-media to your marketing benefits.