Planning an effective marketing plan for a startup is not an easy task. A great product will not sell by itself, You might not need a big budget but you have to put it in front of the right audience. Most of the times, marketing budget for a startup is limited, even if you have a big budget spending it wisely should be the goal.

This article will discuss seven super effective ways to market your startup without burning the budget.

1- Start with Proper Market Research

Knowing your potential marketing is the first crucial part of planning an effective marketing plan. Gather as much as information you can about your targeted market. Get active on forums, social media groups, take surveys, test with real customers, understand the problems your potential customer’s face and make a list of them.

Competitor research is a big chunk of market research, Make a list of your competitors and study their existing marketing tactics.

2- Consider Tested Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is the journey a customer goes through on the way to purchase. Avoid complex funnels, build simple sales funnels where you can capture email or a number ‘based on your product market’ where you can follow up later on.

Before you start driving traffic make sure you have successfully set up tracking tools. Here is a link to the google analytics course from the analytics academy. This is a brainer to complete this course for many reasons, you have to keep track of where your leads and sales are coming from otherwise scaling up can be very difficult.

Set Goals: Using goals in analytics you can track specific user interactions on your website or landing page, it can anything like a download, form submission, clicks to any particular page.

Use UTM: Utm builder is a campaign URL builder from google, using this tool you can different campaign URLs and set specific tracking preferences. Do not share your links without UTM, it is a must.

Behavior Flow: You can see the path your visitors take from one page to another. This is important because you have to know where your traffic is going next, where they stay the most and where they drop off. Ultimately you can visualize everything that a visitor is doing before taking a certain action.

Use Hotjar: Hotjar is a powerful tool that lets you track every move of a visitor, you can use it (free) to see a video of what they do, also the heatmap to find what image they like and optimize.

3- Look for Free Yet Effective Marketing Mediums

It can be difficult for a startup business to invest a large amount of money in paid ads. If are worried about traffic gen and the budget is limited here are some ideas you can implement right now to start generating traffic for free of cost.

=> Blogging and SEO

Search engine optimization can be a great free traffic source for a startup company. SEO is a lengthy process also can cost you some money if you hire an SEO expert on the job for you. Do keyword research and find targeted keywords that you can get benefit from. Create a blog page and start posting content. Ranking your articles higher on Google is the main goal.

=> Youtube

YouTube is the second largest search engine with around 1.9 billion users worldwide. YouTube traffic works best with unique and interesting startups. Unlike google ranking videos on YT is not that difficult, it is well-known for viral traffic.

=> Targeted Social Media Platforms

Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram have billions of active users and a great place for startups to build followers and interact with the audience. Get active on as many social media as you can. Study user statistics to find your targeted audience based platform.

4- Consider Targeted Paid Traffic:

Deciding whether to invest in paid traffic or not can be a difficult task for a startup, as startups’ budget can be a big issue. Investing in a paid channel requires good knowledge of the market. Investing in paid ads without doing proper research will lose you money. ROI is the name of the game. Here is a list of some of the popular pay per click traffic sources:

1. Google ads
2. Facebook ads
3. Instagram ads
4. Pinterest ads
5. LinkedIn ads

5- Enable Retargeting

Only a little percent of web traffic converts on the first visit. By retargeting, you can get in front of your “lost or bounced” traffic. Retargeting will help you to increase your conversion by a big number and you will never lose a lead.

The way it works, you put a javascript on your landing page/website and when someone visits your page, a cookie gets placed on their device. Their cookie ID gets added to your remarketing audience list and later on, you can follow their footsteps on different ad media. As a startup retargeting will help you to warm up your traffic and increase brand value.

6- Do Not Ignore Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing works for almost all industries, people always like to buy from someone they trust. It can be a very effective marketing strategy for startups. Thanks to social media we now have thousands of micro-influencer that anyone can become a partner within a budget.

Influencer marketing can give you a fantastic ROI, but make sure to invest in the right person. As the number of influencers is growing not everyone, has a legit fanbase. Check out their engagement, statistics, just make sure to do the study right; otherwise, you will lose money.

7- Invest in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is where someone promotes your product as an affiliate and gets a commission for every sale. The fun thing about affiliate marketing you only pay when someone brings a sale. So you can say it is a risk-free marketing strategy for startups.

Marketplace Vs In-house:

There are dozens of popular affiliate marketplaces where you can add your product. An in-house affiliate program is when you run an affiliate program internally. There are great benefits of using affiliate marketplaces, their ready affiliate base makes it easy and fast. You just pay a fee and marketplace does all the work.

When you do In-House marketing you create your own affiliate program, recruit affiliates and manage them. In-house is cost-saving compared to third-party marketplaces and you get to build a direct relationship with your affiliates.

In affiliate marketing, you always have to think quality over quantity. A few good affiliates can skyrocket your sales. Anyone who has your potential traffic base can be your affiliate such as a YouTuber, blogger, social media influencer. Affiliate marketing also helps you get quality backlinks and rank better on the search engines.

The industry is growing rapidly and more businesses are focusing on the affiliate marketing model. If you don’t know how to run an effective affiliate program you can hire an affiliate marketing agency like Monsterclaw LLC to do all the work to make it a success.